It’s stories like these that tell us the United States wants to triple nuclear energy:

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/27/americas-coal-communities-co...

And restarting closed plants is becoming a thing

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/30/michigan-nuclear-plant-final...

>No new U.S. nuclear plants are currently being built.

If it was a good idea, plants would be being built. People with much more expertise than us have crunched the numbers and they can’t make it work. It’s too expensive and that’s why there are no new plants being built. No amount of internet proselytizing will change this.

Both politicians and investors are too short-term in their motivations to use their actions to teach us anything.

It's clear the future is unreliable renewable (solar+wind) and batteries, with some pumped/hydro where it is geologically feasible. Because the renewables are so cheap to build, and the cheap renewables cause over-supply and the batteries are a cheap-steadily-getting-cheaper solution to that.

The tipping point comes when we need to start phasing out the base power for overnight and long bouts of bad weather.

So the pricing game to be made is, can nuclear be built cheap enough to compete with batteries for long-term base power?

Most likely to me is that nuclear will survive in places with worse weather (Nordic countries where the sun goes down for 3 weeks in winter) or poor geography (Japan), and sunnier places (like Texas, or most of the US even) will go full renewable+battery.

Completely missing our emissions goals will change this attitude.

I have read these same stories about "doubling" or "trippling" nuclear for more than 20 years.

In that 20 years there has been ~0 increase in US nuclear power generation, and in the UK it has halved.

Actually nuclear has negative growth at this point. There are a lot of aging plants coming up for either closure or expensive investments needed to keep them going a bit longer.

Yeah, people wanted to greatly reduce CO2 emissions. The renewable crowd said we didn’t need it.

Now we’re way behind in reducing emissions. All these stories about AI needing electricity. Where’s the renewable solution?

Having worked in the industry, "the renewable crowd" were heavily pro nuclear.

Clean coal, clean gas, carbon capture, and the "nothing bad happens when you burn coal I would happily live next to a coal power plant" crowd are the real issue. That's the grift that keeps on grifting.

Culture war. The left is against nuclear so the right wants it.

Of course it never actually goes anywhere because money has no ideology only reality. Just years of studies and bureaucracy.