[programmers frantically pulling cables out of the wall]
AI: "Nuclear power. Double teachers' salaries. Build more houses. Distribute food more fairly. TRAINS—"
— qntmyrrh (@qntm) November 24, 2023 I remember growing up with that same old adage of how you could be the next scientist to invent a cure for cancer, or a solution to climate change, or whatever. What they don’t tell you is that we already have solutions for a lot of problems, we just don’t use them.
About that in particular: this is true but mostly because we poured tons of R&D into renewables and we let out skills in nuclear energy slowly decay. Had we invested as much as we should have in the 90s, I am sure nuclear would be much cheaper nowadays. But that point is relatively moot now, I just remain pro-nuclear as in “Don’t close our currently built nuclear power plant prematurely! We need them for the transition out of fossil fuels!” more than “build a lot more and quicker!” I think that ship has sailed. That was something to do in the 90-2000 but now we can and probably should switch to renewables for new plants. I am just bitter that we wasted 3 decades and burnt fossil fuel along the way.
According to the IEA even in 2022 we spend more money on R&D on nuclear then on renewables. There are some years before that, where we spend more on renewables, but those are rarer. We really try to make it work, but renewables are just plain the better technology and therefore it won out.
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/energy-technology-rdd-budgets-data-explorer
Lumping together fission (the kind we use today to produce energy) and fusion (a kind we have never made a power plant of but have high hopes in the future) is questionable.
You source says in 2022, fission + fusion totaled 4.94 billion in R&D funding. This source says that in 2022, increases in fusion investment raised of more than 2.8 billions. I am willing to bet that the huge majority of these 4.9B of R&D investments are in fusion.
You could say the same about renewables. Solar and wind are very different technologies. At the same time there are a lot of renewables, which have failed so far. I am thinking wave power, concentrated solar, geothermal and I am propably missing a lot of others. We did spend a lot of money at those as well.
Point is we have spend more money on fission R&D then we spend on either solar or wind. If anything we spend too much on it and should have spend more on solar and wind in the 90s.
Solar and wind are working power sources right now, like are several fission technologies. Nuclear fusion has never generated net power anywhere and has never gone out of the lab.
No one who promote nuclear energy right now is promoting nuclear fusion, it is a non-existent tech as of now.
[citation needed] The article was not showing that at all.
Here you go. It is fission alone in two year pairs and it still gets more funding then wind, solar, hydro and oceanic power combined.:
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/public-energy-r-and-d-and-demonstration-funding-in-selected-countries-by-technology-area-2000-2019
Quite frankly, I am interested in the actual answer. My gut feeling is that renewables received more R&D than nuclear fission but I would be happy to correct my misconception there. But the IEA numbers are really small. 1.3 billions for 2 years of nuclear R&D? France’s CEA, that oversees nuclear R&D (among other things, but mainly) has a 5 billions yearly budget.
R&D of the 21 top leading solar firms has exceeded the billion since 2017: https://www.actu-solaire.fr/a-10681-les-depenses-de-r-d-dans-le-photovoltaique-depuis-cinq-ans.html
The IEA numbers seem biased in that they just include a fistful of countries. They do not include China (that does a ton of solar R&D) and include France (one of the last to do nuclear research).
CEA also hosts ITER and France pays 40% of the costs for that. It might go throu CEA. I honestly do not know.