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Comment by pfdietz | Hacker News Reader

One of the dishonesties you see from nuclear fans is claiming nuclear is cheap because the operatings costs are low. This is somewhat valid if you're talking about continuing to operate existing plants, but unless you're given new NPPs for free by the Nuclear Fairy, it doesn't apply to new construction.

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Electric cars were never economically viable until a crazy person decided to go all in on the economies of scale for battery production.

Part of the problem with Nuclear is that no one right now is building reactors so startup costs are going to be crazy. But we are still going to need electricity in 30+ years from now so I don't understand why people are so opposed to breaking ground on new facilities just because it will take 15 years for them to pay for themselves.

The problem is trying to show a putative experience curve for nuclear is going to require spending something like a trillion dollars. That's not going to be funded just to show that this time, for sure, the nuclear advocates weren't BSing about how cheap it was going to be.

It takes 15 years until they're through the planning phase, another ten to build them, and then they're likely outcompeted by renewables and never make back their cost.

And waste management plus storage. Research the clusterfuck in Germany, where they put metal containers in a salt mine and then were all surprised when they started to rust away. Really shows how carefully and responsible they treat this. Sure makes me want to have another dozen reactors. So, then you need to move it all to some new location. What's a kwh of nuclear if you take into account the cost of storing that safely for hundreds of years?

Nuclear is the perfect example of privatizing profits and nationalizing losses.

Is this about Asse? Then no, they were not surprised when some containers rusted. The waste was primarily meant to be contained by the salt, not by their metal containers; and it was meant to remain there permanently. Corroding containers was never the issue with Asse, the general instability of the caverns and water ingress is.

Then I focused on the wrong thing, but the remaining facts aren't reassuring either. Long term stability was already a concern when they wanted to declare this a permanent storage, failing to report structural deficiencies when they occurred circa 2007 and as I now found out twice the expected rates of leukemia in the area between 2002 and 2008 while other types of cancer weren't afected, but of course a connection to the waste storage could not be established.

And don't forget the waste. It needs security and are attractive targets

How do you collect and store the waste from solar+natural gas?

Waste from solar? Just handle it like you'll be handling the much larger volumes of ordinary waste from all industrial activity. It's not like solar is creating some distinctly different category of waste like nuclear does.

You missed the second half of the equation. For the long foreseeable future, solar will still require the use of natural gas for many seasonal events. Nobody seems to worry about storing the waste from that but is very concerned about the tiny amount of nuclear waste.

I didn't miss it, I deliberately ignored it. Short term, the issue is not inherent waste from renewables, it's how rapidly fossil fuels can be displaced. Renewables are massively better than nuclear on that score.

Longer term, gas is phased out, so the waste from it is irrelevant (or, rather, the CO2 was has to handled if any is still burned.) Renewables do not require natural gas. If natural gas is used for covering dunkelflauten in the short term, that can be handled by other non-fossil means (like e-fuels burned in turbines) in the longer term. And this will likely still be cheaper than using nuclear.

Who the hell are these nuclear fans you're definitely totally talking to who pretend nuclear power plants are cheap/free (and also, why are these figments of your imagination accorded representative status for the entire class of nuclear fans?)?

I see them all over, on various social media.

Are you claiming I'm lying?

I suppose it's also possible you just live in a weird little bubble and have a poor grasp of the greater world outside it.

A more likely hypothesis is you can't accept an assertion that you don't like.

Cheap operating costs are especially true for new builds. It’s just that capital costs are huge (but these are still separate from operating costs).

> Nuclear Fairy

Not the worst way to describe the US Federal Government, but not a great one either.

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