Nuclear industry and its pols caught in another backhanded deal

[kristopher]

3. No one denies renewables are getting subsidies.

The reasoning is that nuclear generation is a mature industry that has received 60 years of heavy subsidies and has demonstrated a negative learning curve; meaning the more we learn about it the more expensive it becomes. It is not regarded as a scalable solution to climate change nor is it considered sustainable.

Renewables have received only a small fraction of the support of nuclear power over the same period but with that it has demonstrated a very strong positive learning curve with steadily declining prices. A distributed system built around renewables is unquestionably scalable but it is incompatible with a centralized thermal system and is regarded as the desired sustainable solution to climate change.


The fact that they share a single temporary characteristic (nuclear's carbon emissions would rise sharply if scaled to be a significant global energy source) does not outweigh the way the remainder of the operational characteristics of nuclear confound the path to the most effective solution to the goal of a carbon free energy infrastructure.