Nuclear Economics

I’m lacking a good news hook, but this is a good explanation from Daniel Davies of nuclear socialism:

It is not actually the up front investment that makes nuclear power schemes so unattractive to private capital – it’s the back-loaded cleanup liability. This is an unusual kind of risk (most investment projects have an initial investment, then a period of profits, then end), and its risk of a quite toxic kind – you know it’s there and that it’s big, but it’s way out in the future and almost impossible to estimate. This is why the nuke industry, when angling for government support (but I repeat myself) usually focuses on some guarantee of the cleanup liability. Since putting this on the public balance sheet doesn’t actually make it go away or make it any less unattractive, I find myself slightly gratified that one consequence of the now-dying post-Thatcher free-market consensus is that it made nuclear power development in the Anglosphere more or less economically impossible.

This is why, in general, the most nuclearized countries (France, Japan) are also the most dirigiste. I’m not really persuaded that all things considered this is actually worse than status quo energy policy in the United States.