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Skibboleth alluded to this point below: the time to build nuclear was 30-40 years ago when the cost/benefit made sense. In the intervening decades, money has poured into solar, wind, and more niche renewables, such that they are now well ahead in terms of marginal cost per unit of energy, even taking into account the intermittency downsides.
There's probably a ton of room for research into fission to produce similar advances, but the question you have to ask now is why? Renewables are already there. Other than an aesthetic preference for major engineering projects or a desire to poke greens in the eye, the only benefit is just to cover intermittency, but there are plenty of alternatives for that as well
Because the West is a culture of engineers, and we should play to our strengths. (Also, the environment is too important to leave to the Greens.)
Not from a national security or domestic security perspective, they aren't. For the former, no Western country controls its own supply chain of solar panels or [to an extent] wind turbines; for nuclear, you can reprocess fuel (and don't even need much of it in the first place) and construction can't meaningfully be outsourced.
For the latter, I don't trust my political enemies not to intentionally destroy the alternatives to intermittency (because they're already trying to destroy the ability to build new natural gas turbines, which is the problem they're meant to solve) and turn the West into South Africa in service of their death cult. Not that nuclear isn't immune to this (since it's been done many times before in the US), but it's not something that obviously funds my political allies like coal/oil/natural gas does, so even if those things go away I believe my enemies are more likely to feel forced to continue funding a power grid that still works after 5 PM in the winter.
But renewable generation also requires engineering effort, why is that not playing to strengths? Fully solving issues related to storage, grid connection, forecasting, etc. will require plenty of engineering skill.
Manufacturing of renewables is not my area of expertise so I can't comment on your second paragraph. Although the domestic security issue is presumably not going to apply equally to every Western nation.
It's not an area of expertise for any Western country, either. So in 20 years when China has figured out that "hey, now that they're completely dependent on this product, and most of the PV panels we've sold have dropped below the replacement threshold for power output, time to jack up the price", now that cheap product has become a massive liability, just like how the natural gas supply in Europe was sacrificed to further US foreign policy goals in Ukraine.
Considering the US goes out of its way to encourage that domestic security issue in other Western countries, I agree- it's going to affect them more.
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The best time was 30-40 years ago. The second best time is now.
"Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?"
There's also the land use issue. A 1.21 GW nuclear plant takes up a lot less land than 1.21 GW of solar farms or wind turbines.
Unfortunately, the numbers don't add up for any of them.
Yes, but at least for solar that's not that big a deal. There's a lot of big, empty, sunny land in the US. Thing is, environmentalists don't like building on it; I used to joke they'd complain about changing the albedo of the planet, but it turns out they actually do complain about that, along with the fragile desert ecosystems. And of course they don't like transmission lines either, which are kinda necessary to get the power to where you need it. And if you could get around the environmentalists, why would you bother with renewables? They're the ones blocking everything else, too.
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Most nations have some nuclear in their generation mix and will continue to have nuclear for the foreseeable future, but I'm not sure anywhere in the West outside of France will have a significant percentage covered by it. Peaking plants will probably continue to be gas or hydro as nuclear is not suited for this purpose. But ultimately as with renewable generation, the investment in battery technology mean that storage plants and DERs are simply better placed in terms of cost/benefit again.
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