Nuclear power looks cheap—right up until you factor in the part where you have to mothball the reactor for a hundred years, entomb the waste in some geologically stable crypt, and pray your great-grandkids don’t get irradiated by a budget cut. The sticker price on a kilowatt-hour is a joke, a little accounting fiction that conveniently ignores the back-end costs, because if you actually priced in decommissioning, storage, and the inevitable government bailouts, nuclear would be about as ‘cheap’ as launching your local power plant into orbit. But hey, that’s the magic of privatization of profits and socializing the fallout.

Nuclear governance is like a failed faith-based initiative that scaled beyond its ability to self-correct. It relied on techno-optimism, state power, and long-term institutional continuity—none of which are inherently stable across centuries. It’s an entity but an incoherent one, stuck between layers of the stack where it can neither dissolve nor fully stabilize.

Antiques dealer, machine psychologist. http://www.musicinphasespace.com

These aren’t empirical guarantees; they’re ideological priors. It’s an economic theology that treats market forces as self-regulating, even in cases—like nuclear liability—where there is no market mechanism capable of pricing or containing the risk. If renewables have a faith element, it’s the belief that technological advancements will continue to drive efficiency. If neoliberalism is a faith, it’s the belief that markets are the most efficient possible system, even when they demonstrably fail to account for long-term, non-monetizable risks like nuclear waste, climate change, or financial crashes.

Renewables aren’t faith-based in the same way nuclear is because they exist within a feedback loop of measurable inputs and outputs. Sun shines, wind blows, turbines spin—there’s an immediate and tangible energy return. While scaling renewables requires long-term investment and coordination, the basic mechanics are observable, and their risks are primarily economic or logistical, not existential. The faith component (that technological improvements and grid storage will solve intermittency issues) is a bet on incremental progress, not an intergenerational IOU.

Nuclear under neoliberalism or even communism, on the other hand, is faith-based in the sense that it assumes markets will self-correct, that deregulation leads to efficiency, and that private actors/the party will solve collective problems if given the right incentives.