Michael Barnard
2 min readAug 12, 2021

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Nuclear generation speedy deployment depends on the following factors:

- Nuclear reactors have to be in the GW range.

- The same nuclear technology has to be used in the same way in virtually every site and reactor.

- The nuclear reactors have to be built in a 20–30 year window to allow build team expertise to be concentrated and persist through retirement.

- Safety regulations have to pre-date awareness of statistical likelihood of nuclear reactors, aka decades ago, or be in a country where the need for new energy sources swamps the concerns.

- The country has to have a nuclear armaments strategy (typically) or other national-scale burning platform which allows the federal government to sweep aside regulatory variance in sub-national jurisdictions, spend money as necessary regardless of budget and force acceptance of one of ultimate NIMBY technologies.

- There has to be no clearly superior technology on the metrics of cost, risk, construction duration and low-negative externalities.

- The federal government has to be willing to subsidize nuclear energy directly to assist kWh sales be price competitive with wind and solar, with regulatory fixes to make nuclear a desirable alternative for sub-national jurisdictions, with international, national and sub-national security coordination, and with subsidies of decommissioning costs.

Those conditions don't exist, and only existed roughly four times, once each in Ontario (Canada), the USA, France and South Korea. France and South Korea have explicit goals of reducing their nuclear fleet or eliminating it entirely. The USA's fleet will disappear through attrition. Only Ontario is still pretending that it's going to continue much of its fleet, but it's letting an entire facility and its four reactors retire over the next year.

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Michael Barnard
Michael Barnard

Written by Michael Barnard

Climate futurist and advisor. Founder TFIE. Advisor FLIMAX. Podcast Redefining Energy - Tech.

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