> It boggles my mind that France and South Korea had such great success with nuclear but nobody else was able to replicate that success.
The reason is that France has invested a lot of public money in nuclear energy. The state has taken the investment risks, over a very long period of time (decades) for the public good.
Nuclear energy is not really viable with private investment, because the return over investment time and the cost of money is too high. States can borrow sub-0% loans. Private power companies just can't.
And France invested at a time where there was a consensus between politicians, to invest in the future. Now politicians hardly invest for their elected time.
One lesson I learned during my masters and my time n the solar sector was that, at scale, financials are all that matters now. During the cold war, nuclear had a huge political push. Espcially in countries building a nuclear strike capacity.
Now we reached a point were, during public bidding, solar and wind are cheaper per kWh than Hinkley C (that was already three years ago). If the CO2 certificates would just be more restricted, solar and wind would easily outbid coal as well. Last time I checked, which was a couple of years ago, in Germany CO2 certificates ahd the effect that they largely pushed out everything except coal and renewables from the market. Renewables had a marginal cost of zero, so they always got demand. And with CO2 certificates plenty, coal plants ended up the next cheapest power source with dirt cheap fuel. Cleaner and more flexible solutions were thus more often than not priced out, like gas and nuclear.
I hate nuclear, because when an accident happens it always carries the risk of being disastrous. But right now, i would make sense to keep alle xisting nuclear plant running and close down coal and oil plants. Sure, we have the risk of an accident, and we have the added nuclear waste to worry about. but we already ahve a lot of waste, adding some more doesn't change that much. And we would buy ourselves time to solve energy storage coming from renewables. And use flexible as plants to cover unexpected peak demand. Not sure if we will ever see that level of long term thinking anytime soon, so.
>Now we reached a point were, during public bidding, solar and wind are cheaper per kWh
That metric is very misleading. Solar and wind are cheaper than most other sources because their fuel cost is zero.
There are a slew of other costs that are not borne by the solar and wind generators but which are borne by consumers namely balancing costs, standby generation costs, ancillary services and so on.
Once you add in all these costs, renewables suddenly aren't as cheap as the media would have you believe. Don't get me wrong - they are an important step towards decarbonising electricity generation but they aren't the final step.
The final step would be transmission interconnections on a continental scale, large amounts of hydro where possible and nuclear where hydro isn't possible and little to no coal and gas.
> And we would buy ourselves time to solve energy storage coming from renewables.
To my understanding, the intermittency/baseload problem is a much larger problem than people give it credit for. And I don't think it is safe to assume that we will eventually "solve energy storage", any more than we can count on eventually developing commercially viable fusion or any other still-pie-in-the-sky technologies.
Of course we will solve energy storage. There are thousands of different battery chemistries, and large numbers of non-battery storage options (including ones like hydrogen that will do much better than batteries for long term storage). And even with very near term storage improvements, renewables will beat nuclear at providing base load.
The reason is that France has invested a lot of public money in nuclear energy. The state has taken the investment risks, over a very long period of time (decades) for the public good.
Nuclear energy is not really viable with private investment, because the return over investment time and the cost of money is too high. States can borrow sub-0% loans. Private power companies just can't.
And France invested at a time where there was a consensus between politicians, to invest in the future. Now politicians hardly invest for their elected time.