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Comment by feedsmgmt | Hacker News Reader

People focus so much on "cost" and "profit" that it seems to lead to short sighted decision making.

Conversely, they conveniently ignore those when it comes to nuclear as a Hail Mary even though Nuclear has lost the race and won't return. Economies of scale are at work on Solar and Wind which squash any other generation technology.

Short-sighted is generating radioactive garbage with a 24,000-year half-life for a couple GW of power.

reprocessing helps with this.

The whole value proposition of nuclear rests on cost because it is a pollutant too, so what would be your basis if not that

Spent fuel is a very different pollutant, one that at worst destroys local ecosystems (global impact with fossil) and the hard to handle stuff exists in quite limited quantities. Yes, it's pretty hard to put it somewhere nobody touches it, but it's not like we don't already need to find a solution to that problem.

"Very different pollutant" is being pedantic. The point is that radioactive water is an output of nuclear reactors.

I was actually talking about spent fuel rods, the kind you put in concrete casks (and yet they will outlive those). Because that's the stuff that will stay dangerous for time beyond human comprehension.

Radioactive water is not usually a concern. There are heat exchangers between an inner loop with a very small amount of water that is radioactive (but not forever or highly radioactive) and an outer loop with just... seawater. Maybe you're thinking about Fukushima, where they dumped a lot of water on an open core?

You do understand that producing zillions of square km of semiconductor and zillions of metric tons of batteries isn't going to exactly be environmentally benign, right?

Nuclear power, end-to-end, doesn't emit substantial amounts of CO2, which is the only pollutant we don't have solutions to. What are you referring to?

CO2 is not a pollutant and when it comes to nuclear I am pretty sure the nuclear waste is what is being referred to.

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