In reality, the market will do it for them as the datacenter and energy boom requires more energy than green can provide and the money will flow anew to nuclear and fission.
Right. As much as I like nuclear, you could overbuild solar or wind by a factor of 3 in half the time and pay the whole project off before the nuclear project even gets finished.
I am not violently allergic to nuclear, and am mindful that there will be places it is needed, although it’s going to be incredibly expensive and time consuming to build where needed. Texas has enormous wind and solar potential, they can skip it.
Nuclear power is fundamentally incompatible with a for-profit energy sector. It makes zero sense as a profit seeking CEO to invest tens of billions of dollars and over a decade of development to something that might pay for itself over the next half century if ever. Especially when you can build wind farms that turn profits in under 16 months and solar even more quickly these days. Maybe nuclear makes sense for a country's long term energy security. But that literally has no bearing on what happens with US energy investments.
There's also the huge amount of economic risk in each construction project, which is too much financial risk for an entity the size of a utility to bear.
I would argue that it makes little more sense for a nation state to take on that economic risk, either. Risk can be priced, and the bill for many the risks of nuclear are already picked up by others due to the laws around nuclear. If, even with those massive subsidies, nuclear is too economically risky for utilities, I would argue that it's too costly overall for anyone. Or at least a poor decision.
Until there's some major innovation in nuclear construction, the risk should be reserved for those with no better options (e.g. Finland, maybe the UK, etc.)
Rio Tinto is moving smelters to renewables and batteries in Australia.
I've yet to see anything solid in this latest talk of nuclear renaissance (which they talk about every year) that can't be put down to silicon valley nerds moving in weird political circles that are irrationally attracted to nuclear power.
I think it's one of those "be contrarian for the sake of it" positions. People think they sound smart for going nuclear because it ticks a lot of boxes at the surface level.
Then you realise it costs multiple times more than renewables and batteries (ain't that the real revolution), takes over a decade to build and imposes large obligations on the owners.