Handy reference on why nuclear power might not be such a good idea as some people think: https://www.wien.gv.at/english/environment/ombuds-office/arg...
Not sure why I even bothered digging into it, but for example one later point is also misleading: "uranium resources will be depleted by the end of this century".
I think I found the source (not that they link it, that would be too easy, but by ducking around for this number):
> the total identified amount of conventional uranium stock, which can be mined for less than USD 130 per kg, [was found] to be about 4.7 million tonnes. Based on the 2004 nuclear electricity generation rate of demand the amount is sufficient for 85 years, the study states. Fast reactor technology would lengthen this period to over 2500 years.
> However, world uranium resources in total are considered to be much higher. Based on geological evidence and knowledge of uranium in phosphates the study considers more than 35 million tonnes is available for exploitation.
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/global-uranium-resource...
I'm not sure how the "city of vienna" can read this and summarize it down to say that we'll plainly run out of uranium by 2100. That's just not what the source says. Maybe that's what makes this "reference" "handy" for people with a certain preexisting opinion?
The same bullet point continues with some other interesting claims, let alone the rest of the page, but let me quickly close that tab before I feel inclined to go down more of these rabbit holes...
What exactly about this do you not buy?
And what is your solution for storing nuclear waste safely for hundreds of thousands of years?
See https://whatisnuclear.com/chernobyl-main.html#again
Or even just another comment in this very thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30653778
Or the fact that it hasn't happened despite hundreds of active nuclear power plants around the world (not all in countries that you would expect to have high safety standards).
Or the safety statistics in general: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Same with the waste issue. Nobody asks what the proposed solution is for CO2 storage (it will remain for billions of years! The horror!) when proposing to keep open coal/gas plants a bit longer until we have solar/wind/hydro+storage all set up, but with nuclear we need to find more reasons for the phase-out.
Here's another info page: https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
> If these materials are burnt in fuel through recycling, nuclear waste would only remain radioactive for a few hundred years
And that's ignoring that we're also managing to deal with the waste so far just fine, also without recycling.
(The tally is at 40 minutes time wasted for these two answer so far, also because most of the previous one was 'researched' and written on mobile. How long did it take to ask the question? This is why I contemplate templates.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
We got from horses to Lamborghini Huracan in a century.
> And what is your solution for storing nuclear waste safely for hundreds of thousands of years?
While it's a problem, it's actually a fairly tractable one, because the volume of high level waste is small and it doesn't leave the plant as part of normal operations. For coal power, for contrast, we store much of the waste in peoples' lungs.
"Lasers could cut lifespan of nuclear waste from a million years to 30 minutes"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30652334
Obviously this particular idea is still blue-sky but as technology improves, I'd like to think we'll be able to solve problems like this within a few decades.
(although I'm still waiting for my Mr Fusion, Flying Car etc).
I imagine it's almost impossible to manufacture nuclear weapons 'quietly' with waste and sanctions/agreements stop this happening, while countries that go against these are able to manufacture nuclear weapons anyway (North Korea). So I don't think this is as big a risk as suggested.
The rest seem solvable by focusing on better secure designs and then moving from Uranium to another source. I don't know the difficulty of this but I can't imagine it's insurmountable?