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this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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Well of course you can build them when price is no concern.
But when price matters nuclear is too expensive.
Again, capitalism cannot fix the problems created by capitalism.
And you better believe that the factories that pump out solar cells and wind turbines were initially built with government money.
The federal government has been throwing money at solar and wind projects. And these days it pays off, but in the early days, it did not. Wind was particularly expensive for the power generated for about 5-10 years. And then more factories came online and the price rapidly fell.
The same crowd that told us to wait for wind to become viable, screams that nuclear is too expensive and should get no government money at all.
That same crowd often sues new nuclear power projects, driving up the cost further. All because they are fucking idiots who want fossil fuels to win.
See, that's the dirty little secret. Every wind and solar farm needs a backup power source for when they're offline. And that backup is always natural gas.
Those natural gas peaker plants are being built at a breakneck pace. All because solar and wind get priority on the grid. And then when they fall off, you need a near instant ramp up of power, which only natural gas can provide.
Batteries that can handle the load don't actually exist yet, and likely require more investment than it would take to get a small modular reactor factory going full steam.
Nuclear has huge investment since 1940's and tonnes of money is still going into it. More money is not going to help anytime soon. It's just throwing good money at bad. I'm not saying it won't be cracked eventually. But with the limited time and money in the system wind and solar are obviously the answers.
Capitalism can easily solve the problem with externalities. Very few people that support capitalism wouldn't also support government investment so the fact that capitalist governments have funded capital gains is not at all a failure of capitalism. That would be like saying governments funding schools to increase human capital to raise more taxes is a failure of capitalism. In fact it is the optimal solution for all even in a capitalist society.
There is always wind or solar. If you build enough of it they the low points aren't that low anymore. There is still huge amounts of hydro on most continents. We are not even 10% of the way to where we need to be with renewables. The fact that they only offset gas some of the time doesn't mean they won't ever work, it just means we haven't built enough yet.
It had a huge investment in the 40s, 50s and 60s. At least in the US.
Really, we should acknowledge again that the extreme price of nuclear is a US problem, and not as applicable to the rest of the world, although some of the regulatory sabotage was exported to other countries via treaty.
And again, capitalism cannot solve a problem that capitalism created, because oil is still too fucking profitable to solve it.
As to your example of governments running schools to make better workers for capitalism... Need I say more? Schools are not often run for profit, and the ones that are almost always perform worse than the ones that are run by the government at cost.
As to Hydo, most rivers that can support hydro are already tapped, and creating artificial lakes is worse for the environment than almost anything else you can do. The rotting plant matter at the bottom emits more methane than people realize. And that's not even mentioning the ecological damage to the river itself.
As to wind and solar, sure, there's somewhere on the planet you could probably build more, but getting the power from those places to where it's needed is going to cost more than just building an on site nuclear plant, even at the artificially elevated US prices.
This goes into why prices in the US are elevated. It's a fascinating read. It doesn't talk about some of the issues of scale, i.e. the fact that new nuclear plants are often so huge that they need special everything to even be built. Which is actually an outgrowth of the regulatory licensing structure, but it does cover some of the stupidity around the regulations.