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I think what you are missing is that there are parallel developments which call into question whether the high price is actually inherent to the technology in the way we've been led to believe. The most direct parallel here is space launch. Not very long ago, the price per kilogram to orbit was high enough to make satellites prohibitively expensive for anyone but nation states and extremely well-capitalized corporations. Human spaceflight was all but unthinkable for anyone except national astronautics programs. The conventional wisdom was that this is just the nature of the problem: rockets are expensive and expendable, development requires decades of engineering, and there are no real major technological advancements achievable without new fundamental breakthroughs.
But this turned out not to be the case! SpaceX entered the market and proved that using iterations of well-known designs, hiring the right people and compensating them properly, and leadership pushing hard at schedules and milestones while also driving on costs, you actually could dramatically lower the cost to orbit beyond what anyone thought possible, while still being profitable!
So with this context, there's lots of reasons to be skeptical that the cost and feasibility barriers cited for nuclear power are real. As with liquid-fueled rockets, this is a reasonably well-developed and very well-understood technology. The bulk inputs are concrete and steel, inexpensive things we know how to build with. We don't need fundamental breakthroughs. What we need are industry leaders with the drive to engineer better reactors designed for safety and mass production and for the NRC to streamline the permitting process to something with clear, reasonable requirements. Unlike with rockets, we unfortunately also need reform in the building permitting processes that are also used to block or delay every other major infrastructure project, but I don't think that's an impossible dream.
So, your interlocutors may well believe that the cost factor, as real as it is today, not be inherent to the technology, and that we have everything we need to unlock the capability to manufacture and deploy nuclear power facilities as quickly and cheaply as combustion turbines, if only the right combination of leadership and policy falls into place.
I do not think this is the reasoning behind it. I personally believe that nuclear fusion may render all other power sources obsolete in our lifetime, but I do not think more nuclear powerplants with out current tecnology in the foreseeable future.
As far as I know and until I see sources that convice me otherwise, they are too costly, and that gets in the way of more cost-efficient green power generation - and even of nuclear research, depending on how you allocate the budget.
I am yet to see in the general debate someone trying to defend nuclear energy with the argument of accelerating technology development
Would it be fair to say, then, that if it could be demonstrated that the costs are not inherent to the technology, then you would support (or at least not oppose) nuclear power installation?
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