Comment It was over years ago (Score 3, Insightful) 215
Put yourself in the shoes of one of those Masters of the Universe, the people who make the calls on where to invest ten billion dollars and more. You do not have a nuclear engineering degree, or anything like it; you just study trends in industry, more than R&D.
So you've been watching batteries and renewables get exponentially cheaper for over a decade. Solar, in particular, can already beat nuclear's assumed $/MWh, only "firm clean" needs for base-load keeps nuclear in the running, so your nuclear "play" depends on cheap storage not happening for the 40 years it will take to build your plant, and pay it off.
- Halving again the price of existing batteries has to stall;
- The "iron air" 120-hour battery from Form Energy has to fail;
- The discovery by Eavor that their geothermal wells from fracking can store a lot of energy by pumping into them has to not work;
- For that matter, geothermal-via-fracking in general has to turn out a big disappointment
The odds on all of that R&D failing for 40 years is very small.
My copy of "The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear" by Dr. Petr Beckman is 50 years old; I've been championing nuclear from early high school to government pension. But I spent most of that 50 years as an engineer, and we follow the cheapest solution that is reliable and sustainable. The nuclear industry has failed me, after all those subsidies and free research dollars.
It is already baked-in that China is going to try several new reactor designs; as analysts say, they did the *opposite* of that recent wisdom that we should have picked 3 designs and made many of each; China wants to export, so they developed a bunch of reactor designs to please possible customers, and still are, including small and Thorium. For once, we should let them take point, and go back to look at nuclear if they do something good and amazingly cheap; it seems far more likely that they will fail.