This is the Cato Daily podcast for Tuesday, November 19th, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

President Biden has plans to dramatically expand nuclear power, but his plans may have left out some of the very long timeframes required for getting nuclear projects in the U.S. off the ground.

Cato's David Kemp provides some tempering thoughts on the economics of nuclear power.

A lot of environmentalists in recent years, particularly in the last decade, have come around to the notion of nuclear power as a potential solution for both addressing energy needs and not burning fossil fuels.

So how do you come at that trade-off that they've made?

On paper, nuclear power has, for a long time, in theory, been a great source of energy.

It's the promises of nuclear power, especially when you get into things like fusion, have always been great.

What I have seen in my research with Peter Van Doren is that past history almost universally has shown that nuclear has yet to live up to that promise.

Where have the promises fallen apart or not come through? The main issue with nuclear is the cost.

Nuclear power plants have historically been incredibly expensive to build.

So whereas nuclear in general has, you know, for the amount of electricity that they provide lower fuel costs and things like

that, just building a nuclear power plant takes, you know, seven to, you know, 11 years or more,

and costs tens of billions of dollars. And they've faced severe issues with cost overruns and schedule delays.

That these issues aren't unique to individual projects, aren't unique to individual countries.

They seem to be relatively universal, at least in the Western world.

All right.

So the example of France, rapidly over years, has ramped up nuclear capacity.

Is there something instructive in their experience?

So France, in percentage terms, has the most nuclear power, meaning that they get the majority of their

electricity from nuclear power plants. The U.S. has the largest in terms of actual capacity,

has the largest nuclear fleet in the world. France, along with Germany, Canada, and other

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