If a mega volcano explodes and blocks the sun, lack of electricity will be the least of the world’s problems.

Nuclear is the most expensive type of electrical power generation. Diversity is good, but enough of it is achievable with cheaper options.

The cost is a choice. Not inherent to the power. We could choose literally any day to make it dramatically cheaper.

Even if every bit of regulation was scrapped and uranium was free, there are still significant costs to steam turbine based thermal plants plus the reactor itself that can't be hand waved away. As PV costs and now grid-scale storage keep dropping rapidly, the economics of a nuclear plant that takes 5-10 years to get running at full capacity (in the very optimistic case) and even longer to break even look increasingly questionable.

PV solar + batteries is a dead simple, solid state design that's easily scalable without huge up front capital requirements. We're not at the point yet where nuclear doesn't pencil out anywhere, but with current trends it's getting closer by the year.

I wish we built more nuclear 20-30 years ago when the competition was coal and gas but unfortunately we didn't and now the equation has changed. Shutting down existing reactors that are still viable is a bad move to be clear, but new plants are becoming increasingly hard to justify economically.

when you're comparing on a cost basis are you amortizing the cost of the nuclear power plant over the multiple lifetime cycles of PV+Battery as the nuclear power plant will outlast many such cycles, nuclear plants if maintained can effectively last forever.

> […] nuclear plants if maintained can effectively last forever.

That's a very ambitious statement, every piece of hardware has lifecycle limitations. Engineering things for "infinite" lifetime significantly drives up the cost of the resulting product in most cases.

I would certainly hope the radiation-exposed parts of nuclear power plants are engineered for a very long life, but… there's water and metal involved, these things do need maintenance. And the non-irradiated parts probably need to be maintained much more frequently, e.g. the turbines certainly won't live forever.

As a matter of fact, solid state devices tend to last much longer, and PV is one of very few completely solid state power generation technologies. (It does, unfortunately, suffer from general sun exposure damage.) Personally speaking, without some digging I wouldn't make any claims which of them lives longer, it feels like it could go either way by quite a bit of margin.

It's unclear to me exactly why building big projects is so expensive, but it's not just nuclear. In the US, subway expansion, high speed rail, and bridges are also ridiculously expensive. Whatever is causing the runaway costs and schedules doesn't appear to be related to it being a fission plant.

I would love it if somebody who has recently built something like a fission plant could give us a report as to exactly what happened that caused this.

Great answer, also I imagine that in terms of space, one nuclear reactor would be equivalent to 10 square KM of solar panels (or something like that)

One thing we're not short of here in Australia is space. And sunshine.

I'm not opposed to nuclear in the mix though. It's pretty incredible. And the South Koreans have done a pretty awesome job in the UAE with their reactors it sounds like.

If you're comparing nuclear reactors with solar panels though (which is tricky), depends which metric you go for. If total annual output? Then up it by almost an order of magnitude. 100km2+ would be needed to produce the same annual output as a 1GW at 90% nuclear station.

But we've a ton of land, so it makes a lot of sense.

I think you're off by an order of magnitude there. Intensity should be somewhere between 150 to 300 watts per sq meter per 24 hours. At 200 watts per sq meter that works out to 5 sq km. Estimating 50% panel efficiency that's 10 sq km.

To hit 100 sq km at 50% panel efficiency would mean averaging 20 watts per sq meter (obviously wrong). Even assuming a paltry 10% panel efficiency would only get you to 100 watts per sq meter.