[ThomPete]

Of course it is. You are claiming that the lack of success of nuclear shows that it doesn't work financially. The same can be said about the effectiveness of solar. If it was so effective and could support most of our energy needs why haven't it?

The reason nuclear is expensive is because of the regulations around it NOT because of the technical issues of building a nuclear power plant.

[pfdietz]

What condemns nuclear is the stubborn lack of improvement it has shown.

Solar and wind have shown impressive and sustained improvement along so-called "experience curves". The cost of each has declined as a power law in cumulative installed capacity. This decline has been sustained while they've declined in cost by orders of magnitude (PV has improved in cost by more than a factor of 200 since the 1970s.)

Nuclear, in contrast, has been largely free of such sustained improvement. If anything, costs have increased with experience -- negative learning. The complexity and scale of nuclear appears to be such that learning effects are cancelled out.

And no, regulations are NOT the reason. That's the increasingly lame excuse nuclear fans confabulate to deal with the cognitive dissonance of their precious technology not actually living up to their fantasies about it. And as I've said elsewhere, if your complaint is that government doesn't let reactors meltdown enough, you might as well hang it up and go home. You are not going to win that one.

[ben_w]

Because even though only 5 of the last 20 years had less than 30% annual growth, even though the annual average compounded equivalent rate since records began has been 73% per yer (which I think places it second in growth between improvements to cost reductions in genetics (#1) and Moores law (#3)) it takes time to do that.

This year PV alone is forecast to reach half a terrawatt. I’m not sure if that’s peak or average but at 30% per year growth, it doesn’t really matter. World electric use is only 2.7 TW, after that point we want to start electrolysing hydrogen out of water even if only to replace jet fuel.