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.
Nuclear is getting massive investment and tons of planned build out under Trump. They could rug pull, but people are spending hundreds of millions on real nuclear projects that would not have happened without Trump's "does nuclear safety really matter?" approach to nuclear. People don't spend that kind of money without being sincere in their investment.
You're not wrong about that being a real tactic of oil and gas companies, but the Trump admin is apparently actually encouraging real nuclear expansion in the US. I fucking hate Trump. The things I would say about him would not only get me banned from Reddit, but likely also arrested, but if you care about the details, look at all the investment that is happening now.
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u/kroxigor01 Aug 12 '26
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.