alt Hacker NewsThat's great, but we live in the 2020s, not the 1970s. Technology has changed over 50 years. France talks about building more nuclear, but what's actually getting put on the grid is renewables, not nuclear.
It wasn't the weird enviors that stopped nuclear in the US, they don't have much power. What really stopped it was that the industry ordered too many reactors at once in the 1970s, they didn't standardize on a design, they had a ton of construction projects that were starting to run long, and then TMI happened and scared everyone because TMI had been mismanaged so much, leading to oppressive regulation on the already-failing construction projects.
The reason nobody built nuclear for 30 years after that was because it didn't make financial sense. The only reason any of the utilities signed on for new reactors in the mid 2000s was that state legislatures passed bills saying that the public would pay for any cost overruns from construction, rather than the utility! That's how bad of a financial deal it was. And the disasters at Vogtle and Summer show that the utilities were right to not want to build without passing the buck to others: nuclear is a financial disaster.
People want to put on rosy-colored glasses and look at the best possible picture of nuclear, rather than the messy full picture, which involves tons of cost overruns, and all the failed projects that simple did not work.
The US nuclear industry could have done all sorts of things to succeed: they could have standardized like France, they could have done Candus like Canada, whatever. But they didn't and it looks like they can't. We go into climate action with the industries and technologies we have, not the industries and technologies we read about in scifi.
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> Technology has changed over 50 years
Technology sure has but through a confluence of outsourcing, bad policy, NIMBY attitudes among the boomer generation, and weaponized lawsuits US infrastructure remains somewhat frozen in the 1970s. Look at how much pushback, red tape, and cost there is to building a solar farm, road, datacenter or yes, nuclear plant compared to China. Nuclear actually might be the best example of this: the plants are so much more expensive per megawatt than what the navy builds day-in-day-out because of 1) lawsuits every step of the way 2) regulatory paralysis and 3) we haven't been doing it for 50 years so the talent and patterns aren't there.
Which directly contributes to your later point:
> We go into climate action with the industries and technologies we have, not the industries and technologies we read about in scifi
I wouldn't consider what the US navy does scifi. Nor would I consider the ongoing rollout of reactors in China, which haven't seen the cost overruns of western nations, scifi. I'd consider those things consequences of the systems they were developed in. China's power plants have come in at about $2M/megawatt, which is coincidentally almost exactly what the US navy spends on their reactors and appears to be the cost of doing business in a well functioning environment. Solar is cheaper in the buildout (~$1M/megawatt), but not nearly to the extent that opponents of nuclear have made it out to be. It turns out when you make it almost impossible to do something, it gets really expensive!
These are problems we could solve through policy, but the lasting gift of the Boomer generation's rise to power and refusal to relinquish it is that US policy, industry, regulatory structure, and infrastructure were largely frozen-in-time 50 years ago and have been trying to cope with the crumbling shell of that ever since.
>That's great, but we live in the 2020s, not the 1970s.
I'm old enough to have heard that in every decade since the 90s.
>But this time it's different!
Yes, we're much closer to climate change making the industrial supply chains for building a nuclear power plant impossible. If we don't do it in the next 20 years our only choice is going to be what seasoning to use on human flesh.