Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it
While this is a compelling tale of culture war in the US, I think that the culture war aspect has little to do with nuclear&#x27;s failure, if anything at all. I am continually offended as I encounter people with Ehrlich&#x27;s 1970s Malthusianism, but these are not the folks stopping nuclear.<p>Look to France, which has a huge nuclear fleet. Look at what&#x27;s happened at Flamanville, with a supportive population. What sort of culture war or regulatory arguments could be made to explain France&#x27;s failures with the EPR design, that so closely mirror the US&#x27;s failure with the AP1000 design in the past decade?<p>By focusing on culture war, we miss a bigger story: perhaps nuclear construction is not compatible with modern economies? And perhaps it never was a great fit, according to this quote from the article?<p>&gt; At first, nuclear energy was too expensive and so less attractive to utilities. But once General Electric and Westinghouse spurred the indus­try onward by becoming loss leaders (they collectively lost around $1 billion building plants) the race was on.18 A herd mentality soon devel­oped as utilities lined up to take advantage of government benefits to build new reactors. So many orders came in that “[w]ith only two companies building plants, a rapid increase in orders escalated costs for major components and strained the limited supply of qualified labor.”19