| > In fairness, nuclear is also just incredibly expensive. This is only now wit the current regulation and legal technology. There is no fundamental reason, that nuclear power production should be so expensive. If we go from first principle, nuclear power requires the least amount of land, the least amount of resources and not a lot of people to run. It runs for very long time. Nuclear plants were massively out-competing coal in the 80s until there was a huge regulatory changes that essentially killed the industry. Since then no new reactor technology has been license, pretty much all research has been killed, access to nuclear materials is basically impossible, almost no new nuclear plants were built. And just as with anything else, higher production makes things efficient. If you build one nuclear plant ever 10 years its gone be very expensive. This has been proven for nuclear plants over and over, any place that attempted to build many found that you could actually build them pretty fast and cheap. Also, there is a massive step up in our ability to improve nuclear power. Wind and solar will not get all that much better. With nuclear we are operating on 2% efficiency and we are having to build massive building and civil engineering to get it done. Even if we have know for 40-50 years that we could massively improve this technology, it just wasn't done. For example, having nuclear power plants that can load follow very effectively. > That's why nuclear is on the ropes in the US, if you give people a choice, they tend to vote with their wallets. If its all about cost then nothing competes with gas most of the time. If you take into account end-to-end cost of solar its quite a bit more expensive then people like to quote. In reality with intensive and tax credits, solar and wind would not be so successful outside of a few perfectly located places. And the cost goes up the closer you want to go to 100%. The approach the government likes of slowly getting utilities to up their % of green energy will run into more and more problems the longer it goes on. |
Are you talking about the US or South Korea? China seems to be investing pretty hard into nuclear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China