If nuclear power were profitable, no amount of vehement opposition due to environmental risk could stop it. There'd be nuclear power plants everywhere. Fortunately for your vehement opposition, considering all costs. nuclear power has always been the single most expensive way to generate electricity, has never been profitable, and never will be, even if it wasn't regulated. Investors can't be found unless a government subsidizes construction and pays for decommissioning and waste storage and security. The only reason so many nuclear power plants were even constructed in the US in the first place is that someone somewhere, or perhaps a team or committee, vastly overestimated the need for fuel for bombs. Anyway, it really sucks, but opposition and environmental concern can't really stop the destruction of ecosystems or environmental catastrophe if whatever is causing it is profitable. Nuclear is done and didn't need help killing itself, but keep that in mind if you have any other pet environmental concerns, i.e. that to win and protect the environment, one must figure out a way to obliterate the potential for profit in risking or destroying it. Otherwise, you're just shaking a tiny fist at the sky for all the good it'll do.
I don't believe this is inherently true. Theoretical designs exist that solve a lot of nuclear power's problems: this issue is that it got caught in a death spiral due to Chernobyl. That ended investment and R&D, so nuclear power plants didn't improve while other sources of energy did, so they got even less investment and R&D.
> this issue is that it got caught in a death spiral due to Chernobyl.
Nuclear (fission) power's unprofitability predates Chernobyl to the very first reactors and continuing up to this day. The Shippingport Atomic Power Station was the first commercial reactor to come online, and it was a small reactor, cost $78M to construct in 1958. Decommissioning and cleanup 30 years later cost about $100M. Considering the plant and the resulting mess were small, I really don't think it broke even, but I can't find any economic analysis that includes all the things.
A study in 2019 found that nuclear power has not been profitable anywhere in the world.[1] The study also found nuclear power has never been financially viable, that most plants have been built while heavily subsidised by governments, often motivated by military purposes, and that nuclear power is not a good approach to tackling climate change. It found, after reviewing trends in nuclear power plant construction since 1951, that the average 1,000MW nuclear power plant would incur an average economic loss of about $8B.
And R&D in fission is complete. We know pretty much all there is to know regarding it, and reducing cost simply is not viable through more investment in R&D. We've been working on this in earnest since the late 1940's, so it's no surprise we have figured everything out other than how to do it cheaply enough to achieve economic viability. There are some nuclear power applications where economic viability don't matter, such as nuclear subs and aircraft carriers, and I expect we won't stop building those, but commercial nuclear power just can't work because of the money, and nothing else is needed to say "no," and if it was economically viable, no other objections, such as environmental, would stop it.
Yes, it's never been profitable. The first photovoltaic device was built in the 1830's, and mass photovoltaic deployment only became profitable in the last decade. R&D in fission is absolutely not complete. The investment in it has been pathetic since before computer modeling existed, there's no way there aren't efficiencies to find. So much of the field references papers from the 50s and 60s, because that was the last time there was money and a non-strangling amount of regulation. Thorium reactors, theoretically much safer and cheaper, have barely even been tried.
It would take a huge capital investment to get a program like this off the ground, so it's too risky for the market. The invisible hand's rejection is not the same as impossibility.
> The first photovoltaic device was built in the 1830's, and mass photovoltaic deployment only became profitable in the last decade.
This is a bizarre comparison. The US invested about $1.5T total in developing nuclear power. Almost nothing was invested in developing PV. If only 1% of the money wasted on developing nuclear power had instead been invested in PV, nuclear power would have been dead by 1970. A recently passed bill earmarks $6B to keep nuclear plants open. Compare to recent DoE announcement to spend $82M on PV manufacturing. Even with this nearly two orders of magnitude imbalance of spending, PV is going to beat the pants off nuclear by making tons of money compared to nuclear power losing mind-boggling amounts of it.
R&D can not make nuclear energy cheaper. It is simply commercially unviable. If you can figure out a way to make it profitable, you can have all the nuclear energy you want, but a lot of smart and capable people spanning 4 generations have already tried and failed.
nuclear did need help to kill itself. I dont know about usa but in europe many political parties were funded to destroy nuclear. trading it for coal and russian gas. nuclear is the best energy we have today . nothing ever come close to it. renewables are a fad heavily backed by people that are making money out of it. You cant power a full sized country with it. it fluctuates too much. in terms of what you need to build and renew solar panels or wind turbines it has a deep environmental impact. it is actually as renewable as nuclear… look at germany relying on fossil fuels and killing the environment to fit your green agenda. living proof of a clown state backed up by corrupt politicians
