We currently have about 55 GW of generation in the electricity grid. What does it currently cost to build a…

We currently have about 55 GW of generation in the electricity grid. What does it currently cost to build a GW of nuclear power? In the US and UK, about $25 billion. /1 https://t.co/j4KxaimtUw

At that price, if we were to replace our generation with nuclear, it would cost over a trillion dollars. Countries like France and South Korea have historically managed to build for a lot less, as low as $2.5 billion per GW. How? /2

By centralising the process in government. By creating vertical integration. By doing all the anti-market stuff the LNP here abhor. And that was also many years ago. Today they might achieve $3-5 billion per GW, at best. That’s still $250 billion or more we’d need. /3

That’s AUKUS type numbers. Yes building out renewables is also very expensive. But private companies will happily do most of that for us, at their own expense. If we just let them. And probably most important of all. /4

We simply don’t have the social licence to leave the waste problem to 100,000-1 million years of human society to follow. It’s cloud cuckoo land levels of ‘externalities’. It commits the entire future of the human race to dealing with that storage. /end https://t.co/USRVvcd9HH