I mean im guessing its because it may not be as profitable, or atleast at first, boycotts or directly just capitalism fucking everything up? i legit always imagine aliens seeing us still use coal while having DISCOVERED IN 1932
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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Initially, world was very nuclear-positive. Engineers envisioned nuclear power being the holy grail of energy technology and a foundation for our future. Extreme energy density and low price-per-watt of nuclear fuel promised an energy revolution - and for a while, it actually began.
Added to expand: add to this the boost of military. The Cold War required many countries to build up nuclear arsenal, and to make weapon-grade plutonium, you need to conduct uranium cycle - one that conveniently produces a lot of energy and can be used to generate power.
Then, Idaho, Chernobyl and much later Fukushima happened, slowly turning the world against nuclear as a dangerous energy production option. Association with nuclear weapons and Cold War didn't help, either.
In the meanwhile, renewables like solar and wind, which were initially prohibitively expensive, got more traction and investment, and as a result of new developments and economies of scale, they eventually managed to become cheaper than nuclear in most areas of the world, rendering nuclear power financially inefficient and thus largely obsolete.
This was always propaganda to butter over the fact that the investments into nuclear power only made sense as a basis for a nuclear weapons program. Without that (or the ambition for one) nuclear power has always been an economic black hole and with renewables becoming so cheap it is even harder to argue for it.
i can speak to this very directly. my uncle thought he was working on making nuclear power more renewable. but what was really happening is that depleted fuel rods are the magic sauce that makes thermonuclear devices (hydrogen bombs) work. even now, i do not truly believe the nuclear powered ai centers are about the progress of man, but rather an excuse to set up extraction economies stripping the earth of her natural resources to then be turned against the working poor who mined the wealth for their overlords in the form of weapons of instantaneous genocide. the only arguments i'm willing to hear in favor of nuclear are to decommission old petrochemical plants, but none of the nuclear plans being presented now have these provisions. the capital hoarders do not propose to sunset any coal, and accuse you of being a pro-petrochemical luddite when you stand in the way of their nuclear proposals.
Up until quite recently, nuclear has been decently economical as it is - but indeed, a lot of nuclear investments of the previous century were made with obtaining weapon-grade plutonium in mind. It's one part of why countries went with uranium cycle to begin with.
Modern research into thorium-based reactors that could be cheaper, safer and not produce nuclear weapon material is too little too late. Renewables already took over the game.
Anyway, I added this to the original response, as I think it is a vital part I forgot to mention.
In terms of engineering, it takes renewables + shitload of storage in order to have equivalent power generation characteristics to nuclear.
The recent portugal/spain power outage was due to the system being insufficiently damped (insufficient storage/inertia to buffer (the loss of) a high proportion of unpredictable power generation).
Yes, storage is complicated - but it can be done. Pumped hydro and other technologies exist to make storage cheaper than it would be in batteries, and sodium-ion options become cheaper and cheaper to serve as buffers.
As far as I know, the power outage in Portugal and Spain did not start with renewables, those were disconnected to protect the equipment later, when the voltage already dropped, along with other power stations. Moreover, they were the first to recover, and they handled some of the load during the blackout: https://www.euronews.com/green/2025/04/29/did-renewable-energy-cause-spain-and-portugals-mass-blackout-experts-weigh-in
Grids are best modelled as a system, jointly operating. Insufficient damping is the cause as per the grid operator (1).
Can be solved in multiple ways such as make it a france problem (stronger interconnects to a system with more turbines), storage, improved DC-AC transformers for small (<1MW) solar plants. (*)
Pumped storage is indeed one of the best known technologies for grid stability, as it provides both storage, and turbines with inertia. Hard to build though, finding funding and appropriate locations. Then solar suddenly isn't as cheap if one takes into accou t the cost to make it a reliable source of energy.
(*) the report mentions an estimated 700MW of production auto-shutting down as grid frequency dropped. Most likely these are the inverters of small scale solar installations, which are frequency following (measure then adjust) rather than synchronizing, and simply shut off when out of bound. To quote: