But in the United States, where no nuclear plant has been built in the past 30 years, and where oil and coal remain the principal power sources, big energy companies have been reluctant to invest."
This is impressive. If France can do it, all industrialized nations, especially and including the US should do it. Just imagine if we would get 78% of our energy needs filled using nuclear power. Then you could watch the price of oil go down to $15.
It’s worth noting that we operate close to 2X as many nuclear electrical generating plants as the French (103 vs 58). I couldn’t quickly find data on TWh of production, but I would expect similar ratios.
That said, we need to be building nukes to replace aging nuclear and coal plants.
This is impressive. If France can do it, all industrialized nations, especially and including the US should do it.
First of all, let me agree with you.
But... What is amazing to me is that France gets away with this and there are no massive worldwide anti-France nuclear rallys outside of a few kook groups like there are about the big bad nuclear US.
Also, France tends to be a socialist society where the government primarily determines what is going to happen. It is obvious they decided nuclear power is IT! In the US, we have to contend with freedom of speech from an ever increasing bunch of enviro-kooks who are idiologues and not rational. They affect their congressmen and senators, who write the laws.
I think we almost have to slide into the dark ages when the oil pipeline is shut off, the coal fields are silent, and the electric grid constantly goes dead on cloudy, still days and nights because the solar panels and windmills are not reliable before a nuclear plant will be seriously considered an alternative by the majority of Americans.