You must log in or register to comment.
This genuinely puts a pit in my stomach looking at the US costs. My industry is completely stagnant at a time where it is receiving an unprecedented positive shift in opinion across the population.
Nearly everyone who speaks to me about my industry from outside of it does so in a curious excitement, regailng me with their optimism concerning the emergence of nuclear science.
Yet I have to sit here and temper that optimism because our economic system is currently squandering all the potential nuclear technology has towards large scale deployment. I try my best to describe the innovation of China, and how their system allows for it compared to ours, but I can tell people feel slightly disappointed that this technological marvel isn’t happening in this country, and the steps to make it possible require its complete restructuring.
My jealously of Chinese nuclear engineers and scientusts grows deeper every day.
We could have had this if we kept investing in nuclear, which is the safest energy source we currently know, but instead we decided to kneecap ourselves. Germany is going back to coal after shutting down its nuclear plants.
You’ll see, in 5 years time at most China will announce 99.9999% recycling on spent nuclear fuel, to the point the remaining 0.000001% is just dust you can safely scatter in the wind and we’ll still be debating whether we should put solar on roofs or not.
China will be beaming near limitless power down to earth from orbital solar farms while the West turns it’s air into tar from trying to power the most inefficient AI imaginable with fossil fuel power plants.
At some point, I feel like AES countries will have to go to war with the west just to try and prevent them from completely destroying what little is left of a breathable atmosphere.
But at what cost??? ($2.50 per watt.)
The anti-nuclear lobby is probably the fourth worst lobby in the US after the health insurance lobby, the war lobby, and the Israel lobby.
Honestly I disagree that the failure of the US nuclear industry is due to the anti-nuclear lobby. Modern opinions on nuclear energy, particularly among young people, show that nuclear power has a largely positive acceptance. The reason the industry struggles is entirely due to capitlism and particularly the US banking system.
Our entire nuclear sector is privately owned, which as fat as I’m aware, is not the same in any other country. Every single country that has had successful nuclear power industry (this includes the US in the 50s and such) was due to state owned initiatives or heavily state influenced (in the case of the US) projects. The USSR is the obvious example, France’s standardized reactor design roll outs being is a Western example, and modern China’s SOE’S being the modern example.
In the US if a nuclear company would like to get the finances for building a reactor, they must go to a private bank which will charge a massive interest rate due to nuclear power plants not immediately turning a profit (they’re technically more profitable then Natural Gas, their main competitor, in the long run). This obviously will dissuade any private nuclear company which is itself seeking a profit from ever building a power plant.
Essentially it’s a too pronged problem where the industry being entirely for profit doesn’t lend itself well to the kind of economic model which allows nuclear to thrive, and the mechanism for financing these massive projects is also entirely privatized, so again, the industry which requires long term stable projects is fucked over by short-term thinking that’s dominant in am entirely market economy.
The anti-nuclear lobby has at most just made it so that Western leftists are blind to an obvious solution to large parts of the environmental crisis for an astonishingly long time. That’s not exactly something ground breaking though in my opinion.
LOL! Vogtle is right up in the top corner on price! 🤭
