I mean im guessing its because it may not be as profitable, or atleast at first, boycotts or directly just capitalism fucking everything up? i legit always imagine aliens seeing us still use coal while having DISCOVERED IN 1932
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
23 points (65.3% liked)
Green Energy
3072 readers
15 users here now
Everything about energy production and storage.
Related communities:
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Realistically, the time for nuclear (fission) has past. If we were in the 50s or 60s, and were making a concerted effort to remove fossil fuel energy production, nuclear could have helped us do it. Now, with steadily decreasing renewable energy costs and cheaper and more effective battery storage, it's a break-even option at best, and takes a long time to implement.
Fusion has a real chance, provided we can figure it out well enough to do anything with it. It may not be economically viable, and it's hard to be certain before we actually get it working. Fusion could also be more effective for certain space missions, especially to the gas giants and farther from the sun. Realistically, anything closer than Mars does pretty well with solar.
Renewables get cheaper because we are building them… if we built nuclear at the same frequency as renewables their price would plummet as well.
Personally see the best option as a combination, in places like LA, Las Vegas, Phoenix solar should be the number 1 power source. Build wind power in places like Wyoming, and off shore wind where it’s possible. But when you have a place that needs huge amounts of batteries to try and compensate for inconsistent wind/solar that’s where you should build nuclear.
Nuclear is not renewable and has a lot of issues but we also shouldn’t ignore the negatives of lithium, nickel, cadmium, and cobalt mining. At the end of the day all of them are better than fossil fuels
We did build a lot of nuclear in the 60s and 70s, but prices didn't really drop and began to increase (higher safety standards, more oversight, general cost disease as is usual for large civil engineering projects), so we stopped building nuclear. It also wasn't sustainable to build nulear at that rate for some countries, as, well, after you built enough you don't need more (france) for a while.
The U.S. has an increase in energy demand, and if we consider phasing out fossil fuels then the demand for new power plants is huge.
Arkansas nuclear one which started construction in 1968 and finished in 1974 had a total construction cost of 2.522B (2007 dollars) and produces 13555 GWh a year with a 66 year license giving it a $2.81//MWh in general initial construction represents 60-80% of total nuclear power costs so if we use the conservative value that’s still under $5/MWh using 2007 dollars and if we scale to today that’s $8/MWh. So not sure what you mean by it didn’t drop costs.
It was expensive compared to fossil fuels that had little to no safety systems