New nuclear reactor designs promise safe, clean electricity
We should have built more nuclear 20 years ago, but it seems it&#x27;s too late now. The design of reactors that are actually built is extremely conservative, it still takes forever to plan them and get appropriate permissions, and then they take nearly a decade to build. Meanwhile the price of wind+storage is dropping. If you were to start planning a new reactor now, by the time it&#x27;s operational it might be uneconomical to even turn on. And even if it isn&#x27;t, it&#x27;s extremely unlikely that you make your investment back over the lifespan of the plant, especially once you add the decommissioning (which is more expensive than the construction of the plant, because a lot of the structure turns slightly radioactive).<p>We had our chance, we wasted it by never moving beyond 1970s reactor designs. Now the economics of those designs no longer make sense for new plants, and nobody is going to risk a fortune on building unproven large-scale reactor designs. There&#x27;s some opportunity with reactors sized like those on ships, but that&#x27;s it.