I thoroughly agree with you on coal! We need to get away from it as soon as possible. I just do not believe that nuclear fission power is the way anymore. 25 years ago I would have had another opinion entirely because the time frame would have been different.
Let's say I agree to build a modern reactor type today. Planning and construction begin, it doesn't have a host of issues and cost explosions like the "new" Finnish plants [1], problems that are typical for modern large scale engineering projects in Europe.
Then it will go online in 12 years and deliver the megawatts of power as planned. That's 12 years of progress in renewables at the same time. Just look at photovoltaics since 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics and that's just ONE out of many categories of renewables. A decade of progress while monstrous masses of concrete a poured for an 80s power plant design so it doesn't blow up in our faces and make land inhospitable for thousands of years. Is that where we should invest our cognitive energy?
Nuclear waste disposal and upgrading/modernizing the many 1960s reactor designs out there would have been key but it hasn't happened because of cost.
If nuclear was cheap, reliable and environmentally friendly it would have replaced coal a long time ago. But even Western states with tight proliferation control and a strongly embedded infrastructure in the Western security hemisphere are not opting to vastly extend nuclear fission power for a decent number of reasons.
And if in 12 years those photovoltaics somehow haven't replaced coal - maybe the efficiency improvements stop, maybe there's issues with the supply of rare earths, maybe - then we'll be in a fine fix won't we.
Nuclear isn't the only thing that tends to take longer than planned. I would confidently bet that we'll still be running coal in 12 years' time. Certainly I think it's worth hedging against when the cost is building what, a few dozen power plants that follow existing designs?
Nuclear was affordable and effective when countries were building out national programs for nuclear. France was building them at crazy speed, every reactor was identical, safety information and skills were shared.
Then came the age of neoliberalism where public infrastructure for some reason needs to be build with private money for profit. We could have lent government money to the project at 0.1% interest, but instead in UK we built it with private money of 5% interest + profit. On a 50 year project that quadruples your cost. Now ever reactor is a different design with different issues, built by a firm that overpromises and under delivers, mired in contract disputes
That every reactor is too different maybe stems from idiotic regulations, ecohype and nimbyism streching build times so long that every time another one gets started there's a new design available.
And not from financing, although the multidecade stretches do not help that either.
EDIT: And these same delays force operation of 50 year old designs to the failure, just because building some new ones is in fact infeasible. Then those ancient reactors fail, as in Fukushima, and we're onwards on the spiral.
Let's say I agree to build a modern reactor type today. Planning and construction begin, it doesn't have a host of issues and cost explosions like the "new" Finnish plants [1], problems that are typical for modern large scale engineering projects in Europe.
Then it will go online in 12 years and deliver the megawatts of power as planned. That's 12 years of progress in renewables at the same time. Just look at photovoltaics since 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics and that's just ONE out of many categories of renewables. A decade of progress while monstrous masses of concrete a poured for an 80s power plant design so it doesn't blow up in our faces and make land inhospitable for thousands of years. Is that where we should invest our cognitive energy?
Nuclear waste disposal and upgrading/modernizing the many 1960s reactor designs out there would have been key but it hasn't happened because of cost.
If nuclear was cheap, reliable and environmentally friendly it would have replaced coal a long time ago. But even Western states with tight proliferation control and a strongly embedded infrastructure in the Western security hemisphere are not opting to vastly extend nuclear fission power for a decent number of reasons.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Finland#New_c...