why we don’t rely on nuclear power plants more, especially these days
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Nuclear power plants are _relatively_ safe to build and operate **if you do not screw up** at any step. This means they are very difficult to plan, construct and maintain. It takes western countries an average of 5-15 years to build one of these things and they always turn out more expensive than they appear during planning. Once they are built they are very good at always producing a stable amount of power. However, we don’t always use a stable amount of power, instead there are daily peaks. Nuclear has kind of the same issue as renewables in this regard if they run, they run cheaply and efficiently, however their production doesn’t match well with our consumption. That means nuclear alone is not suitable to supply power alone without storage or buffers. Switching them on and off constantly increases risks and maintenance costs and it takes a while for them to power up and down. So essentially what you get is a technology that has significant upfront costs, is too slow to build to meaningfully contribute to decarbonization in the time frame we are looking at to combat climate change, runs into similar supply and demand issues as renewables and, you know, there is still the thread of a meltdown, which will just increase the more of these things we run. Additionally, for many countries without decent uranium supplies, nuclear solves none of the supply chain and oligopoly issues that come with fossile fuels, making them a geopolitically contentious proposition. There is an argument to make that having some amount of nuclear, at least in the short term, to support renewables can be useful for grid stability. But renewables are less high maintenance and cheaper and faster to scale up. Nuclear is, however, very lucrative once its built, so there is a huge incentive for energy companies to lobby for subsidies to shoulder the upfront costs and then pocket the profit over potentially many decades.
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