Show me anything with even remote promise of delivering like coal, oil and nuclear And you will find a swarm of willing investors. The problem is that energy isnt like technology, its about fundamental physics, something we spent almost 200 years exploring. There isnt just some magical solution out there that can compete with fossil fuels unfortunately.
Engineering, unlike fundamental physics, involves worrying about the competitiveness of what you're trying to do, compared to the other ways of solving the problem.
Freeman Dyson pointed out that in engineering, unlike science, competing ways of approaching a problem rarely coexist. The better (including economically better) solutions drive the others to extinction.
Nuclear right now is on the losing end of this competition. Levelized cost of power from new nuclear power plants is not competitive, and it's not competitive by a wide margin. Nuclear is dead tech walking and, absent some a near-miracle that changes this, will go the way of the zeppelin, the reciprocating steam engine, and the vacuum tube. It could persist in niche markets, but for general use it will be dead.
Levelized cost of nuclear IS competitive compared to wind and sun as nuclear has everything factored in including decomission which sun and wind doesn't.
Sun and wind need backup systems either coal, oil or nuclear once you factor those in and factor in that coal will be more expensive because it only has to run as a backup then you realize that wind and solar is not even close to being relevant. That's not factored in.
Sun and wind currently is about 1% of the entire energy market projected to be 4% in 2040.
The levelized cost of nuclear is the same as solar and wind only when you're looking at the operating and decommissioning costs of fully depreciated existing nuclear plants. The levelized cost of NEW nuclear plants, including amortizing the construction and financing cost, is about 4x that of solar or wind.
New nuclear is grotesquely uneconomical, and unless a cost miracle happens it's dead technology walking.
It does. I am talking about technology in its broadest interpretation. Fundamental physics is a very different market than the on established on top of microchips.
