| > It's always about cost As the direness of the climate situation becomes more and more urgent, cost becomes irrelevant. During times of emergency and total war, dollars don't mean anything. If you have the manpower and the raw resources to do something, it gets done. Ignoring the politics and economics of energy production, from a physics standpoint nuclear is a high outlier in terms of energy density per resource spent or per unit climate change impact, and that fact will increasingly override dollar costs or public perception as the the climate gets increasingly hostile. Until the crisis becomes apparent, I am sure nuclear will continue to be a mostly ignored option across europe and the west while political forces dominate the issue. China on the other hand isn't bothered by public sentiment[1] [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/china-nuclearpower/china-lik... |
As far as public utilities go, the problem is that people who give them money expect a small but static return on investment. For almost all the 20th century they were a mostly safe place to keep money. That was part of the reason why Enron was one of the few companies where the white collar criminals were actually punished.
One of the major problems is that the people running them don't know how to manage projects that are more risky and the people doing the investing don't know how to account for the uncertainty around fossil fuels, versus intermittent renewables, versus huge nuclear projects. The message from the politicians is always "your money in these projects is safe", and they've made sure to keep that promise even if they've put a different spin on it because the underlying shockwaves would be as bad as government bonds going bad.