Comment by automatic6131 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by automatic6131 | Hacker News Reader

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>Is the waste problem solved? Are we not still fighting with all the previous attempts of handling it? Is "dig a hole in a salt deposit and keep it there" really good enough for the very, very, very long term? It is technically solved, but politically unsolved. YMMV about how much of a deal breaker this is.

>Are old powerplants properly decommissioned and replaced with new ones when the time comes? Not a problem that you can solved today

>Can we really claim to be able to handle worst case scenarios well (e.g. Fukushima)? Yes, also Fukushima can't happen in geologically inert Western Europe.

However, what is clear is that the world needs consistent, plentiful, reliable carbon-free energy. The storage required to meet the first three conditions with renewables DOES NOT EXIST. It doesn't exist for anything outside of a few minutes. Nuclear power is: consistent, reliable and carbon-free; and humanity has known how to do it since the 1960s. In a contest between a technology we DO NOT HAVE, and one we DO, it is a no-brainer.

How is technically solved? We are talking enormous timelines for which we have to guarantee safe handling of the waste. Every try until now has proven to be inadequate.

So we are in the situation where we live with old powerplants that are not up to standard and no way to handle that but we will definitely be in the future?

„Can‘t happen“ is always the argument until it does and it‘s a difference if we are talking about something that will be over in short time or will remain a problem forever. But my point was more in the direction of how to handle that, if the solution is bury it and move far away from it, it‘s not something that can be scaled.

There are trillions of tons of uranium under your feet and somehow everything is ok.

But it isn't a competition between technology. It is a competition between industrial-societal complexes that include supply chains, resources, training, politics and a large number of flawed human beings. Having the best technology isn't enough. The human infrastructure behind is what wins. And in that respect the renewables/battery complex is just more successful. We may well be able to scale up storage to support renewables more quickly than nuclear new build.

> We may

Here it is. We just don't base the immediate future of the underlying infrastructure of our whole economies on a 'may'. We do it with proven, existing, scalable tech.

Reliable?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-p...

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