Thing is, Renewables are already cheap. By the time Nuclear is built, batteries and solar will be hugely cheaper than the price they are now (and in 10 years, its reasonable to expect more than half the price again).

The same thing that happened to NBN will happen to nuclear (basic Game theory). With NBN, competitors undercut the NBN with 5G, because FTTC and FTTN was so bad, and it wasted everyone’s money.

In this case, if they start building, everyone knows that power costs will be expensive, so renewable energy companies will target the prices, and encourage people to install solar and batteries anyway… If batteries are 1/5 of the price they are now, everyone will simply install 5x more batteries, more panels (because they’ll also be more efficient and cheaper than they are now, and work during worse conditions) and remove themselves from the grid. From a game theory point of view, Solar/batteries have a 10-15 year head start and are already cheaper.

I bought my 6.6kw panels maybe 3 years ago, and 10kw is apparently already cheaper. If I wait 5 years, 15-20kw will probably be cheap (and I have more than enough roof space, so the only thing limiting me would be weather the power company allows it)

I have no idea why anyone would want a centralised grid. Last major power outage here in Victoria during storms was triggered because Loy Yang coal fell offline, and non-solid state power generation takes ages to come back online (it needs to sync up to the grid). Solar and batteries sync up immediately, so if its available, they will always beat Nuclear, and nuclear will simply be sitting there burning rods increasing our taxes and power prices (because nobody wants to use it, and its ultimately taxpayer money)… Similar to what happened with NBN (they ended up having to replace a lot of the copper anyway, and now yet again, they’ve had to upgrade to fibre)