First of all, the anti-nuclear vote was incredibly dumb whether you decide to build a new nuclear plant or not. Note, this was not a vote for or against a nuclear power plant, rather it was a general popular vote against nuclear power for now particular reason.

That nuclear is expensive is also nonsense. France had incredibly cheap electricity prices for 50 years and most of that was paid for by their cheap electricity prices. Even during the recent crisis while Germany is struggling and dropping 100s of millions in support, France still has cheap electricity.

In fact, if you take the price of recently built South Korean reactors, turning the whole German grid 100% nuclear, including cheap long term electricity prices, would cost around 250-300 billion $ conservatively. That is less then Germany is currently planning to spend in support, completely outside of all the cost of the 'Grünewende' over the last 20 years and the next 20 years.

When you actually calculate the cost of a society going to green electricity, 0 to 100%, nuclear is by far the best option and in reality its the only option that has proven to work for a modern industrial society.

> The fact of the matter is nuclear power has never, never ever, been profitable

A number of issues with this. First of all, all power supply in Europe is managed by government and profitability is not really the goal. If you can produce it cheaply, people just pay less. Therefore success in European energy policy is price paid by consumers. And in so far as that, places with well run nuclear operations have long term fix cheap electricity prices.

Switzerland has not build a new nuclear reactor in many decades, and yet people living around those reactors are still receiving cheap power and will continue to do so for decades to come.

Further, when wind and solar became to be pushed, it was certainty no profitable in the way you suggest. In fact the opposite, it took decades, and was supported by government policies all over the western world and china. The boom in roof solar in the US was directly driven by government support and collapsed after. Much installation of solar/wind happened because of government mandates to have a certain % of renewable electricity.

At the same time, when renewables were introduced, basically all countries just pretended that intermittency wasn't a thing and put no value on base energy supply. In the US, solar companies made money even when producing energy when price was 0.

I can go threw many more examples, in France for example the government forced the profitable utility (because of nuclear) to invest in solar (and also gas and other fossil).

The simple fact is, solar and wind were pushed in Europe and the United states as a point of principle, when it started it was very much not about profitability, and many decisions were made to support that deployment. This overtime lowered the price of the these deployments.

Nuclear was often explicitly excluded from all these benefits, despite being just as green. In fact we had the opposite, where most western governments did their best to utterly destroy nuclear and trying to give them every disadvantage. In Germany and other places like Belgium nuclear was planned to be phased out. In France in 2015 they literally decided to start shutting down large parts of their fleet by 2025.

Had we spend the last couple decades using every possible means to push nuclear we would have seen a different result. Had we simply picked 1 type of reactor and with the EU planned to build 100 of those across Europe, we would have spent less money for a much better result. As France proved in the 70/80s, as soon as you mass produce these, you can do it quickly and cheaply.

> And these days, it costs $10B just to build a nuclear plant before any electricity is generated, and that's just construction costs.

UAE just build 4xARP-1400 for US$24.4 billion. That is in a country with no existing infrastructure and no knowlage base.

Yes, if you build a one time specific reactor it might cost 10 billion, but as we can see in the UAE example, with each one you build them faster and cheaper.

If Europe would just build many ARP-1400, soon the per unit cost would be very small. As France has shown in 70/80s, you can easily finish 5 reactors per year and build them within 5 years.

If we as a society are actually serious and want to quickly move have 100% green grid, nuclear is the logical conclusion. Its not expensive, in fact its the opposite, its the most efficient. It has the least amount of resources used, the least amount of land, its the cleanest and the most reliable.

Your whole perspective acts as if energy is some kind of free market, when in effect literally every where around the globe it actually isn't, it is about politics. Your narrow minded profit focused perspective is just ignorant of the reality of global energy policy.

And even if it were true that nuclear was more expensive, for Switzerland it would still make sense. Other nations can use energy policy to put pressure on us. Having reliable local electricity at slightly higher cost is still beneficial.