[BongoMcCat]

I think that the economic argument is that it isn't viable for a private company to start a nuclear power-plant, it would require government involvement, and lots of people don't want the government to get involved in something that they think no-government entities can handle.

[account42]

You don't nee the government to get involved in the nuclear plant if you don't want them to be - you can have the government make sure that the cost of global warming is paid by the coal plant. Either climate change and global warming are serious issues, and then properly accounting for their cost would significantly disadvantage coal power - or they are not serious issues and we can keep burning coal and oil.

[oblio]

That's silly for electricity.

Electricity will never, ever be a free market. The barriers to entry are almost insurmountable, especially capital requirements (production + distribution, especially distribution) but also the myriad safety regulations.

Might as well involve the government and gain some accountability, because with corporations, there is 0 accountability.

[pjc50]

One of those definitional things; it'll never be a truly unregulated wild west market, but then what is?

Realistically the grid needs to be nationalised or under an arms-length wholly government owned corporation. You can't have competing grids. The grid is the market. The UK tried privatizing it (and the rail infrastructure, and the broadband infrastructure) and ended up taking electricity and rail national again.

On the back end I think the UK market works reasonably well with a light regulatory touch allowing for microgenerators. The retail side is more of a problem. You can't really expose retail customers to the spot price (that went wrong in Texas), so there has to be an intermediary, who is vulnerable to bankruptcy instead if the spot price shoots up.

[oblio]

> One of those definitional things; it'll never be a truly unregulated wild west market, but then what is?

Well, I didn't say "unregulated". You can have regulation that doesn't create huge barriers to entry.

What would be a free market today? Something with very low barriers to entry (capital, expertise, legal requirements) and with lots of competition.

For example real estate agents in some developing countries. They frequently have only a high school degree (if that), they don't really need a ton of money to get started (just some nice clothes and some time), and the legal aspects are mostly covered by notaries, anyway. In many developing countries the real estate market is not consolidated so you have a million independent real estate agents, who frequently don't even have exclusivity for the property they're selling. So you could literally have 10 agents promoting the same property.

[emteycz]

Electricity is a free market on a huge portion of the world, including EU, which is working hard to make it even freer market.

> with corporations there is zero accountability

This is not Somalia, lol. There is rule of law here and it works fairly well. The only problem is who people vote for.

[marcosdumay]

Yeah, distribution is a huge can of worms. But production (and storage, as soon as it makes economical sense) are quite easy to entry. There are many cars that are more expensive than a small sized hydro or solar plant.

[aerostable_slug]

Note that managing lots of small generation is much harder than a few big ones that are contractually bound to behave according to certain rules. Distributed generation is extremely exciting, but it's also a big challenge.

[DennisP]

In the US, private companies have built all our nuclear plants. And reactors like this little one in Canada will make it a lot easier.

[flgb]

With entirely public money and underwriting.

[DennisP]

You're claiming that the government paid to build the reactors? Do you have a source?

[pjc50]

Is EDF a "private" or "government" entity?