Honestly I disagree that the failure of the US nuclear industry is due to the anti-nuclear lobby. Modern opinions on nuclear energy, particularly among young people, show that nuclear power has a largely positive acceptance. The reason the industry struggles is entirely due to capitlism and particularly the US banking system.
Our entire nuclear sector is privately owned, which as fat as I’m aware, is not the same in any other country. Every single country that has had successful nuclear power industry (this includes the US in the 50s and such) was due to state owned initiatives or heavily state influenced (in the case of the US) projects. The USSR is the obvious example, France’s standardized reactor design roll outs being is a Western example, and modern China’s SOE’S being the modern example.
In the US if a nuclear company would like to get the finances for building a reactor, they must go to a private bank which will charge a massive interest rate due to nuclear power plants not immediately turning a profit (they’re technically more profitable then Natural Gas, their main competitor, in the long run). This obviously will dissuade any private nuclear company which is itself seeking a profit from ever building a power plant.
Essentially it’s a too pronged problem where the industry being entirely for profit doesn’t lend itself well to the kind of economic model which allows nuclear to thrive, and the mechanism for financing these massive projects is also entirely privatized, so again, the industry which requires long term stable projects is fucked over by short-term thinking that’s dominant in am entirely market economy.
The anti-nuclear lobby has at most just made it so that Western leftists are blind to an obvious solution to large parts of the environmental crisis for an astonishingly long time. That’s not exactly something ground breaking though in my opinion.
Honestly I disagree that the failure of the US nuclear industry is due to the anti-nuclear lobby. Modern opinions on nuclear energy, particularly among young people, show that nuclear power has a largely positive acceptance. The reason the industry struggles is entirely due to capitlism and particularly the US banking system.
Our entire nuclear sector is privately owned, which as fat as I’m aware, is not the same in any other country. Every single country that has had successful nuclear power industry (this includes the US in the 50s and such) was due to state owned initiatives or heavily state influenced (in the case of the US) projects. The USSR is the obvious example, France’s standardized reactor design roll outs being is a Western example, and modern China’s SOE’S being the modern example.
In the US if a nuclear company would like to get the finances for building a reactor, they must go to a private bank which will charge a massive interest rate due to nuclear power plants not immediately turning a profit (they’re technically more profitable then Natural Gas, their main competitor, in the long run). This obviously will dissuade any private nuclear company which is itself seeking a profit from ever building a power plant.
Essentially it’s a too pronged problem where the industry being entirely for profit doesn’t lend itself well to the kind of economic model which allows nuclear to thrive, and the mechanism for financing these massive projects is also entirely privatized, so again, the industry which requires long term stable projects is fucked over by short-term thinking that’s dominant in am entirely market economy.
The anti-nuclear lobby has at most just made it so that Western leftists are blind to an obvious solution to large parts of the environmental crisis for an astonishingly long time. That’s not exactly something ground breaking though in my opinion.