The problem with nuclear is that is not really improved by market forces. The failure mode is pretty catastrophic so insurance is underwritten by the state.
No company can simply try a different operational regime and go under if they do it badly. Thua any nuclear project is by default a government project. I am much more hopeful for fusion in this regard. Letting a fusion company fail doesn’t seem very dangerous so if the basic science can be tamed, gradual economic improvement could actually acrue by market forces.
Contrast that to nuclear where each new plant is getting more expensive per GWH delivered.
Nuclear plants are uninsurable. No insurance company will touch them. Fusion is an impossible dream and completely pointless.
The dirty secret of the industry is that we need nuclear plants in order to make nuclear bombs. It's where we get the enriched plutonium to blow things up. They never mention that, do they? The entire industry is an offshoot of Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" mandate. The world was so horrified by Hiroshima that we had to make up peacetime uses of radioactivity in order to keep rational people from stopping the entire experiment. Fusion is just the latest of these.
No company can simply try a different operational regime and go under if they do it badly. Thua any nuclear project is by default a government project. I am much more hopeful for fusion in this regard. Letting a fusion company fail doesn’t seem very dangerous so if the basic science can be tamed, gradual economic improvement could actually acrue by market forces.
Contrast that to nuclear where each new plant is getting more expensive per GWH delivered.