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Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

“Stop Letting Your Ridiculous Fears Of Nuclear Waste Kill The Planet” https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/06/19...

> By letting go of our nutty fears of nuclear waste we can save nuclear power. America’s nuclear waste fund — which is comprised of money paid into it by the operators of nuclear plants — still has $46 billion in it. It should be used to subsidize the continued operation of economically distressed nuclear plants, and subsidize the building of new ones.

> If such a fund paid out five percent interest per year — an amount the IRS requires philanthropic foundations to give away annually — then $2.3 billion could flow to the distressed or new nuclear plants. That amount would be enough to keep uneconomical nuclear plants operating while creating an incentive to build new reactors.

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The saddest thing about those $46 billion is that this is by far enough money to develop new reactors that could reduce the waste by 99%.

But instead, idiotic politics has locked that money into an equally idiotic project called Yucca Mountain. In on of the most amazingly stupid sagas of stupidity in history.

You literally have the money sitting there to flat out solve the problem, but instead make a solution impossible trying to force something that makes non sense in the first place.

Its truly sad, like seriously, truley sad for the whole world.

The amount of nuclear advanced development one could make with $46 billion is insane.

Think about how NASA developed SpaceX with just a few billion. You could literally have commercial competition to develop next generation fast burners and thorium breeders.

The state of nuclear competency is one of the saddest things in the world today. We have the technology that could solve the majority of the world energy problems and essentially refuse to use it, all the way from popular to even technological elites (like HN).

> nutty fears

Both Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents will have trillion-dollar cleanups.

$46 billion is only 4.6% of each cleanup.

Can I send you the bills for those cleanups? If not, stop being a nuclear apologist.

You can't even send the company a bill in the US, the nuclear liability cap puts operator liability an order of magnitude or more below what would be needed in a serious event with a bad wind.

Chernobyl used very old reactor technologies. Fukushima had backup diesel generators below ground level. Both modes of failure will likely never happen again and can be validated through regulation.

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