It's possible that it will keep going long enough to be competitive, but it's not a safe enough bet to put all the eggs in one basket.
If we build a lot of nuclear reactors and then it turns out that storage becomes cheaper, it will cost an amount of money in line with what we currently pay to generate electricity, much of which will be paid by the investors who bet on the wrong horse. If we don't build a lot of nuclear reactors and then it turns out storage is not cheaper and so we keep burning fossil fuels, that is bad.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-9-2022-00127...
But they lobby against anything that could practically reduce dependence on fossil fuels, not just nuclear. If you want to do anything about it you have to overcome that.
I certainly hope we have learned the horrors of colonialism and won’t repeat that disastrous period.
How are you going to get people to build nuclear power plants when they could make more money on solar?
Who is going to pay to decommission nuclear power plants when they go bankrupt? Solar drives baseload plants bankrupt, which is why coal plants are going out of business.
That obviously depends on the cost of storage relative to the cost of building more plants, but you don't even need to ask the question until after you've already built enough plants to replace all of the existing fossil fuel baseload, so let's start there.
> How are you going to get people to build nuclear power plants when they could make more money on solar?
Regulatory reform to address the maliciously, intentionally high cost of construction and operation, resulting in competitive prices.
> Who is going to pay to decommission nuclear power plants when they go bankrupt?
They don't get decommissioned because they don't result in that kind of bankruptcy. They cost a lot to build, but once they're built, they're going to exist for decades.
If something else turns out to be much cheaper the people who invested in it may get a below market rate of return, but still it doesn't get shut down, because the initial capital expenditure is a sunk cost that has already been paid. The incremental cost of continuing to generate power is much lower.
> Solar drives baseload plants bankrupt, which is why coal plants are going out of business.
Coal plants have a substantial fuel cost, which puts them at a disadvantage. They operate at a loss if the price of electricity drops below the price of coal, and then shut down, and then have to recover their capital costs by operating for fewer hours. Nuclear plants continue to operate at 100% output pretty much regardless of the price of electricity because their fuel cost is negligible. Notice that it's the existing coal plants going out of business and not the existing nuclear plants.
Nuclear also has untapped potential for things like cogeneration, thermal storage and on-site desalination, all of which would make it more cost competitive but are not currently being exploited.