That's the most depressing thing. Nuclear has been successfuly overregulated.
replyIt’s not even that it’s overregulated but that the amount of power it brings online at a time is just too big.
replyIndividual wind turbines aren’t very big, solar panels get laughably small, and while they are not efficient at their small form factors they are very easy to scale up and down. Nuclear is the exact opposite, representing a very large single point of failure, and even under pre-renewables hard to absorb; some of the first pumped hydro was developed to take excess nuclear capacity because it cannot scale up or down very easily.
Its not just matter of regulation if it was that easy to build China would be building 100s. And by saying China I am referencing their manufacturing capacity and them being a command economy that does not have the same financial profitability concerns. It is not like they have not tried they have but nuclear technology the world has currently have does not translate to mass manufacturing.
replyChina is currently building almost 40 nuclear plants at the same time.
replyAnd we've sunk decades into small modular reactors and it hasn't born much fruit either.
replyIf you deregulated it and made it pay for its own disaster insurance it would stop existing.
replyWithout price anderson act dumping the liability on to taxpayers nobody would build nuclear reactors even at the cost they are.
A completely predictable outcome of being under regulated and having several disastrous outcomes.
replyUnfortunate, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.