[epistasis]

For the costs of nuclear, they are pretty abysmal, because it's a construction project and Western countries are terrible at construction logistics. One cost estimate:

https://www.lazard.com/media/451905/lazards-levelized-cost-o...

Every year the cost of nuclear increases because we have fewer examples of successful construction and more examples of failed construction. The industry is in shambles, effectively dead. The US attempts at construction of AP1000s resulted in 2/4 failing, and the other two reactors being several multiples behind in schedule and pricing. The latest excuse for the failure is that they began construction before design was complete, so of course they failed. However this was the request of the nuclear industry, in an attempt to bring down prices, and the entire regulatory approval process was changed to accommodate this, which was supposed to bring down prices and prevent the failure of construction. Look at any attempt to build nuclear in a modern economy and you will find failure, not success.

As for spending infinite dollars to solve climate change, no, that is not possible. There are real productive limits to capacity to build things. The solar, wind, and storage industries are growing at massive rates, but still its only barely enough to meet the speed needed for our energy transition.

If we had infinite money to spend on nuclear, we still would not be able to build sufficient new restore by, say 2040. In the US alone we would need to build ~100 reactors simply to replace those reaching their end of life. We do not have the construction capacity for that, much less a design to build, or willing financial backers.

For the foreseeable future, nuclear is a dying industry in the US, not because of regulation or public backlash, but because the industry can't build.

The only hope for nuclear in the US or Europe is for small modular reactors, a design that in the past has been rejected for being too expensive. But since it's closer to manufacturing (like a plane) than like construction, there's hope, even if it's a long shot.

[ncmncm]

There is too little scope for graft in modular nukes to be feasible in the US.

I.e., if you are trying to scare up money for a big enough nuke plant to be worth installing, the stakeholders you would need on board will see noplace to skim off the money they demand to greenlight the project.

Thus far solar and wind seem thus far resistant to graft, for reasons that are easy to speculate about, but hard to prove.

[epistasis]

Honestly I think it's exactly the opposite, there's way too much opportunity for graft, and that's the only reason they ever get pursued.

It's much easier to take some graft off a super size construction project with few bidders and massive transaction costs compared to small repeatable transactions that happen with smaller projects.

Nuclear construction often ends up with people in jail. It's happening in South Carolina, and happened in South Korea too, and up until the corruption was found, SK had been touted as a modern nuclear success story that could maybe be replicated in the US.

So we are left with only China and Russia's Rosatom as the only builders that claim to be able to deliver at a reasonable cost. We just need to trust the builders enough to construct in our countries, with our workforces, and somehow get a hugely complex construction project with lots of high-precision welding and construction pours done on time and accurately.

[ncmncm]

Point was that modular nukes would have well-known prices: a plant with two dozen modules would be expected to cost 24x the public price of a module. It is hard to bury much graft in the land acquisition, and hard to stretch out the construction time, or pad the cost. So you can't drum up enough support to start it.

Solar projects are useful at smaller sizes, so need fewer stakeholders, making it easier to find honest ones. People choosing to be involved with renewables are more often self-selected for idealism.

[throwaway0a5e]

>Thus far solar and wind seem thus far resistant to graft,

That's because the graft happens earlier in the process before the actual "build the thing" portion so you don't notice. The developer typically pisses away money directly or indirectly getting on the good side of the local powers that be before actually pulling the trigger on the project.

Contrast with nuclear or any other centralized power generation where the state gets involved. Sure, money gets pissed away in similar ways on those projects (pay off special interest X, promise a favorable rate for Y, etc) but it tends to not technically be graft because it's all done through the official processes.

[ncmncm]

Anybody can count panels and turbines, look up their prices, and compare them to the project budget. There is just noplace to hide the grift. Undoubtedly that is slowing deployment of really big installations, but economy of scale is much less for renewables, so instead plenty of small installations go up. A single wind turbine or few acres of solar has close to the same value, per unit cost, as a GW-scale installation.