alt Hacker NewsUnless nuclear gets dramatically cheaper one should expect to see basically just the minimum amount of it to maintain grid stability / heavy industry, or something in that direction (I think). Obviously this is quite path dependant.
The one thing I really wish people would take away from thinking about energy / grid composition and so on is that its a portfolio construction problem.
If you ever, ever, see anyone banging on about how expensive or cheap a particularly type of generation is please just write them off as either an idiot or a liar - what matters is the cost of constructing a portfolio of electricity production that meets the requirements of a nation e.g. running an industrial economy solely off solar power is probably impossible but it seems realistic to imagine a "modern" (politics aside) economy that runs off sending emails on a mixture of solar power and storage.
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Renewables often make more sense for robust decentralized infrastructure.
However, the upfront cost of Full-sized Fission power facilities are often still around 1/2 to 1/3 the end user $/kWh. The issues arise with the long term waste stewardship costs, and the cognitive disconnect people can engineer their way out of the liabilities.
Now that "AI" data-centers are acting like a public infrastructure equity siphon, in some places private solar can have a payback period measured in under a few years. =3
What? Nuclear is cheap to build when the rules hold still. The problem is that while a plant is being under construction (which can be fast), policies change and on a multi-year build, every change means rework and financing costs on capital that is sitting idle. That's the main driver of prices, along with restrictions that keep tightening, the most overbearing being the linear no-threshold model. It's not a problem inherent to nuclear build out. Gas is faster and more modular because it is less encumbered and because we have far more experience building it. If gas/carbon construction was as hampered as nuclear is, the costs would be equivalent. They are not, because coal and gas have the backing of powerful interests that would not let that kind of policy instability happen. Meanwhile, nuclear has no backer with the same amount of resources
In my country we have people, lots of them, that would prefer to forget that renewables forget and to massively build out nuclear to meet demand. In that situation it makes sense to bang the energy cost drum. Yes, obviously the network needs to be kept running and that may take some added nuclear and investment in the existing hydro plants, but at the end of the day a sizeable part will going to be renewables as it is so much cheaper.