Cato Institute: Nuclear power’s hamster wheel
Accelerating climate change demands a stop to wasting precious little time along with human and financial resources being diverted from real solutions on nuclear power that’s going nowhere.
The conservative Cato Institute’s Fall 2025 status report on “The Next Nuclear Renaissance?” provides a comprehensive status report and global overview, nuclear nation by nation.
The report is best summed up in its concise conclusion:
Why are people unwilling to consider the reason that nuclear projects fail so often is the technology itself? Instead, they fall back on old, tired excuses such as unsympathetic regulators, delays caused by local protestors, and simply not getting the right ‘recipe’ for building nuclear power plants.
In March 2025, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer claimed: For too long, blockers have had the upper hand in legal challenges—using our court processes to frustrate growth. We’re putting an end to this challenge culture by taking on the NIMBYs and a broken system that has slowed down our progress as a nation.
Starmer has created a taskforce to streamline safety regulation, but he has offered no evidence that the delays and cost escalation suffered at Hinkley Point C are in any way attributable to opposition or obstructive regulation—and he cannot because there is none.
The problem is not so much that money will be wasted on large numbers of uneconomic facilities. Rather, it is the opportunity costs of the time and human resources that are consumed by nuclear power and not available to other, quicker, more cost-effective and less financially risky options. We appear now to be facing serious risks from climate change, and there will not be a second chance if we fail to tackle it because too many resources are being consumed by an option—new nuclear—that will not work.”
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