This is great, but all of this feels like it's coming 15 to 20 years too late. I worked with a guy in Berlin who had previously worked in PV energy. He predicted that unless the costs were reduced by a factor of half the price point of fossil fuels that it would go nowhere. We're addicted to cheap, no hassle sources of energy right now, and it's depressing.
You have to wonder what PV would cost if even a tenth of the resources invested in developing nuclear energy were instead invested in solar energy development. I expect by 1980, solar energy would have been the cheapest way to generate electricity, President Carter would have been reelected, no Iran-Contra affair, and no deregulation of banks leading to the 2008 recession, and likely would have avoided 911, both Iraq wars and the one in Afghanistan. We could have saved all kinds of money, had cheap energy, still had plenty of nuclear power, and it wouldn't be so damn hot all the time.
> You have to wonder what PV would cost if even a tenth of the resources invested in developing nuclear energy were instead invested in solar energy development.
Not enough was invested in nuclear. Fossil fuels received massive funding (and subsidies). Had we deployed more nuclear power for baseline and industry, we would have been in a far better place. The Cold War also messed up things, and caused the reactors that were deployed to be the ones better suited for weapons first, energy second.
Note that our solar panels are similar to computer chips. Investing more money would have sped up the development but not in time for it to be viable in the 80s.
> The Cold War also messed up things, and caused the reactors that were deployed to be the ones better suited for weapons first, energy second.
Sure, but those were Gen 1 reactors. We're overwhelmingly using (pressurized water) Gen 2 reactors these days, which, while being downstream of the same processing as the one required for nuclear weapons, and also theoretically capable to be used to make nuclear weapons themselves, are definitely NOT better suited for weapons first !
The Manhattan Project cost, adjusted for inflation, $22B. That was just to blow something up. Had the United States and Great Britain not subsequently developed nuclear energy, it is likely it never would have been developed because it would have been impossible due to cost. Only a nation can develop nuclear energy, it is not something that could have been developed privately, again, due to cost.
When factoring the cost of the energy produced by nuclear fission, the cost of that electricity, the cost of the development of nuclear energy is never factored in. If it were, it would be clear there has never been a more expensive way to generate electricity than nuclear fission. Nuclear energy development was a freebee, and the biggest freebee in the history of civilization: nuclear energy development, paid for by tax payers, was given away and the tax payers' investment never had one penny of return. "Electricity too cheap to meter," never materialized, and not even close. The tax payers were bamboozled.
When all is said and done, the treehuggers have the weaker argument. Sure, nuclear energy has some environmental concerns, but these kinds of arguments pale in comparison to the economic argument: nuclear energy has never been and will never be economically viable. There are reasons, but they can be ignored, because we can see the result, no investor will touch nuclear. And complaining about the type of nuclear plants serves no purpose because the fission plants we built are the cheapest designs there are. Seeder reactors would be cool, but, you see, they're even less economically viable than the fission steam turbine plants.
We could invest everything, every dollar earned, every possible value society could produce, into nuclear energy development, but even if we did, nuclear energy would remain economically unviable.
Again, if we could just invest a small portion of what we wasted on nuclear energy development into solar energy development... well jusT look at how cheap solar has gotten in 20 years with private development. Imagine if it was 80 years instead of 20 and included massive, mind-boggling, government subsidies. Forget any government investment in solar, if solar subsidies could merely match nuclear subsidies, dollar for dollar, no one would be talking about nuclear power anymore.
Agreed ... but I'll posit the existence of technical 'treehuggers' who knew it early on (and kept quiet after what happened to Oppenheimer.)
Further posit: they were aware that nukes were more about making Pu than heat. No insurance company back in the day would accept the risk either (thus the 1957 'Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act').
Anyway, I'll quote a 1951 expert:
"t is safe to say ... that atomic power is not the means by which man will for the first time emancipate himself economically.… At present, atomic power presents an exceptionally costly and inconvenient means of obtaining energy which can be extracted much more economically from conventional fuels.… This is expensive power, not cheap power as the public has been led to believe." — C. G. Suits, Director of Research, General Electric, who who was operating the Hanford reactors. [https://www.ieer.org/pubs/atomicmyths.html]
