I agree with Michael Tobis; just because we are not currently on-track
for a dramatic increase in nuclear power generation does not mean it
will not happen. Sure, nuclear cannot hope to compete with coal at
$0.04 per kWh, but slap a carbon price of, say, $30 a ton and the
economics begin to change.
Frankly, the government shouldn't have much of a role in picking
winners outside of basic research and development. The market should
be shaped to take the costs of climate change (and, for that matter,
nuclear safety and waste disposal) into account, and should decide
which technologies to invest in based on which are most efficient.
That may be large-scale distributed renewables coupled with hydrogen
production as a load-curve flattener, it may be nuclear power, it may
be IGCC coupled with sequestration, it may be more natural gas. More
likely than not, it will be a combination of all of these, as well as
new technologies that will emerge when people have an incentive to
spend money researching them (as an aside, it might be an interesting
exercise to plot private R&D expenditures in electricity generation
against average electricity price in the U.S...)
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