Thanks for this! Austin Vernon took a look at why the nuclear industry isn’t growing and came to some broadly similar conclusions here. I think a lot of environmental groups have gotten themselves into a situation where “nuclear power is evil” is kind of taken as a given, while the techno-optimist crowd is overly sanguine about cost problems being driven by regulations and the chances of those regulations changing. in other words, there’s a lot of people with different assumptions and values talking past one another in this debate. Continuing to pump money into next-gen nuclear research seems like a reasonable use of money to me because the potential payoff is big enough to outweigh the low-ish probability of success. You could say the same about lots of branches of renewables research (e.g. perovskite solar cells) though.
In my opinion the most baffling (and angering) part of this post was the chart of DOE energy technology research investment from 2009-2018. Forget about the nuclear spending, how is it that, during the Obama administration, we spent more researching fossil fuel tech, which is supposed to be a dead technology, than we spent on what almost everyone agrees will be the future of energy, renewables? I wonder what percentage of that is carbon capture and storage, what percentage is discovery and extraction, and what else we’re throwing our money away on. The big oil and gas companies are some of the most profitable companies in the history of the world, can’t they pay for it themselves? Why are taxpayers paying to make the environment worse? It’s madness!
Thanks for this! Austin Vernon took a look at why the nuclear industry isn’t growing and came to some broadly similar conclusions here. I think a lot of environmental groups have gotten themselves into a situation where “nuclear power is evil” is kind of taken as a given, while the techno-optimist crowd is overly sanguine about cost problems being driven by regulations and the chances of those regulations changing. in other words, there’s a lot of people with different assumptions and values talking past one another in this debate. Continuing to pump money into next-gen nuclear research seems like a reasonable use of money to me because the potential payoff is big enough to outweigh the low-ish probability of success. You could say the same about lots of branches of renewables research (e.g. perovskite solar cells) though.
In my opinion the most baffling (and angering) part of this post was the chart of DOE energy technology research investment from 2009-2018. Forget about the nuclear spending, how is it that, during the Obama administration, we spent more researching fossil fuel tech, which is supposed to be a dead technology, than we spent on what almost everyone agrees will be the future of energy, renewables? I wonder what percentage of that is carbon capture and storage, what percentage is discovery and extraction, and what else we’re throwing our money away on. The big oil and gas companies are some of the most profitable companies in the history of the world, can’t they pay for it themselves? Why are taxpayers paying to make the environment worse? It’s madness!