A lot of what is said about nuclear power fails to drill down to the bare essentials: how do you de-risk building nuclear power and how do you get the cost down. A lot of smug mumbo-jumbo written by industry insiders who have their heads too far up their own behinds tends to take attention away from the fact that, so far, we've gone about it in ways that don't make sense. You don't actually need to know anything about nuclear power to understand why the approach of building large nuclear power plants doesn't work. Some basic knowledge of financing and the statistical chances of "black swan events" when you stretch out projects in time suffices.
Or in short: if you don't understand the goals you must navigate towards, it doesn't matter how much of the technical implementation you know.
"How Big Things Get Done" by Flyvbjerg and Gardner zooms out a bit (well, a lot) and draws a relatively clear picture of what approximate shape the solution space has for nuclear. Yes, the book gives a high level perspective. And yes, transforming the industry so it can fit within the constraints outlined in the book will be expensive and time-consuming. But it is worthy of serious consideration.
I tend to point out that the country where I live is uniquely suited to design and build reactors precisely because we don't have a nuclear industry. (We had a research reactor, but that's an entirely different matter and you would NOT want to involve the cowboys who ran that)
Or in short: if you don't understand the goals you must navigate towards, it doesn't matter how much of the technical implementation you know.
"How Big Things Get Done" by Flyvbjerg and Gardner zooms out a bit (well, a lot) and draws a relatively clear picture of what approximate shape the solution space has for nuclear. Yes, the book gives a high level perspective. And yes, transforming the industry so it can fit within the constraints outlined in the book will be expensive and time-consuming. But it is worthy of serious consideration.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61327449-how-big-things-...
I tend to point out that the country where I live is uniquely suited to design and build reactors precisely because we don't have a nuclear industry. (We had a research reactor, but that's an entirely different matter and you would NOT want to involve the cowboys who ran that)