It is actually an enemy of nuclear, economically. Solar is so cheap, it will naturally grow until it satisfies 100% of the daytime load. This pushes nuclear off the grid during the day - it’s power costs too much. But nukes need to be running and selling at 100% 24/7 to have any chance of breaking even.

This is what the OP means - they make no economic sense on most modern grids.

Yes no real cons if we exclude the small con of being completely economically unviable.

Cost and time seem like a pretty important con to me.

> it should be a no brainer for a place like Europe without significant energy resources.

The uranium needs to be regularly replaced. Europe currently imports virtually all of the uranium used by its nuclear power plants. While Europe has some decommissioned uranium mines, they would have to be reopened, but the known deposits are estimated to cover less than the 50 years you cite, at current levels of nuclear production (much less when expanding production).

So if this is about energy independence rather than cost, I’m not sure that it would be such a great win.

>Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment,

That's not true. It's extremely expensive to operate for one, so expensive in fact that nobody in the private sector wants to do it without having nation states basically guarantee profits for the lifetime of the plant or accept all liability. Which in several countries means that he operator is the nation state. Like in France.

The profits are guaranteed by collecting extra taxes from the population, not by increasing the price of electricity. Which is why people believe France has cheap electricity when they really don't.

Also of course each nuclear plant carries a nonzero chance of a trillion dollar incident (we've had two so far) as well as a nonzero chance of millions of casualties. Both these cons are entirely unique to nuclear power plants. No hydro plant, solar plant, wind farm, coal, oil or gas plant can cause as much damage as a nuclear plant.

>t's that or buying gas from Russia.

Not at all, there are many options (including buying gas from someone else). Some options got viable so recently people still haven't realized it. Like batteries. They're cheap now, you know, and China can build as many as we want. China has also caused a severe drop in the cost of hydrolyzers, used to create e-fuel. E-fuel means you can use solar power in winter and during night, which removes the remaining weakness of renewable sources. Europe should spend every eurocent in that direction instead of nuclear. That's the path to true energy independence.

And anyway, europe still gets 70% of it's nuclear fuel from Russia. How is that better than gas?

Cost of deployment is a massive consideration in our not-yet-post-scarcity society.

It takes billions to certify a nuclear power plant, and it takes billions more to re-certify it every few decades, to say nothing of the costs of modernization.

To be clear, I consider myself generally pro-nuclear power, but let's not ignore the massive upfront and ongoing capital and operational costs that really undermine this idea that it's free power.

How about nuclear fuel still being dependent on either russia or us? and that is just one reason.

> Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment

... and cost of operation and the fact that you have radioactive material you need to securely and safely store for quite a bit (which no one has figured out yet)

People have been arguing nuclear is too expensive and soon renewables will be so cheap they will push fossil fuels out of the grid for 30 years, if not more. Meanwhile during those 30 years, while waiting for the price of renewables to drop sufficiently, the world has built massive amounts of fossil power generation and emissions have been going up and up.

That being said, it seems finally solar+wind+storage+a little bit of other stuff is becoming cheap enough that it's starting to make a dent in the emissions. Which is fantastic, don't get me wrong. But it's also sad we've lost decades.

What does "Upgrade to the next level" even mean? What next level? Where is the dividing line? Why should we, beside all other concerns there are?

To produce 10x the current power demand with nuclear you’d need breeder reactors or perhaps thorium unless you want to run out of fuel rather quickly. That’s not what is being proposed here.

I also don’t believe that fission, fusion or antimatter are on the same branch of the tech tree.

> upgrade civilization to the next level

Why?

Sir I'd like you to step out of the car and breathe into this Kool-Aid detector.

Planets aren't going to be colonized like colonies were on this Earth. Economic growth and prosperity have decoupled not only from fossil fuels, but it's no longer a function of energy consumption in general. Humans simply do not flourish without the Earth ecosystem. The future you paint here is only credible to 13 year-old boys who just finished their third Jerry Pournelle book.

Is musk's stream of consciousness leaking?

> upgrade civilization to the next level

What does that even mean? Will we have no more wars? Will we overcome capitalist ownership structures? Will we save our planets ecosystems from extinction? Will we finally be able to eradicate hunger and homelessness?

Or are we just talking more fancy gadgets for the rich at the expense of all of the above?

Total world energy usage is about 1/10,000 what the sun provides. Bumping that up an order of magnitude means 1/1,000 instead. Seems reasonable for solar.

I don’t see research into fission power doing anything useful for spacecraft. The big bottleneck right now is getting stuff to orbit. The rest is easy, relatively speaking. And getting stuff to orbit is not practical with nuclear unless you use something like Orion, which has some downsides to put it mildly, and is already doable with 1950s tech.