The alternatives are better. Nuclear is expensive even before you factor in the decommissioning costs. With those costs factored in it just doesn't make any sense.

Invest that money in geothermal, hydro, solar, wind and eventually tidal power and you get far more bang-for-your-buck.

Convert coal plants to burn biomass combined with carbon capture and geological storage and you get power which - whilst more expensive - removes carbon from the air. The more you use it the more carbon it removes.

Given these developments, why build new nuclear plants?

Closing down plants which are still viable on the other hand seems like pure madness.

If (when?) we can design nuclear plants which are both economical, safe and don't have the externalized decommissioning costs then it would also be foolish not to include them in the mix.

>The alternatives are better. Nuclear is expensive even before you factor in the decommissioning costs.

Nuclear is very cheap for producing the base load. You also shouldn't compare the price of different energy sources in isolation. If an electricity market goes 100% solar and wind for example, it will get power outages soon. Storing the energy of varying power generators is expensive with current technology.

>Given these developments, why build new nuclear plants?

You can create cheap and clean eletricity.

>If (when?) we can design nuclear plants which are both economical, safe and don't have the externalized decommissioning costs then it would also be foolish not to include them in the mix.

Nuclear plants are economical and safe.

Geothrenal is limited geographically. Iceland has plenty but a tiny population. California has a lot but it’s largely tapped out and what we do have is sufficient only for the communities nearby to the plants.

Your hypothetical biomass burning coal plants are still that: hypothetical. If they work at scale, add that to the list.

Damming up rivers has its own problems, but this is largely moot: the majority of lakes in California are dam lakes and damn near every river with good capacity in the State is already dammed up.

Tidal power is likely to have other environmental concerns. If mitigating these concerns still makes it cheaper than nuclear plants, fine, but I’m not going to support the installation of any new tech that screws with coastal ecosystems the same way we screwed up prior river and lake ecosystems.

Yeah, tidal power is a joke. First, its not cheap at all, and the type that produce a decent amount of energy do much more harm to the environment than good.

Nuclear is only expensive because the current climate from anti-nuclear movements buries each plant in red tape and makes them all one off designs.

Windmills would be extremely expensive as well if each one was designed with a custom generator and custom blades.

Yeah, economics is where nuclear really falls apart. Once we get our renewable storage game on point there will be no place in the world for nuclear power, economically.