> If nuclear could compete on cost, we should go for it, but it can't without a major tech breakthrough
I do actually agree on the sentiment. We should be using the cheapest form of energy with a little bit of a concession to reliability.
But the problem with saying "nuclear costs more" is it is clearly over-regulated. We accept, for coal, about 3 orders of magnitude [0] more deaths per TWh than nuclear, as we have for the last 30 or 40 years†. At any point, literally hundreds of lives could have been saved moving to a technically excellent form of energy. We didn't do that. Ditto for renewables despite the terror displayed by the climate change lobby.
Humanity has, when tested, shown an overwhelming willingness to go with cheap power and disregard some really quite high social costs to get there. Nobody likes that inconvenient fact, but nuclear has been grossly over-regulated when assessed against humanities choices through the industrial revolution and beyond.
If we hold nuclear to the same standards all of us sitting in fossil-fuel based economies are accepting right now it would be much cheaper. If we held solar to the same standards of doing no harm as nuclear, it would be much more expensive.
So yes; cheapest option please. But can we also be consistent about the standards that we hold our energy to before we make that choice?
Though fears of safety has prematurely shut down nuclear in some markets, I don't think that safety fears has hindered deployment of new reactors that much. And if we are talking about addressing climate change, we are talking about new deployment because we must replace other energy sources.
In places where new nuclear has been built, it has not proven to be a spectacularly desirable energy source. The entire Western world has failed at building new reactors, causing bankruptcies and state acquisitions and restructurings. Even nuclear darling France is pulling back from new nuclear, instead looking to renewables and storage, including hydrogen. China tried valiantly but is pulling back from very large scale deployment. South Korea has had some success, but that's because quality control turned out to be a scam, so who knows about the quality of the reactors they built.
Russia's Rosatom has had some success, probably, but nobody trusts them.
The remaining market for nuclear are where there are corrupt bureaucracies where the prospect of a massive single project makes the potential for massive bribes possible. This is why coal succeeds in India, for example.
As for "doing no harm" with solar, I have yet to see any concrete examples of solar causing definitive harm. A solar failure doesn't cause massive environmental harm. The mining issues are similar to uranium mining. If solar is causing harm, I'd love to know how, but having searched for this and come up empty, and having people claim that solar causes harm and never follow through with specifics, I'm extremely skeptical of the claim. At least until there's some evidence to look into.
Until we can reliably contradict nuclear and also see that it actually seems like a good financial deal (taking into account all the costs of failed builds), nobody will really want to put up money for nuclear unless it's for ulterior reasons: corruption or nuclear proliferation or subsidizing a nuclear submarine fleet or something like that.
> The mining issues are similar to uranium mining.
They aren't comparable. There are something like 50 mines supplying the entire global uranium industry [0]. And I happen to know Australia quite well, 3rd biggest uranium supplier globally with 2 active mines and one reprocessing old waste heaps. More than half our production comes from a mine that isn't even a uranium deposit, it is really a copper mine [1]. That is a top 3 global uranium producer - a uranium mine, a copper mine and an old dump. Good luck supplying the production of a serious number of solar panels with that sort of mining setup.
There are no issues associated with uranium mining. The industry is too small.
> Still looking to see what harm solar is doing that it is not paying for.
Nuclear power is doing measurably less harm - in deaths, in habitat damage, in volume of waste produced and management thereof. Solar companies also aren't going to be held liable for the social costs of grid disruption which will inevitably cause outages or require additional countermeasures by other parties to secure their electricity supply.
Nobody is going to protest when solar company employees get skin cancer. Nobody is going to protest solar power when toxic sludge from carelessly-disposed heavy metals waste (or indeed solar panels themselves) contaminates drinking water in some rural town. Groups won't be organised to phase out solar installations in response to accidents in foreign countries.
And I think solar is perfectly fine, I just don't see why we impose all these silly restrictions on nuclear when it is a measurably superior form of energy.
> I'm surprised it takes 50 mines for uranium, that's far far more than I had expected.
Sounds like you might be in for a nasty shock when you find out how many coal mines the world has.
Except powering global civilization with solar means using most ground-mounted large scale solar fields, not covering rooftops. The latter is more a way to game utility billing systems, and is inherently unfair to those left paying for grid power and subsidizing the grid for the solar powered free riders (who get the reliability benefit of the grid at low cost.) Rationalizing the design of grid billing to make everyone pay their share of this reliability service makes rooftop solar much less attractive.
I do actually agree on the sentiment. We should be using the cheapest form of energy with a little bit of a concession to reliability.
But the problem with saying "nuclear costs more" is it is clearly over-regulated. We accept, for coal, about 3 orders of magnitude [0] more deaths per TWh than nuclear, as we have for the last 30 or 40 years†. At any point, literally hundreds of lives could have been saved moving to a technically excellent form of energy. We didn't do that. Ditto for renewables despite the terror displayed by the climate change lobby.
Humanity has, when tested, shown an overwhelming willingness to go with cheap power and disregard some really quite high social costs to get there. Nobody likes that inconvenient fact, but nuclear has been grossly over-regulated when assessed against humanities choices through the industrial revolution and beyond.
If we hold nuclear to the same standards all of us sitting in fossil-fuel based economies are accepting right now it would be much cheaper. If we held solar to the same standards of doing no harm as nuclear, it would be much more expensive.
So yes; cheapest option please. But can we also be consistent about the standards that we hold our energy to before we make that choice?
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy
† Misread the chart. Originally said 4 and thousands. Point still stands.