There was a dream that was nuclear power. You could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish...

better than Belgian environmentalists
>nuclear power is very bad for the environment, let's buy our power from France instead

It's more than just a political impossibility, it's an economic impossibility. The building cost versus electricity produced is massively inferior to wind and solar.

Economics is not the only measure for investment. Security is a biggest concern, but because of the political entanglement with the Chinese contracts, its a political impossibility.

Every military tech with "guidance" attached to the word requires the rare-earth metals only China can produce and make into something useful.

Even if US forces a sort of a Project Manhattan like urgency on this, it will still take a decade or so to make something viable. The US has no industry, the rest of the world has no capacity either to either produce or make use of the rare earth metals.

Such a valuable and critical piece of technology is in the hands of the China. Any military conflict with China will end with them denying their enemy that critical resources.

Nuclear could never compete with coal and now it's getting killed by fracking.

You do realize that rare earth metals aren't actually all that rare yeah? The reason why we aren't mining them here is because the mining would be very destructive to the environment.

Germany is a huge ecological disaster. Their open air coal mines destroyed entire villages and landscapes the size of Manhatan. The abandonned sites are now lakes, not because they drowned them voluntarily, but because the groundwater table filled the holes. Note that the groundwater tables are lost now. But there's another problem: the lakes are acidic as fuck because hey that was a mine before, and now they have to dump constantly tons and tons of limestone into the lakes, and the limestone don't fall from the sky, it comes from yet another mine...
And the icing on the cake is that to legally compensate their carbon print due to massive use of coal, they capture CO2 in the athmosphere and pump it into the ground like if it was nothing, they literally put the dust under the carpet.

It wasn't fragile, nuclear power companies were unstoppable from 1945 until about 1979 when the Three Mile Island accident happened. In this time they got all the subsidies, government support, and environmental approvals needed to build.

So how could it recede so fast? The entire industry was built off government subsidy, once that subsidy ended it suddenly had to modernize it's products. It is very hard to sell a power utility on a huge, expensive, monolithic reactor that has a slight chance of creating an unfixable worldwide disaster. Then the Cold War ended and demand for nuclear bombs and bomb components faded, causing reactor designs to increase in price. The final blow was cheap solar, which quickly took the market by storm as they could more easily adjust and scale to any market from the individual consumer up to full size utility work.

It crushed itself through it's own incompetence. One of the reasons why it's the *government* trying to rescue them through Small Modular Reactors, which they are only doing because they hope it will decrease the unit cost and liability of naval reactors. Which speaks to it's durability, not it's fragility.

The same applies to solar today. It looks unstoppable, until something is found out (say disposal of old PV panels) that is not discovered until the first wave of panels hits their end-of-service-life and have to be replaced or refurbished. If the same level of subsidy is there (it won't because the government will consider the market "mature" enough to survive on it's own), the market will then crash. And there it will be the government ready to step in to help them so they can get the cost of something else down in the process.

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Your post would be correct if everything you said was changed to its opposite.

The US government spends a huge amount of money managing the nuclear industry because of national security concerns. They have to because the US is a nuclear armed country and the Navy uses nuclear reactors for propulsion. The industry has persisted despite solar being the new flavor of the day, a testament to it's durability. It's current diminished state exists because back when these companies had money they had tunnel vision and only wanted to provide one product (huge reactors), which fucked them once their only customers (power utilities) gave them the cold shoulder.

And again, everything applies to solar too. Once PV panels hit their expected end-of-service-life, owners will be tasked with the full replacement cost without subsidy. Many will balk at it, just as concerns over PV panel disposal cause people to rethink if it really is green (it is, but not the final solution boomers believe it is). It too will falter and the government will pick it up because they want a way to easily charge combat radios or other equipment.

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>which fucked them once their only customers (power utilities) gave them the cold shoulder.
What the fuck are you talking about, name one reactor that went out of business because it couldn't sell electricity.

All the ones being decommissioned? There is a reason why America's only new commercial NPP project is the Watts Bar 2 reactor, which is being purchased by the publicly owned Tennessee Valley Authority and not a private firm. Every other program dies during development because private firms cannot justify 10+ years of just licensing on top of a billion-dollar plant they will only get 25 years of service from before they have to relicense it again. Also the plant cannot scale at all, which means if the region's power demand changes they won't be able to resize operations up or down. On top of all this is the liability and waste concerns.

Such is why the US government is promoting SMRs, because they would have a far quicker licensing process, the ability to scale, a cheaper cost and the ability to bottle up malfunctioning reactors for quick disposal.

>nuclear
>cleanest and least harmful source of energy to exist
>"let us ban it" t. environmentalists
>they use faulty reactors built by shady contractors through government corruption as reason for banning them
its like banning wind turbines because someone keeps throwing birds into them

They are being decommissioned because they are 50 years old you moron.

This kek

Yes, and they are being replaced with fossil fuels. Do you not see how this is a problem for the industry?