I'm 100% convinced there is an oil/coal lobby conspiracy here. Nuclear used to cost $3000/kw in the fucking 80s, still does in China.
America needs 700GW of Nuclear power for 100% nuclear energy AND to charge EVs. That's just $2.1 trillion to COMPLETELY decarbonize both energy and transport. That's 3 years of military budget, we could have done this 40 years ago :agony-consuming:
For the UK, even assuming a conservative $5k/kW cost of construction, it would cost $250 billion to fully nuclearize the electricity grid. That's 1% of the GDP over 10 years. This 1-2% over 10-15 years figure applies more or less to all developed countries.
There is ample evidence of coal/oil interests frustrating nuclear power construction through sockpuppet environmental NGOs, lobbying to hamper nuclear development, anti-nuclear propaganda etc.
Here are 5 reasons why capital doesn't want nuclear:
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Nuclear is structurally unprofitable. It requires massive initial capital investment, and there are very little running costs to profit from. Nuclear power has never been profitable anywhere, BUT IT DOESNT MATTER. It is still massively beneficial to humanity. It is living proof that profitability is not the only metric for a better society, and in fact can actively hamper building a better society.
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Nuclear lasts 60-80 years, modern designs could even last 100 years. Coal, Oil and even wind turbines, solar, need continual gradual replacement. See why fossil interests support wind and solar, and oppose nuclear? It's better for them to have a constant stream of revenue. :capitalist-laugh:
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Virtually all reactors are owned by the state, for reasons of profitability. Nuclear is a socialist source of power, private corporations HATE that! There is a reason why China is going all in on nuclear. The Soviet Union also was planning on making nuclear it's primary source.
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Resource extraction industries also extract rent, i.e super profits (according to Ricardian theory of differential rent). Uranium is a tiny fraction of nuclear costs, can't have that, gotta get that oil/coal/gas rent.
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Solar/Wind requires trillions in energy storage, that's another massive cost to humanity, but for capital - a massive source of profit :capitalist:
Edit : China built a 6000MW nuclear power plant for $10 billion. At that cost, it would cost USA just $1.2 trillion to go full nuclear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangjiang_Nuclear_Power_Station
This is all well and good, but there's people outside of US. The conclusion is correct, it's communism or barbarism and I really hope we reach the right solution before the global working class suffers too much (well, it's already too much) from the inevitable climate catastrophe, but we also have to start fixing the problem while we are living in the capitalist system.
Outside the US it is even more easy. You have to rehaul your electricity grid anyhow every 30-50/60 years (depending on components), this means the push for decentralization can be done everywhere. For Northern Africa you can have the Pan-European-Supergrid, for Western African countries you can have a nice grid, too (and it might be more easy for the non central urban areas to go for hard pushes for renewables and bridge technologies). The construction of nuclear reactors and the grids they need do tend to take much longer than thought and get much more expensive, if not done under experienced management (which currently means China, and even then the projects take longer and cost more, but not to the amounts the new reactors in France or Finland did cost).
You could have currently remote small cities in Egypt in which you can achieve electricity independence within 5-7 years without having to connect them to the grid (though that should be goalpost).
After writing it down, I would like to underline another point. Most people are within a couple of areas, in those grids are not a problem (and nuclear might be sensible).
Most electricity is consumed where most people are and the consumption is high OR where production happens. If this is at a place of bad grid connectivity then renewables are more attractive (so basically in South Africa outside the east cost, the very south, Gauteng and thus Pretoria). Though with another company that isn't fucking Eskom nuclear energy generation might be a good step for in 20-30 years.
It always blows my mind how low the population in Europe and the USA are.
Yeah, this would be all well and good if this kind of cooperation was possible under capitalism, but especially for northern countries solar is unusable for most of the year, and not all countries get enough wind for continuous production. Unfortunately for short term solutions (30-60 years) we have to do the planning on the assumption that borders and capitalism exists. Even with that taken into account, we could do way more with solar and wind, but there still exists a need for nuclear. I don't think we actually disagree that much, just wanted to bring up the edge case for nuclear power. The problems with the Finnish and French nuclear projects stem from the profit motive, and the same problems exist with renewables aswell.
Believe that, too.
Yeah, it definitely is good to have a good material politics about it instead of a hippie one. Though it is important to look at the material conditions and subjective consciousnesses of the politics when speaking about energy generation in the future.
Sure, but honestly the remote places can be basically ignored for such analysis (as very few people live there and even in Seattle / Torronto you can get sensible wind and even PV generation). For Norway the problem doesn't even quite ask cause they are effectively 100% hydroelectric (but could do more in terms of total energy consumption).
The biggest consumers are the people with the most capital and also the US.
Yeah, we have a pretty extensive hydroelectric system in my home country aswell. It fucks up the rivers and surrounding nature with the reservoirs, but that's another struggle session for another day. The tidal and wave generators seem pretty effective, hopefully they get more support in the future (please, don't tell me that they destroy the local ecosystems where they are installed).
Yeah, that does happen. My favorite is lignite mining, though which you can even see from space.
There are ways to mitigate quite a bit of it and there are associated problems, which will not solve the core contradictions. However I am not fond of doing a "natural" argument, there are few pieces on earth were nature is not antropogenized/human imprinted for centuries or even millennia.