Renewables already figured it out. They're already cheaper. Nuclear already lost.
Until next-gen nuclear is developed, it's over. They're welcome to keep researching it though. Meanwhile, renewables are also getting better, and much faster. And they're already better than nuclear.
Higher interest rates make everything more difficult of course - ask the auto or mortgage industries.
The debate at this point isn’t about whether renewables will scale: China has already answered that question. There is a very real question about whether the West will be able to keep up. There seem to be a lot of people who want to sit around and fantasize about 1970s-era nuclear tech while our neighbors undergo what is effectively a second Industrial Revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#/m... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_Ch...
440 people die for every 1000TW of solar, compared to 90 for nuclear: https://www.engineering.com/story/whats-the-death-toll-of-nu...
Solar panel disposal impact: https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-dark-side-of-solar-power
Renewables have a place in our energy future. Fanaticism about them does not.
"The number of deaths for every 1000TWh of energy generated by rooftop solar panels is 440. Put simply, this means that for every 1000TWh of energy produced via rooftop solar power, 440 people lose their lives. Other estimates [obfuscated hyperlink to a Forbes page] place this number to be around 150. These deaths are mostly the result of electrocution and other hazards that occur during rooftop solar panel installation (such as falling)."
So they're not happy with the official statistics bureau that is Forbes and chose to stick with their uncited 440. It sounds made up to me. Searching for that exact datum actually yielded the original source [1], and yeah - it's made up. It's from a 2008 article where some guy just started hand-waving hard in a not entirely coherent fashion.
A quick search for something more reasonable turns up this. [2] The data comes from multiple studies and the UN Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation. Wind/Nuclear/Solar all have pretty much the same mortality rate: 0.04/0.03/0.02 per unit of electricity, respectively. If I want to be disingenuous I can claim [accurately] that nuclear is 50% deadlier than solar (and obviously many many magnitudes deadlier per installation), but the numbers in terms of energy/watt are low enough to be irrelevant.
[1] - https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all...
[2] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
If solar profitability is affected by higher interest rates (I'm not arguing this point) nuclear would be much more effected. Nuclear power is the most capital intensive form of power, they are a huge up front investment with very long ROI (incidentally they almost always require significant price guarantees over for decades and backed by the government to derisk the investment).
Nuclear has a niche, but it got steamrolled by the S curve of solar, wind, and batteries.
Edit: Nuclear power generation in China has, IIRC, tripled in the 21st century.
But demand has gone up much more than twentyfold though, and this year we are the crossover point where wind an PV manufacturing and install rates, and transmission line build rates, exceed the growth of demand, so fossil plants can start to be retired there.
If nuclear can't be built fast in China, where can it?
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carb...
> The most striking growth has been in solar power, according to Myllyvirta. Solar installations increased by 210 gigawatts (GW) this year alone, which is twice the total solar capacity of the US and four times what China added in 2020.
> The analysis, which is based on official figures and commercial data, found that China installed 70GW of wind power this year – more than the entire power generation capacity of the UK. It is also expected to add 7GW of hydro power and 3GW of nuclear power capacity this year, said the report.
Edit: I found the 2022 numbers on Wikipedia and got curious what the 2023 outlook is going to be. It is shocking: https://www.rystadenergy.com/news/china-s-solar-capacity-sur... Their 2023 numbers are double the 2022.
Shoeboxes are dead.
But a practical issue here is that there hasn't really been much motivation to develop this industry, because there's been relatively little critical necessity for high capacity at-scale energy storage.
> Installed battery capacity increased from 153 MW in 2019 to 3,518 MW in 2023. Interconnection agreements have been signed for an additional 7,945 MW of battery storage through 2024, allowing batteries to play a growing role in daily power needs in the near future.
I say this as someone who bikes their kid around most of the time; I love biking but it is way of life that only a minority of people can make work.
It’s taken that long for renewables to get marginally cheaper without solving the base load problem one bit. Meanwhile natural gas has dominated both.
"By 1986, the Reagan administration had gutted the research and development budgets for renewable energy at the then-fledgling U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) and eliminated tax breaks for the deployment of wind turbines and solar technologies—recommitting the nation to reliance on cheap but polluting fossil fuels, often from foreign suppliers."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-hous...
Also, "marginally cheaper" can't help but sound like sour grapes; the cost-per-watt of solar has fallen by 500x in the past 50 years (https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/evolution-of-...). How many hundreds of times cheaper per-watt is nuclear since then?