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Comment by malthuswaswrong | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear is totally economically viable. It's not viable in the current regulatorily climate. Investing $1 billion in a nuclear plant that will return profits for 80 years is an easy financial decision. Investing $1 billion in a nuclear plant that will be shut down by moonbats every 4 years when the next batch of princess unicorns is voted into office is not economically viable.

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Indeed the regulatory climate is missing to put the costs of handling nuclear waste onto the producers. I doubt it would be economically viable to operate a nuclear plant if those costs were fully factored in.

What about factoring in costs of handing carbon waste onto fossil industry or costs of having no power due to weather onto renewables?

Each power source has disadvantages, and this bickering isn't helping.

That is, if you leave the storage cost of the nuclear waste for the next 100.000 years out of your business model.

There’s very little storage cost as the fuel can be burned til there is nothing radioactive left.

Nuclear doesn’t produce radioactive materials it reduces radioactivity. If you mix the spent fuel from a heavy water reactor back into the ore, it’s radioactivity will have been reduced.

While you can burn the fuel until very few long-lived isotopes are left we don't do that currently. Nuclear reactors also turn relatively harmless Uranium into much more active elements. Just mixing the waste back into the rocks you got the Uranium from is not a safe storage method.

We don't do that currently because there hasn't been a new plant built in 50 years and the designs of the old plants were specifically engineered to make materials for nuclear weapons.

If there wasn't a huge stigma against nuclear energy they would be making advancements, but nobody is going to fund advancements while there is no guarantee they will be allowed to apply them.

What would happen to the JavaScript language if every year half of congress gave speeches condemning JavaScript and calling for a prohibition against any new JavaScript code? How many new people would bother learning JavaScript.

The French do reprocess their fuel, but iirc it was made illegal in the US, so we just bury it all.

We do in Canada, just export your spent fuel to us

Nuclear waste is very compact and small.

Tell me about the storage and disposal costs of all the solar cells and wind turbines.

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