"Quasi-religious nonsense" indeed!
Yes, indeed.
Engineering nuclear reactors is undergoing a rethink. New designs, new ideas. So that mitigates against building new reactors from old and expensive designs.
The same is true of wind and solar generation. And massively more true of storage - we haven't got an effective and affordable storage option at anything CLOSE to the scale required to compete with nuclear power, and we may NEVER have such a thing.
The big problem is as Westinghouse demonstrated, it is easy to botch up new ways of doing nuclear reactors.
So as it stands, experts are telling us we are a decade away from new designs, and then another decade to implement those designs. If possible.
And yet we have perfectly good existing designs to fill the gap. Unlike the intermittent generatoirs, who have no solution at all for the storage problem other than hope (and burning natural gas)
Meanwhile, in that time, a couple of more of our current reactors will reach their designated end of life. and will have to be decommissioned or rebuilt at huge costs.
Yes. But not at unknown or unexpected cost, and not at commercially unreasonable cost. So who cares? The only reason costs are so high is political - it could be changed overnight at the stroke of a pen. In other words, it's expensive because and only because religious zealots like yourself want it to be.
Meanwhile, wind power will continue to grow and solar, but at a lessor rate for solar.
Leading to the consumption of vasts amounts of natural gas, with the inherent environmental problems of fracking and climate change. These 'solutions' don't solve the underlying problem.
From a real life perspective, nuclear is not an attractive prospect for the near future. And nuclear is needing subsidies to survive as it is.
That's simply not true, for the reasons given above (which you ignored because they contradict your faith)
Will future plants need subsidies? Will states allow building of plants that will need such large subsidies to build, maintain and operate? Probably not in wind rich states.
As long as nobody gets subsidized nor unreasonably penalized, it won't matter. Nuclear power is the only solution to the problem of providing continuous power in the quantities needed for modern civilization without carbon emissions. If people don't give a shit about the environment then they can play around with gas backed wind and gas backed solar; If we do give a shit, then we have to build nuclear plants.
10 years to new designs, 10 years to build. Texas gets 17% of it's electrical power from wind and in 20 years that will be 50% - 60% at this rate. Can nuclear compete in Texas? Coal, long term, cannot.
The gas companies are going to LOVE Texas. The people who suffer blackouts, not so much, but you don't care about them, or the environment, as long as that nasty nuclear power, which you have NO basis to oppose (other, apparently than the high costs THAT YOU MADE HAPPEN) doesn't get used.
It's fucking ridiculous. For sixty years, the "environmentalists" have opposed nuclear power on any grounds they could think of, using lies, disinformation and irrational fear, because they were terrified that it was so cheap that abundant power would become available and would lead to a population boom (particularly in the Third World, where energy poverty meant that only nuclear power could be cheap enough to make a difference). Slowly the lies and fear have been stripped back, and now the only opposing argument you can rely in is that it is 'too expensive' - Which is rather pathetic, given that the initial fear was due to it being too cheap.
The early anti-nuke protesters were horrified by the prospect of cheap electricity. They were terrified by population growth. And now they have fucked themselves and the world over, because of their (it turns out baseless) terror and evil anti-humanism.
What a bunch of cunts. They fucked the people, and they fucked the environment, because they worried that billions of Africans and Indians would overwhelm the world. If you are not outraged about this, then you haven't understood it.
Nuclear power is going to happen, because it is the only option that doesn't fuck up the environment, or civilization, or both. The only question is how much pain we much go through before deciding that we have to do this. As you point out, it can take 15 to 20 years to bring a nuclear power plant online. The best time to start was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
