The price comment was not about "price is low"; it was about it becoming SO plentiful that the overhead in metering the cost would exceed the revenue and it could be just an on/off subscription
This HAS happened with telecom services, where long-distance calls used to even be sometimes only one town over, and were charged by the minute. Toll-free (800)- numbers were a big deal. Now, the network is so successful and calls so numerous that it is literally too cheap to meter - you either subscribe or you don't. Per-call metering is only the case in some international calls.
Nuclear electric power could have become this ubiquitous and successful, where the overhead of per-kilo-Watt metering outweighed the revenues. It would have merely had to scale up several more orders of magnitude. THIS was the prediction.
Obviously, although nuclear did have some success this did not happen. The costs of commissioning, building, and decommissioning individual plants were just too high.
We cannot conflate the actual modest success, producing barely 20% of power in the US in 1995[0], with the prediction of nuclear succeeding like telecomm.
It did not happen.
I think it could yet happen with some of the new small (neighborhood-scale), self-contained, inherently safe designs. But that is another prediction.
But after 2/3 of a century, nuclear has clearly failed to attain the level of success of other technologies, and it's success has been capped.
Moreover, nuclear is now on a clear and accelerating decline. The peak was 1995, producing 20.1% of US power, and it's now fallen from 19.7% to 18.2% in the last two years.
I wish nuclear had enjoyed more success; it still may with new smaller-scale and inherently safe technologies.
But the current cost profile and construction profile is so far out of line with the continually-rapidly-declining-costs of competing solar and wind technologies, that current nuclear is only falling further behind. To build a nuclear plant vs solar or wind requires far more capital, has a far longer permitting process and construction process before a return on capital can even begin, and a far more costly end-of-life phase (notice we're not even mentioning the usual highlights of nuclear waste disposal, containment, and nuclear material proliferation). Nuclear has simply become an unmanageable option.
So, considering that it's success was limited, and is now in decline with no end in sight, how is it unfair to characterize it as "failing to make the grade"?
This HAS happened with telecom services, where long-distance calls used to even be sometimes only one town over, and were charged by the minute. Toll-free (800)- numbers were a big deal. Now, the network is so successful and calls so numerous that it is literally too cheap to meter - you either subscribe or you don't. Per-call metering is only the case in some international calls.
Nuclear electric power could have become this ubiquitous and successful, where the overhead of per-kilo-Watt metering outweighed the revenues. It would have merely had to scale up several more orders of magnitude. THIS was the prediction.
Obviously, although nuclear did have some success this did not happen. The costs of commissioning, building, and decommissioning individual plants were just too high.
We cannot conflate the actual modest success, producing barely 20% of power in the US in 1995[0], with the prediction of nuclear succeeding like telecomm.
It did not happen.
I think it could yet happen with some of the new small (neighborhood-scale), self-contained, inherently safe designs. But that is another prediction.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/273208/nuclear-share-of-...