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Comment by lamontcg | Hacker News Reader

Current nuclear power runs the risk of a trillion dollar nuclear meltdown. This is something that solar and wind plants don't need to bother thinking about or mitigating, which makes the engineering vastly simpler.

And as we get better at working with molten salt engineering it probably makes more sense to apply it to solving the solar baseload problem and not nuclear:

https://phys.org/news/2022-10-molten-salt-corrosive-effect.h...

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That is great. We should replace all those hydroelectric dams located in Europe so we don't need to run the risk of flooding. We could try to replace them all with molten salt storage, but I am unsure how much you would need to cover the electrical need of Europe for a few winter weeks/months.

It would be interesting to see an insurance companies evaluation of a person living downstream of a hydro electric dam where the energy is made from wind, solar and hydro, compared to a person who live near a nuclear plant where the energy is just made from that single plant.

It doesn't if you build them away from cities, which many countries are capable of doing.

Not many countries in Europe though. You also need a water source like a lake or river, which is where towns tend to be.

Well there won't be many towns left unless we start to build alot more nuclear thanks to climate change.

Nuclear is too expensive and slow to deploy to address climate change, it is being used as a distraction in order to slow down the transition from fossil fuels, just like hydrogen was.

Nuclear is so far the fastest way to deploy clean energy and has been for decades. I don't see how the most sustainable source of energy is a distraction?

Fallout doesn't respect human borders. To this day, if you're out hunting game or collecting shrooms in Bavaria, you're well advised to test them for Chernobyl fallout, and required to do so if you're selling it [1]. At the start of last year, that made the headlines in regional papers as a hunter brought in a wild pig that was twice over the radiation limit [2].

The biggest problem are the shrooms because they actively seek out and concentrate radioactive elements in the ground for whatever reason, and then the wildlife eats the contaminated shrooms, further concentrating the radioactivity.

[1] https://www.jagd-bayern.de/jagd-wild-wald/jagdpraxis/rcm-mes...

[2] https://www.merkur.de/bayern/bayern-wildschweine-tschernobyl...

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