Nah, it was just nuclear cost too much and couldn't compete without constant government subsidies. Money rules the world bro, if nuclear could make good money all the public complaining would mean jack and shit just like it does with medicine.

The Levelized Cost Of Electric for nuclear is just too high compared to gas or coal over the years. Nuclear is so complex it could never get the cost down and while it may seem simple enough to be like BUt GLOBal WARmING could have been prevented, that's questionable since power plants are just one part of the problem AND you're still talking about killing a lot of people with high energy costs.

Plus there is near zero chance most of the world, aka the developing world, even has an option to go nuclear. Talk about lack of energy independance, imagine buying into a power model that only like 3 countries sell. That would suck and that's only if their countries allow the export in the first place, a policy that could change at any moment. It's easy to see why most nations that don't have gas would go with coal, because unless you're the country making the nuclear reactor AND you're ok paying 2-3 times more for power AND you waive the added risks/costs of meltdown and pollution storage... it kind of sucks. There is also a bit of a water use problem as we saw as rivers in Europe got low, so all that would have to be fixed too.

That's a lot of money going to nuclear, which isn't improving rapidly, that is better spent pushing batteries and renewables.. which also have WAY WAY more uses than nuclear since you can expot them all over the world and install them in your home or power computers and robots with better batteries. There is a lot more vertical integration benefits where many products can benefit at once from something like solar and batteries and not much beside power plants for nuclear.

The problem is investors don't invest in nuclear and they don't because the return on investment takes way too long and it takes way too long because the cost to operate the plant is too high..

That's what LCOE means, so you if you cared you would know the LCOE on nuclear is too high to replace gas and coal without MAJOR economic slowdowns.

All that and then solar and batteries still keep getting better and their LCOE drops below nuclear and you're left with a bunch of nuclear reactors nobody can run cost effectively.

THAT is why nuclear died.. complexity = costs.. which is 100% predictable and obvious so your brain should really not need to create some secondary excuse. Costs are only like THE MOST IMPORTANT single factor in everything, so the only way you can be surprised nuclear failed is because you paid no attention to the costs of each power generation model.. aka you basically aren't interested in power generation buy want to have a say.

The data is SUPER easy to find, so I don't see a good excuse to not realize costs are what sunk nuclear.

If not then how did the same pattern happen all over the world? You're telling me the citizens of every country all kind of agreed nuclear was a bad idea and that's the reason it didn't catch on, not the fact it's 2-3 times more to run?

You basically need to invent a global conspiracy for that to make sense. It wasn't just one public, it was ALL the publics in all the nations. Sorry, but that's smells like BS.. it was the high complexity and cost and the fact renewables and batteries are improving far faster than nuclear.

The thing people don't get is that the best way to generate power will ALWAYS be the simplest way with reasonable costs than can be scaled globally and nuclear is none of those!

We don't need unlimited power. We just need the simplest way to meet global power needs. the simpler method that can accomplish that goal will win out because over time costs will always scale in favor of lower complexity. Less moving parts = less costs and nuclear is a lot of moving parts.

>We could have been 100% nuclear decades ago but it was the greens who shut down building of all new nuclear plants.

That's pure misinformation.

https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.html

Nuclear basically isn't scalable beyond 1 TW globally. Geothermal energy alone has twice that potential. Nuclear is pretty much a dead end as far terrestial utility-scale use is concerned.

Blaming "[political group you don't like]" for the issues inherent to the technology isn't going to solve anything.

No. The hippies did zero damage to the nuclear industry. It was all WallStreet as the nuclear industry had constantly rising costs and weaker than expected long term earnings.

Any new nuke plant today will not be commercially viable in 10-15 years.

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Nuclear was failing in the US in the early 70s long before ‘the greensa’. Low knowledge nuclearvangelists say this because they don’t accept reality.