[rtpg]

There was still a perfectly nice window of opportunity even scratching nuclear from the list.

My other glib thing about nuclear is that France, a much denser nation than the US (though of course density is a local property...), has a bunch of nuclear, but even with "full" buy-in it's hard to make the whole thing profitable, and a lot of the nuclear reactors are running at like 80% capacity.

Electricity is pretty fungible at smaller scales but when you start building reactors you need water and you need consumers of a lot of electricity to be close by, and that does cause its own sets of constraints.

Would still be better if the US had built a bunch more nuclear reactors, but my assumption has often been that there are limits to how much it could be expanded in the US given those constraints.

[xethos]

> a lot of the nuclear reactors are running at like 80% capacity.

This is presumably intentional. Beyond longevity, being able to shift one plant to 0 and take up the load across other plants allows for continued uptime even with a plant down (or just below capacity).

> it's hard to make the whole thing profitable

Considering France had the second-cheapest electicity for industrial use in the EU (in 2015, the most recent date from Wikipedia), this feels more regulatory-bassed than a properly fair shot at "Look how expensive nuclear is"

[rtpg]

> This is presumably intentional

It's intentional in that people are making decisions to do things, but the people running the power plants really would rather run at much higher capacity

I get what you're saying, but the line of comfort for these plants is above where it's at. I think the target is like 90% or something?

> Considering France had the second-cheapest electicity for industrial use in the EU (in 2015, the most recent date from Wikipedia), this feels more regulatory-bassed than a properly fair shot at "Look how expensive nuclear is"

Well... the State is present to make the whole thing work. This isn't a bad thing per se, though I think it goes against some US narratives of "well if the state didn't put in a bunch of regulations then nuclear would just be everywhere".

It's more I guess a point about how there's unlikely to be magical economies of scale that make this whole thing work out.

And the industrial use electricity point goes hand in hand with the reactor usage levels: there's a lot of electricity that EDF would like to sell but have few buyers for! It's a buyer's market!

I like nuclear stuff in general, just think it's worth being clear eyed that nuclear power generation has Real Problems that even full state and societal buy in didn't solve in France's case. Though they did get cheap power for trains etc from the deal, so not like France's situation is bad by any stretch of the imagination.