Why Has Nuclear Power Been a Flop?

Or maybe they have made it less safe. Consider the Fukushima disaster of 2011. The design at Fukushima had huge safety flaws. Its pumps were in a basement easily flooded by a tidal wave, a simple design mistake unlikely to be repeated in a more modern design. It was an old reactor and would have been phased out long since if Japan had still been bu... See more

Now, two things are happening.

1. Technology is making old and new ideas cheaper and easier to build.




2. There’s a reemergence of “premium demand.”

Ideas Need Adoption to Make an Impact

Ideas alone are not enough. They need to be techno-economically viable, buildable for a low enough cost that the market is able to adopt them. There is no progress without

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EXPLOREWORK IN PROGRESSThe Forgotten Stage of Human ProgressInvention is easily overrated, and implementation is often underrated.By Derek ThompsonA light bulb shatters.Al Barry / Stringer / GettyMAY 11, 2022SHARESign up for Derek’s newsletter here.What if we invented a technology to save the planet—and the world refused to use it?This haunting hyp... See more

Because error could be so cataclysmic in the case of nuclear power, and because trials are so gigantically costly, nuclear power cannot get trial and error restarted.

Catastrophists are wrong, time after time. And techno-optimists, who promise endless near-miraculous solutions, must reckon with a similarly poor record. One of the best-known (and embarrassingly well-documented) failures has been the belief in the all-encompassing power of nuclear fission. Many people appreciate that the partial success achieved b

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