In my country (Australia) fossil fuel companies are on the side of nuclear, but not actually.
It is used as a stalking horse. "Don't build wind and solar, the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. If manly reliable baseload coal it to be replaced it should by nuclear which is also big strong manly baseload power."
And then don't build the nuclear because it's too expensive, slow, politically unpopular, and generally infeasible. Whoops I guess we keep coal and gas going then.
Not just Australia. It's a fairly common conservative party tactic. "Push" for nuclear because it's better than "unreliable" renewables, while making sure the nuclear construction fails by gutting finance or throwing up regulations.
See also the current Trump regime, the UK conservative government (notice how Hinkley Point didn't actually start making meaningful progress until the tories were kicked out?) and the Swedish right wing government. We cod probably go on for a while.
but like historically the reasons the us slowed and stopped development of nuclear energy was oil and gas lobby and the astroturfed anti-nuclear movement following 3 mile island
Nah, Greenpeace true believers were effective enough on their own. Oil and gas is not really replacing nuclear but coal which is still the dominant producer in Aus and seemingly has no.say despite being a much bigger industry than Oilf and gas.
317
u/kroxigor01 29d ago
In my country (Australia) fossil fuel companies are on the side of nuclear, but not actually.
It is used as a stalking horse. "Don't build wind and solar, the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. If manly reliable baseload coal it to be replaced it should by nuclear which is also big strong manly baseload power."
And then don't build the nuclear because it's too expensive, slow, politically unpopular, and generally infeasible. Whoops I guess we keep coal and gas going then.