According to conventional wisdom, the reason we don’t power everything with nuclear fission is because everybody freaked out after Three Mile Island. Some go on to claim that this irrational fear is blocking us from a cheap solution to climate change.
As the chart above shows, that interpretation is not backed up by any facts and is really a case of a lie being repeated frequently enough that it becomes the truth. We see that nuclear reactor construction peaked in 1976 and then plummeted 1 year later. We see that in 1979, the year of Three Mile Island, construction actually rose over the year before. We see a smooth linear decline from 1977 and 1990 irrespective of any accidents. Another thing to consider, if it’s irrational fear keeping us from nuclear power, why isn’t it super popular in countries where governments aren’t accountable to voters? Why do the Chinese only get 2% of their electricity from nukes?
We are being gaslit into blaming evil environmentalists for excessive carbon emissions when the truth is simple economics. Nuclear reactors simply cannot pay their own way. Modern nuclear projects have been a disaster of delays, cost overruns, and cancellations. The cancellation of 4 reactors in Georgia and South Carolina bankrupted the once iconic Westinghouse corporation.
The other form of gaslighting comes from those who, instead of blaming the government and the left for the failure of nuclear power, choose to blame the attachment to uranium boiling water reactors. They say our salvation is to be found in travelling wave reactors, pebble bed reactors, thorium reactors, and small modular reactors.
The Popular Mechanics article above makes many familiar arguments about how we’re using the wrong type of reactors, it could’ve been written yesterday. It was written in 1963. The truth is that most types of reactors have been known about for over 60 years and the reason we don’t use them is they don’t work.
Thorium merits its own discussion. Some cynics claim we don’t use it because it doesn’t produce nuclear bomb fuel. The implication being that all of our nuclear power industry is set up to serve the demand for weapons of mass destruction. There’s 2 problems with that 1) It’s not true, fissioning Thorium produces Uranium-233, which can and has been used for bombs. 2) Even if it didn’t produce bomb fuel, there’s enough private actors with incentive to develop and market a cheaper form of nuclear power that if it were practical it would’ve been done. I don’t think the guys at GE would leave that type of money on the table.
The good news is that we already have a nuclear reactor that is 93 million miles away that hits us with more energy in one hour than we use in one year. I’m of course talking about the sun. We have made actual progress with economically harnessing that form of nuclear power to the point that Utility scale PV systems now are cost competitive with coal and gas power and they are projected to keep falling. Furthermore, the problem of intermittancy will be solved with better batteries.
In conclusion, nuclear power is an expensive and useless folly. It is time for us to let it go and head into an era of solar power that could actually wind up being too cheap to meter. More importantly, it is time for us to shut out the people who argue in bad faith that nuclear power would work “if only the government got out of the way” or “if only we tried this new [not really new] type of reactor”.