Nuclear power companies are rare, and badly funded. Most civilian nuclear programs are/were state-sponsored. Throughout the cold war, the main financial driver was a need for enriched plutonium and uranium for obvious applications.
Now that we have been (mostly) in an era of nuclear deproliferation for over 30 years, there is little to no money behind nuclear lobbying (though nuclear-armed powers are much less likely to scale back civilian nuclear production, they also don’t have a military need to increase it). Weapons programs aside, “Big Atom” does not exist (unlike Big Oil or Big Coal who have billions of dollars to spend on lobbying annually).
Countries like Belgium or Germany even shuttered perfectly serviceable and economically viable NPP on ideological grounds FFS.
Now green field nuclear might not be a sound investment anymore (arguable, and depending on unreliable predictions about our future ability to do grid-scale battery storage to overcome intermittency issues as well as our willingness to rely on fossil gas instead).
But as someone living in a country whose nuclear program got fucked by stupid panicky rhetoric, I can tell you from experience that until the energy crisis of last year, “nuclear good” was a fringe “right wing” opinion held almost exclusively by people for who economics matters more than ecology (because traditional ecologists truly believe that nuclear waste is always worse than GHG emissions).
Yoyoing gas prices and the threat of an infrastructure collapse recently brought nuclear back into a more mainstream appeal, but unfortunately far too late to seriously consider building new NPPs.
Nuclear power companies are rare, and badly funded. Most civilian nuclear programs are/were state-sponsored. Throughout the cold war, the main financial driver was a need for enriched plutonium and uranium for obvious applications.
Now that we have been (mostly) in an era of nuclear deproliferation for over 30 years, there is little to no money behind nuclear lobbying (though nuclear-armed powers are much less likely to scale back civilian nuclear production, they also don’t have a military need to increase it). Weapons programs aside, “Big Atom” does not exist (unlike Big Oil or Big Coal who have billions of dollars to spend on lobbying annually).
Countries like Belgium or Germany even shuttered perfectly serviceable and economically viable NPP on ideological grounds FFS.
Now green field nuclear might not be a sound investment anymore (arguable, and depending on unreliable predictions about our future ability to do grid-scale battery storage to overcome intermittency issues as well as our willingness to rely on fossil gas instead).
But as someone living in a country whose nuclear program got fucked by stupid panicky rhetoric, I can tell you from experience that until the energy crisis of last year, “nuclear good” was a fringe “right wing” opinion held almost exclusively by people for who economics matters more than ecology (because traditional ecologists truly believe that nuclear waste is always worse than GHG emissions).
Yoyoing gas prices and the threat of an infrastructure collapse recently brought nuclear back into a more mainstream appeal, but unfortunately far too late to seriously consider building new NPPs.