This is one of the many reasons that I think nuclear plants should not be corporate owned
I think a lot of stuff that’s currently corporate owned shouldn’t be but that’s a conversation for another time
Edit: Should to shouldn’t
The people with money to invest in the energy sector don’t seem interested in nuclear. They’re looking at the history of cost and schedule overruns, and then putting their money in solar and wind. Regulators do seem willing to greenlight new nuclear projects, but nobody is buying.
If the public were to finance a nuclear power, we have to ask why there’s a good reason to do so when private investment is already rejecting it. There has to be some reason outside of cost effectiveness. One answer to that is recycling all the nuclear waste we already have.
That’s because private companies are incapable of large scale engineering. They want fast profits, not stable infrastructure.
Nuclear is not going to help that. It doesn’t synergize well with wind and solar. You want something that can scale up when wind and solar drop off. Nuclear only makes sense if you can run it at the same level all the time.
Need some smaller, shipping crate sized nuclear generators that can be rented. If smaller set ups end up helping with knowledge and new tech then awesome. If not, it’s still pretty fucking cool.
TerraPower, backed by Bill Gates, has the same belief. The the first one to be built is already underway in Kemmerer, Wyoming.
The good reason is cost externalities. Nuclear is the only power source that deals with its own waste. No one demands the solar industry recycle their stuff for free or that they pay a carbon tax for the trees that don’t exist because of the panels in the space. Same for wind but add on the birds killed. Same for hydro but the fish killed. Same for coal but add all of us killed.
We all subsidize the waste disposal of the other power sources. Coal gets to dump all that stuff in the air and our collective resource is that much lowered in quality.
Change the market conditions to reflect the true cost and nuclear comes out on top. Even the CO2 used to make the plants is laughably small when you consider that the plants can last over 50 years while solar has to be almost completely replaced in 15.
It deals with its own waste by leaving it sitting in a big pit. That’s not a viable long term strategy. It needs to go to a central facility to be buried for 100k years, or (my preference) recycled in other reactors designed to do that. Neither is being done right now in the US, and both would almost certainly require public subsidies.
