Solar started in truly tiny markets, like for satellites.
It moved to slightly less tiny markets, like ocean buoys, remote radio repeaters, and eventually off-grid homes.
At each point, there were small markets for which it made sense.
During this time, PV started showing it had good experience effects, with costs declining about 20% per doubling of cumulative production. This empirical experience curve (which has actually gotten better recently) was the basis for additional funding, to drive the technology down the curve.
Nuclear has not shown good experience effects. There is no small niche market for NuScale's reactors. There's nothing to drive it down some supposed experience curve, and no reason to think the curve would be favorable.
Solar panels get built, nuclear does not. At some point, you stop throwing good money after bad.
Over 500GW-600GW of solar will be built and deployed this year, and that rate is accelerating. This would never happen with nuclear, we are simply not capable of managing this technology at that scale based on all available evidence.
> The IEA now projects that to meet global climate goals, approximately 633 GW per year will be needed [solar PV] by 2030, a target that could be achieved as soon as next year.
That is likely pointless in US Nuclear. If you look down to the "Nuclear Power Learning and Deployment Rates" figure [0] you can see that the US has managed to invert the learning curve; by regulation since I've never seen any other technology do something like that V shape.
That strategy might work in other Asia. It probably won't catch in the US.
All these regulatory stories seem to fail to connect the full picture back to a suitable regulatory regime that actually saves costs.
With our latest round of nuclear failures, there was a new combined licensing approach taken at the behest of industry. It did not seem to work. The article cites "hundreds of millions for licensing" which is a tiny percentage of reactor cost, and frankly insignificant. For costs to be lower, there has to be a huge, 50%+ drop in construction costs. The latest nuclear failures in the US used a new design, the AP1000, which used something like an order of magnitude less concrete and steel, and that was not enough to pull down costs. Where is the money going? Labor.
The French regulatory regime is presumably OK, as it oversaw a large buildout in the 1970s, and I've never heard anybody complain about it, but it has still resulted in economic failures at Flamanville and Olkiluoto.
Eliminate ALARA, and what construction or design cost savings are there? I'm not sure and it's not really clear. What construction site savings are there? Ignore the containment? People all agreed that after Chernobyl is was a bad idea, what engineer is going to sign off on that? Maybe they are OK with it, but I haven't heard any engineer brave enough to cite a lessening of safety that would drive down construction costs.
Also, all large construction projects, the heart of nuclear, have gotten expensive in the US, even without the NRC. It's just a hard problem to build big things with complicated logistics.
Look at construction productivity trends over the past 50 years, and they have been stagnant compared to manufacturing and other types of productivity. And as productivity increases in an economy, overall wages increase, even for the less productive construction sector, because workers have the choice to work in more productive fields, and must be paid to compensate for the low productivity of working in construction. The places closest to having low costs on nuclear are economies with cheap labor: Russia and China. It's going to be hard for us to outsource construction labor to cheap countries when the reactors need to be sites in high labor cost countries.
Even if regulation is a major factor, this labor cost of construction is also a major factor. And it's unclear to me why nuclear should ever be cheap. It's a huge huge construction project, and in advanced economies, those are still very expensive.
> And as productivity increases in an economy, overall wages increase, even for the less productive construction sector, because workers have the choice to work in more productive fields, and must be paid to compensate for the low productivity of working in construction.
Solar PV is intrinsically scalable from microwatts to hundreds of gigawatts, or even larger. There were and are markets at all of these scales.[1] That's what allowed its development.
The space industry funded early development, Japan and then Germany funded early-mid adoption, and then China saw an opportunity to take leadership in the transition away from fossil fuels. So it goes.
1. Well, so far, only tens of gigawatts at the upper end in commercial operation, but it's just a matter of time before we get to hundreds. There are no engineering or regulatory problems.
The US government. They have a vested interest in maintaining a nuclear supply chain and skills base to share with the military.
It's the reason why there has been such a huge pro nuclear PR offensive in the last 10 years. Consent needs to be manufactured for lavishing nuclear power with subsidies. E.g. in order to justify giving Bill Gates's startup a dumptruck full of taxpayer money people have to be positively predisposed to nuclear power.
The most ironic and fucked up part of the nuclear-military industrial complex's PR offensive was when they tried to shame environmentalists for being anti nuclear power and tried to shame Germany for trailblazing a highly effective green energy policy. The environment is of no concern to them.
They could always sell the power for less.