Why nuclear power dreams cling on

Gee, doing some searches of this blog for posts on renewable energy, I see that I used to put a fair bit of effort into understanding the change to renewable energy and its challenges.  Some old posts are full of details. 

I guess I gradually lost interest in the finer details of energy generation economics because it became wildly complicated, in large part (I think!) because of the interplay of privatisation of energy generation,  government policy, market forces, spot pricing, transmission line complications, interstate sharing of power, and God knows what else.   (See John Quiggin's 2018 article for some details.)

I'm still interested in the technological challenges of going to completely carbon free energy - it's the economics of the best way to get there is so daunting.  

Anyway, I also get the impression in casting my eyes over early posts that renewable growth has been much better than initially predicted.

But, with the revival of the nuclear dream, almost certainly for cynical political/culture war reasons rather than well considered ones, I just wanted to comment that I think the reason nuclear in Australia can take on a sheen of plausibility with the voters is because of what I noted in this post in 2021:  governments are unable to explain the details of how the transition to fully renewable energy will work.  

I suspect there are two reasons for this - the role of the private sector in building electricity generation, and the always evolving technology of renewables.  On that latter point, we've seen lots of ideas for clean energy come and go in the 20 odd years of this blog.   For example, I used to like the potential of solar farms using multiple small scale stirling engine generators.  (They just look cool, if you ask me!)  But all the start ups that were hoping to go somewhere with that have vanished.  Similarly for pebble bed nuclear reactors - South Africa was going to try it, and now I think there is only one or two in China.   It seems they can have issues that can be difficult to overcome (probably in the difficulty of making sure the pebbles never crack open, I suspect), despite early promise of a an inherently safe form of nuclear power. 

I saw from a headline that old private sector loving economist Judith Sloan endorsed in the Australian the Coalition's policy that government will build and own the nuclear reactors.   Quite a turn around for Judith, but should I be too harsh, given that I reckon it would help a lot with the public's impression of non-nuclear renewables transition if government were completely in control of that.

Anyway, I feel like renewing my call, or wish, that governments be more specific about the nuts and bolts of how rapid increase in renewables without nuclear will happen.   I had lots of suggestions for practical ideas that seemed sensible to me in 2021, but I don't think any of them have been taken up by government...