Part of the problem is the difficulty in building new reactors, which means old and outdated reactor designs remain in operation which cannot utilize or recycle nuclear material because our nuclear knowledge at the time was lacking. If your reactor was built in the 70s or 80s, it was probably designed in the 60s which means 60s era nuclear technology, only 20 years after we first discovered nuclear power in the first place.

Its like driving around Model-Ts and then lamenting about how inefficient and unsafe they are. And then using that as evidence on why we shouldn't build modern cars.

But, PV has gone through many generations of technology over the years. That's why its cost has gone down by a factor of 300 or so.

If nuclear hasn't iterated as much, that's the fault of nuclear, not the cruel oppressing world. It's a technology that's big and slow to evolve, and that's ultimately lethal.

The grandparent comment mentioned modern recycling. Perhaps Belgium is operating old types of reactors that aren't amenable to modern ways of dealing with waste? A quick search yielded that all of Belgium's reactors were built in the 70's and 80's.

A lot of news pieces about nuclear are unrealistically rosy. Waste reprocessing isn't really all that new and it doesn't really get rid of waste. It replaces much of the solid waste with even more liquid waste.

The problem with having any discussion of nuclear is agreeing upon the facts. It's crazy hard to find an unbiased source. If you asked a random bystander why we haven't built nuclear reactors in recent years, you might hear "environmentalists." However, the truth is dramatically different. No one will insure a nuclear power plant except the US government. Investors won't invest in nuclear, as there's no appetite for the risks to open a plant and spend over a decade building it when cost overruns are common and it may never actually open.

The reason wind and solar are growing much, much faster than nuclear today isn't because of "environmentalists." It's because nuclear involves far more subsidies and risk.

Aren't the "environmentalists" the ones that are creating the mood that makes it hard to invest in nuclear?

Mood has nothing to do with investing in nuclear. We are talking something you build that prints money at a guaranteed rate, there's no one to sell to that you need to influence one way or another to make them throw more of their money at you.

The only reason why nuclear power isn't widespread is that shareholders see a 30 year return on investment and run away to juicier returns.

Investors at large aren't phased by things like the environment. There's too many who would invest either way if the profit potential was clear. So far, all nuclear plants have required large subsides, taken over a decade to build and open, and have cost far more than originally anticipated. Investors often look to past performance as a predictor of likely returns. There's no appetite for this kind of investment nowadays.

Probably but Fukushima probably helped too.

And yet, for the same quantity of energy over the same timeframe, nuclear is cheaper. It's not so much that it loses because of economics, it's losing because of the perceived uncertainty of the economics.

Risk, not uncertainty. The long-term (or even medium-term) pricing situation for renewables is highly volatile right now. It makes investing in new nuclear extremely risky financially. What if you start building a plant now, expecting a certain energy price to pay for it over decades, and by the time you finish, solar power costs half as much as your target? That could well happen. That's how utility companies go bankrupt.

So, yeah, uncertainty about the prices creates a risk that has to be bet on

New nuclear is certainly not cheaper. And we will soon be at the point where operating existing nuclear is not cheaper.

Does that factor in the upfront cost of building the reactor? IIRC it takes 30 years to get a return on investment for reactors, which is a non issue if the reactors are public but definitely a tough pill for the private sector to swallow.

But then if we need to replace all the old reactors by new ones, the argument that renewables are just ramping up is moot.

We don't need to replace old reactors by new ones. Replacing the reactors with new ones is an option, but only an option, and almost certainly not the economically optimal one.

If that argument could convince investors, it would have already.

That's a good point. These reactors are ancient. I wasn't aware of any major improvements in spent fuel handling, so I've got some reading to do!

I believe the issue with recycling is non-proliferation from one or both of these reasons: 1) If I'm not mistaken, recycling generates/accumulates plutonium, which in the wrong hands can be made into a thermonuclear weapon. 2) Enriching the spent waste back into fuel is much too close to the process of enriching it for bombs. I distinctly remember a YT video where they said that it's very hard (as in, much work) to enrich U to x-% for reactor fuel, but once you're at x-%, it's realtively easy to keep going to to y-% for bombs. So to recycle waste involves running that process and the NRC or some governments simply don't allow anyone to do it. My apologies if I'm incorrect in any of this.