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I just don’t see it in terms of fundamentals. We’ve heard this for years, yet countries that have denuclearized have not been able to go full renewables, they have become more dependent on fossil fuels. Storage has just not been able to keep up with demand, baseload is still necessary, and we don’t have other options.
We should absolutely keep investing in renewables and pushing forward, they help. There is no reason at the same time to prevent investment in nuclear and other non-carbon emitting solutions, and if tech companies are willing to foot the bill we shouldn’t complain. Every gigawatt counts at this point.
Which countries are you referring to? Germany for example denuclearized and replaced them with renewables, they didn't become more dependent on fossil fuels (even if people like to say that).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File%3AGermany_electricity_production.svg
Japan for one, whose coal and natural gas consumption has gone up significantly: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Japan
Germany has stayed fairly steady, fair enough. Imagine if they had just focused on replacing fossil fuels instead of nuclear, they would be nearly carbon free by now.
I have no problem with the majority of funding going to renewables and making progress right now, but I also don’t see why we can’t break ground on new 4th generation nukes and continue investment in nuclear research at the same time. We can hedge our bets, make progress on both. If the 100% renewables + storage plan pans out, cool, we stop the nukes. If they don’t, then cool, we have our carbon free baseload production and we aren’t a decade behind on it when we need it.
The thing is that things are evolving incredibly fast in this space. Renewables have gone from being more expensive than the alternatives to being the cheapest option by a large margin in the span of a decade, and prices are still plummeting. This trend can be observed for both renewables (solar/wind) and different storage technologies. The reason we're not seeing them online at a large scale yet is that they've quite simply just recently become economical to do so. Nuclear does very much not have this property - it trends towards being more expensive over time. Given how long these projects take to build, it's not out of the question that they will have to shut down on account of being just way too expensive in comparison once the projects are finished.
I generally agree with this - any private actor that wants to build nuclear completely on their own dime and at their own risk should be able to do so. The problem is that this is not what's happening - these companies often get government funding for these initiatives, which displace investments that could otherwise be going to other more viable solutions.
Take Sweden for example, where the right wing government campaigned on renewables being too woke and that nuclear is the only option. The way they are making nuclear happen is by guaranteeing financing at favourable terms, plus offering guaranteed pricing of the output electricity for these plants. This is going to be massively expensive for tax payers, and is actively making it so that other renewables are not getting built.
Since nuclear takes so much time to build out and is so unviable from a financial perspective, it's also used as an excuse by fossil fuel interests, that get to stay in business comparatively longer in a scenario where the world tries to pursue nuclear vs where the world pursues renewables.
This is why nuclear support should generally be met with skepsis.
I don’t think we have the time to wait on and expect breakthroughs anymore. A decade ago, sure, but if we end up having major issues with storage and don’t make those breakthroughs 10 years from now, and we start building nuclear plants then, we’re in for an even worse timeline.
Re: government support, sure. If this is a zero sum game and we have to choose one or the other, I’ll probably go renewable. From what I’ve seen, the zero sum mentality itself is the conservative trap. They keep us fighting against each other when we could just say “do both”.
When the IRA passed in the states, there was some amount of funding for nukes. Not a ton, but some. Yet there was skepticism of that, there were calls on the left to defund that among circles I frequented. Why? The support for nukes was much less than renewables and storage, and like an order of magnitude less. It was a hedge - keep investing in alternatives to renewables in case they don’t work out, because we don’t have a crystal ball. So why be divided on this?
The trap isn’t nuclear. It’s division and scarcity thinking. It’s zero-sum politics.
We aren't waiting for storage breakthroughs though. The current technology is good enough, cheap enough, and faster to build. And meeting the reaction times needed to use renewables correctly.