points by zipy124 4 days ago | 0 comments
> It turns out the problem is interest. If you spend $20B building a nuclear plant, you need to make enough money to pay the interest on that $20B.
This is exactly the sort of investment governments are suited to make since they have access to extremely cheap debt. Or at least they did until recently, though still cheaper than private markets. China has access to debt with interest of only 1.6% which allows these projects to be very viable.
From the perspective of one company all you get is that one power plant that produces electricity so if that can't pay for itself you can't do it and that's the end of that story. From the perspective of a government you're also creating business opportunities elsewhere, there's a lot of economic activity that arises from these investments that is great for society at large, both on the supplier side in terms of companies delivering materials and components etc and downstream you're producing cheap electricity that can support anything from aluminium production to data centers and whatever else.
And most importantly, to me, it's clean. The only reason fossil fuels are economically competitive is because we're ignoring the future cost those emissions will incur.
If our predecessors played their cards differently, we could today be living in a world with abundant clean energy from nuclear and renewables. We could use this abundant energy to produce hydrogen from water, eliminating most emissions from transport as well - those that aren't already eliminated with EVs.
I have some hope that this vision can be realized, there seems to be movement towards it. Might end up being more about SMRs than large scale reactors though, which I think is a bit sad as SMRs seem to me like they compromise away some of the benefits of nuclear energy to solve the economic viability issue but I guess if they can make them work it's still a big step in the right direction.