They do, because "greens" being anti-nuclear isn't just a fossil fuel talking point. We could have had widely deployed fission power by now, but politicing against it, in which greens were complicit in, managed to stall that out. While it was stalled out, perfect being the enemy of the good, guess which coal and oil plants ran in the meantime‽
I'm pretty green, and opposed nuclear power back in the 1980s, but I now consider that a mistake. We've remained far too dependent on coal and oil. If nuclear power would have prevented more coal plants from being opened, that would have been a massive win for the environment.
I still consider nuclear worse than solar, and I see it only as transitional tech until we can go fully green, but coal is so much worse, that nuclear should have been considered the better alternative.
By now, I think nuclear's window of opportunity has closed, because solar is just so ridiculously cheap right now. But if anyone wants to do it safely, I'm not against it.
The biggest blocker to nuclear in most places is that it needs the backing of a country in order to be built. The financial risk is just to big.
Pair this with their decade+ timeline and you have a mix that means that it's a long term goal. Us as voters have made long term goals unfeasible, we mostly run after what was in the news yesterday.
>The biggest blocker to nuclear in most places is that it needs the backing of a country in order to be built.
And who was complicit in creating that state of affairs?
Why did this technology not trickle down from the nation state to the enterprise and eventually the everyman the way that the material technologies of electronics and aerospace, the other high technologies of the time, did?
> And who was complicit in creating that state of affairs?
Financial institutions? Because the issue is getting a loan for say 8 billion that you might start repaying 10 to 15 years from now assuming it all pans out.
As much as you want to blame people for this, I don't think that's really the biggest reason. Most projects don't even get off the ground as the political will to back it is missing.
> Why did this technology not trickle down from the nation state to the enterprise and eventually the everyman
Uh, the cold war, nuclear proliferation etcetera. And I would argue that makes a lot of sense, even today.
>Financial institutions? Because the issue is getting a loan for say 8 billion that you might start repaying 10 to 15 years from now assuming it all pans out.
Sometime in the last third of the 20th century the bankers and industry looked around, they looked at the heavy industry that normally ran on decade long investment and reinvestment cycles and they looked at the state and federal regulators who had just been empowered to fairly unilaterally take action with net effects on the same order as most industries profit margins and they were like "nah we good, quarter to quarter is how it's gonna be now".
That's why nothing big gets built in boring but necessary industries, nuclear or otherwise.
>Most projects don't even get off the ground as the political will to back it is missing.
The fact that you need "political will" to plug generation capacity into the grid is the problem.
>Uh, the cold war, nuclear proliferation etcetera. And I would argue that makes a lot of sense, even today.
Disagree. The economic potential is too great. If there was a market there they'd find a way to make it safe enough.
Ooh pick me I know! It's basically that meme of shooting the guy in the chair. Their predecessors did everything in their power, in collusion with oil companies, to ban nuclear by all channels available - regulation, lying, fear-mongering.
Then nuclear doesn't advance for decades and not enough is built (btw killing the really-existing-50-years-ago right in our laps green energy solution).
Then they say nuclear is shitty tech that has no hope and has proven to be slow and expensive, and therefore it's a waste to put in effort into it. (Guess what state solar was in before we put effort into it + didn't make it effectively illegal?)
The anti-nuke environmentalists, with the help of oil, bear the biggest blame for global warming. Fuck amory lovins, fuck ed lyman.
I'm a broken record, but I'll say for the 100th time. How is everyone so damn certain nuclear is the one technology that doesn't improve with innovation, iteration, and scale? And don't tell me learning curves have proven it doesn't without looking up the preconditions for learning curves to apply.
