alt Hacker News> The cost and time required to build them is non trivial. During that entire construction time you can build renewables substantially faster and for a lower price.
They're not mutually exclusive. If time and money were the only considerations in life, I'd only have pets instead of some kids too. We'd never go to war because it would be expensive and costly. I'd drive only gas cars because they're cheaper and easier to fuel up. And so on and so forth.
Nuclear takes more time and money, but it is great for the diversification of your energy grid. It will likely outlive either of us. It will produce jobs for generations and a RELIABLE base load for as long as it exists. It will not easily be at the whims of different politicians of the day because of the momentum required to get it going in the first place.
The list goes on. We shouldn't make energy decisions based only on time and money in an economy where other choices don't play by those same rules.
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Except they are mutually exclusive. Money spent by utility companies (or by taxpayers more broadly) to add new generation is not infinite, every dollar spent on nuclear is a dollar not spent on other renewables.
For better or worse, we live in a highly capitalist world, and most western electricity is an open market. In this construct we only make decisions based on money.
The markets won’t do it, because nukes don’t make any capital sense to invest in, so the only way you can build nukes is nation states forcing it. Forcing the populace to pay extra for very expensive power that will only get even less competitive over the 30+ year lifetime… is not a popular move. It works only in single party states (eg china)
This is just the reality of economics and the world we live in