| > There is the point: fossil fuels are the only alternative to nuclear. According to whom? I don't know if any carbon free grid models that say nuclear is absolutely necessary. There are some models that show that it may be cheaper to have 10%-20% nuclear generation along with other renewable generation, but I'm not sure if they have updated their models for a word where we don't have any constructible nuclear designs in the US, or accounted for current nuclear costs. As far as shortages: 1) the current semiconductor shortage is a chip fab shortage, the semiconductor process for solar only shares the input of silicon. That's not to say that there aren't supply chains issues, but the solar PV market is orders of magnitude larger than nuclear production capacity, and growing exponentially. The cure for high commodity prices is high commodity prices, and the solar PV history is a history of overcoming shortages and using ever less materials to relentlessly reduce costs. And as far as "materials" that's only part of the cost of any product, there's also labor, and also different materials have vastly different costs. So instead of being concerned about "materials" we should be concerned with costs. And that's where nuclear has not shown any ability to compete, any ability to learn and reduce costs, or really any ability to behave like a proper and good technology. Nuclear gets more expensive the more advanced an economy we have, which is not a tech that we want to continue to use. |