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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

Are these going to produce 470MW?!

A 1MW wind turbine costs ~$4M and is competitive with oil/gas.

At $2.4Bn - anything above 400+ megawatts sounds like a great deal - since you don't have to worry about the wind blowing or the sun shining.

If these can produce 470MW at that price - what has been the hold up?!

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1) People are skittish on Nuclear because of the perceived danger.

2) We still can't solve the waste problem, the best we have is putting it underground in Finland.

I disagree with these opinions, since the waste is minuscule for the amount of power generated. (1 cubic centimeter of uranium per million homes per day or so) and coal is killing more than nuclear ever will.. but, hey ho.

Coal is a bit of a red herring in the UK as we don’t burn much of it anymore.

To be fair, even oil and gas are orders of magnitude more dangerous than nuclear per unit energy

The French seem to have solved the waste problem.

And either way, at least it's less urgent than the climate one

Could you please elaborate or provide some further reading for the French solution?

96% is recycled the remaining 4% is sealed in lead, sealed in concrete and placed in a bunker. IIRC 200m^3 per year is generated meaning 50 years of Frances energy production could 1/10th of an average American football stadium

Do you have a good source for this? People tend not to believe me when I try to tell them about nuclear waste reprocessing/recycling.

The problem here is that the difficulty of storing spent fuel isn't so much a function of its mass, it's a function of its heat production. The latter is what limits how much waste you can put into a geological repository. Separating out the 238U (which will still have to be handled carefully unless it is extremely clean of shorter lived isotopes) will not reduce the heat production of the remaining waste significantly.

The French have admitted their reprocessing doesn't save money vs. just disposing of spent fuel directly.

We should place them on old offshore oil drilling rigs, so that they're not near people if things go wrong.

Wind power costs less than $1.5M/MW currently. Your price must be a bit older.

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