France did it with 50/60 technology in 70. France did it fairly centralized but there are other options to get to a similar place.
Today its far easier to mass produce and scale. Modern reactors are better design for this.
Nuclear growth in the developed world would actually be possible. That is actually what China is planning to do. They want to sell reactors and get fuel contracts to control people infrastructure.
Most experts agree that civil nuclear power actually helps proliferation.
My problem is this. You read news article after article about how horrible and disastrous climate change already is and will be even worse very soon. WE NEED TO ACT NOW.
When you then go to the same newspapers and people, they are talking about how solar is coming along nicely and with government support in 20 years it be relevant.
Nuclear could have been adopted (or continued) 30 years ago. Carbon would never even have been a large problem. Only having to change transportation would have been far easier once you have non-carbon energy.
Nuclear construction is great for energy supply throughput, terrible for latency.
Today its far easier to mass produce and scale. Modern reactors are better design for this.
This is not supported empirically. France's Generation III reactor design, the EPR, is proving slower to build than Generation II reactors in the 1970s. The first French EPR, Flamanville 3, is currently on month 102 of construction, when it was originally supposed to be complete after 54 months.
The two Generation III AP1000 reactors under construction in the USA are now expected to be completed in 2021 and 2022 after 9 years of construction. They were originally supposed to be completed in 2016 and 2017. Two others were cancelled after years and billions of dollars were spent because they could not meet schedules.
Note that EPR and AP1000 reactors are also under construction in China and they are years late there too. These dreadful mis-estimates can't be laid solely on Western laws or environmental activists.
Before construction actually started on EPR and AP1000 reactors in the West, project boosters were claiming that Generation III reactors would be safer, have predictable construction schedules, and be affordable. None of those boasts have been affirmed yet. Nuclear boosters sometimes excuse this with "the first of a kind is always slow." But then talk of "fast" nuclear construction is even less realistic. It takes a decade to build the first of a kind. Then if the debugged construction process gets down to a brisk 4.5 years per reactor, like China has managed, it's about 15 years before you see any kind of fast decarbonization progress from a commitment to build a new generation of nuclear reactors.
I think that the US should keep reactor construction alive so that the know-how isn't entirely lost again, and certainly should not shut down already-built reactors that are still in good working order. But that still wouldn't be a fast fix for cutting emissions.
France is also smaller than Texas and has a much larger economy with twice as many people. And France was rebuilding alot of its infrastructure from WWII which gave it an advantage in terms of cost compared to the situation the U.S. was in at that time. The U.S. is much more spread out and geographically diverse than any of the examples you've given and there is no "one size fits all" solution for that reason.
Nuclear power is good for dense populations, but it is much less cost effective for low density places which includes half or more of the US geographic area. Which means you're left with subsidies specifically for nuclear plants in those areas, or something like a carbon tax to make them competitive, which would also benefit solar and other alternatives that are a better fit to begin with.
Today its far easier to mass produce and scale. Modern reactors are better design for this.
Nuclear growth in the developed world would actually be possible. That is actually what China is planning to do. They want to sell reactors and get fuel contracts to control people infrastructure.
Most experts agree that civil nuclear power actually helps proliferation.
My problem is this. You read news article after article about how horrible and disastrous climate change already is and will be even worse very soon. WE NEED TO ACT NOW.
When you then go to the same newspapers and people, they are talking about how solar is coming along nicely and with government support in 20 years it be relevant.
Nuclear could have been adopted (or continued) 30 years ago. Carbon would never even have been a large problem. Only having to change transportation would have been far easier once you have non-carbon energy.