| If you think nuclear facilities are complicate I would suggest to look into facilities used to manufacture polycrystalline silicon for solar panels, or facilities for manufacturing gas turbines used in gas power plants. Nuclear industry is running with very high quality standards, this requires very good training, good maintenance. In this aspects, nuclear industry is similar to aircraft industry. Solar panels are cheap to install, wind turbines are not so cheap to install. Solar panels are cheap to maintain. Maintenance of offshore wind turbines is very expensive, therefor offshore wind turbines are more expensive, build with higher quality, than onshore wind turbines - so they require less frequent maintenance. I assume you are from US. The big difference between US and Europe energy landscape is the cost of natural gas, Europe pays 4-5x higher prices for natural gas then US. When solar power don't supply electricity (at night or under cloud cover) and wind has slow speeds (can happen for multiple weeks) some countries from Europe can use hydro-power (Norway, Austria, Switzerland), some countries can burn coal (Poland, Germany), but most European countries have to burn very expensive gas. The biggest source of electricity in Europe in the year 2025 was natural gas. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s... |
That's an unfair comparison. We are talking about operational costs, not capital costs. A fair comparison would include nuclear's capital costs, which don't do it any favors - nuclear plants also need fancy turbine blades.
Not that I'm against nuclear, I think we're completely mad to be still burning (burning! so primitive!) ancient plants, coming up on a century after Magic Energy Rocks were discovered. "Cost" is a fickle metric when so many costs are externalized in both space and time - nobody cares if the effects of pollution are felt years down the line, thousands of miles away.
But it's funny that governments throw wildly generous subsidies and special legal treatment at domestic food production, correctly perceiving cheap reliable food as upstream of a functioning society, yet fail to similarly "overinvest" in energy sources for machines as well as humans. I hazard that most of the European countries that depended heavily on Russian gas would not have been so blase if their population had been subsisting off Russian food imports.
We should be building out tremendous energy capacity using every conceivable technology available. Any country that does this is virtually guaranteed wealth, for energy is fungible with almost everything else. The equation is so obvious that failure to do so implies regulatory capture by entrenched energy interests. "Too cheap to meter" belongs in the same rhetorical bucket as "Perfect sound forever" - a promise that was retracted as soon as it became clear that scarcity was more profitable than abundance.