There's a few things to unpack here. But I won't talk about why nuclear costs so much. I'll just point out that if you look at countries like Germany and Japan which are turning off nuclear plants and targeting renewables are also turning up their coal usage. The big issue here is that battery technology just isn't there yet.
No pro nuclear person is anti renewable (maybe they exist, but I have yet to find one). They just don't want to see nuclear replaced with coal. They care about the environment. Many believe it is too late for any other option and we need to just aggressively go to net 0 (or less) with current technology. The truth is that we just can't meet these goals with current renewables and batteries. We're all for funding battery and renewable tech. But we also believe that action has to happen NOW.
Here in the UK they OK'd the Hinkley Point reactor in 2010 and it will probably produce electricity around 2025, fifteen years later at a cost of around £22bn cash and £50bn in raised electricity prices. These things are not fast or cheap.
I'm kind of optimistic that renewables will grow exponentially and solve things but we'll see. Whatever works best I guess.
And this is extremely unfortunate. Some of the reasons are logistical some political. But even with this I'll still take the bet to build nuke because what if we don't have good enough battery tech in 15/20 years? You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket, especially if that basket is a gamble.
I guess and I'll give you Hinkley seems a particularly inefficient example. Probably what they more want to do is take a proved reactor design and mass produce them.
> take a proved reactor design and mass produce them.
This is the tricky part. The key word is "proved". Currently that means an actively running reactor that is part of the power grid. But that clearly means there can be zero innovation, if we're considering that research reactors can never be considered "proved". Even if they have been running for years. But that's only a small part of the problem, even though this is usually pointed out as being a big part of the problem. It is convoluted.
> and targeting renewables are also turning up their coal usage.
Germany is actually turning OFF coal. There is a new plant right now which will never produce power. Others are being turned off. Coal is clogging the lines for renewable power.
Meanwhile costs for nuclear waste disposal and decommission of nuclear plants cost the taxpayer money because of failed ideas of a safe mine in the past and heavy lobbying today.
As you can see below in those old numbers the amount of renewables is rising constantly. The actual number is now at 37,8% [0]
The fact that deals which have been done decades ago are something very hard to get rid of. It was very expensive with nuclear and it will be likely just as expensive with coal etc. but it's happening as I wrote above. All the more reasons why nuclear is just nothing to even mention if you consider energy in the future. It's a dead technology from the past and we'll have to face the remains of it for decades to come. We'll have to deal with it when the last coal power plant disappeared.
Here is a chart which includes nuclear and other zero emission technologies. A 7% difference is nice but it's a drop in the bucket when you're increasing the renewable share by 5% annually. Even if you consider that Germany shut down 75GW out of 150GW then a 15% difference is still just not very important but it makes Germany look very bad in the short term. Give it 10 years and the zero emission share will be somewhere around 90%, meanwhile any nuclear plant planned today will only be finished in 2029 only to become obsolete the same year.
The thing is that if they didn't shut down the nuclear reactors they could have shut down more coal plants. Doing so would be more environmentally friendly. And I doubt there's any serious academic that would disagree. Shutting down coal before nuclear.
The reasons to shut down coal and why it goes so slow are political. It's jobs in the east where right-wing populists are already taking over for example. Same goes for the region in the west where shutting down heavy industry and coal has been a continues issue for politicians for the last few decades. There is also the matter of contracts and reimbursing plant owners.
Honestly I don't see anything to explain other than maybe Germany is basically trying to accomplish it's goal on nightmare difficulty. (almost no sun, south is far away from offshore wind, shutting down nuclear, no hydro)
The next step is reducing the carbon impact of transportation but that is something that hugely relies on battery prices falling over the next decade.
I believe the short to medium term future of nuclear is SMRs, not necessarily utility scale nuclear reactors. SMRs are basically naval scale PWRs that can be transported on a truck and deployed in batches. Most nuclear "waste" from these could then be further burned in fast breeder reactors, which are indeed more expensive but they solve the waste problem and create new fuel for conventional thermal reactors.
Nuclear cost more because of the extreme regulations put around it, not because of the actual creation of the facility or the production of the energy.
Neither solar nor wind can deliver anything close to the amount of energy we need and they aren't reliables which means that you either do coal or oil.
Solar and wind worldwide is less than 1% of the actual energy consumption.
