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Comment by dmm | Hacker News Reader

Everyone seems to talk about the safety of nuclear power but to me the costs are as big a problem. If it was affordable to build new plants these long term problems would be less important.

I mean, has a nuclear power plant ever been built on budget? In my state the only nuclear plant was finished years late and 2 billion over the original 1 billion budget.

Now they are trying to build another with a 6 billion budget. How much over will that one go? The prediction is that it will be producing power in 15-20 years. That's so long from now and meanwhile power users will be charged interest on the loans to build this thing.

They are predicting a 30% increase in power demand in the next 20 years, so maybe it is the best option...

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Another cost that you don't mention is the cost of waste disposal. As far as I am informed no single country has yet found a safe, clean and cost-effective solution for nuclear waste disposal (correct me if I'm wrong here).

If that is true this means that the cost estimation of all the reactors that we have until now are false and until now we do not even know what it will cost us in the future to "clean up the mess".

No single country has yet found a safe, clean and cost-effective solution for coal waste disposal either.

If you are going to get into the externalities of nuclear power, then you have to do the same for other technologies.

I'm interested to hear the critiques of Synrock as one method of addressing this problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synroc

Because it's not really a pressing problem. Spent nuclear waste can sit in a swimming pool of water for any amount of time without endangering anyone. And water is so good at shielding radiation that you can even swim in such a pool. After few years the waste is moved to outside casks which are also not a danger to anyone. The only real problem is protecting those places from terrorists and such. But then again we have burnt coal ash sitting in huge piles outside under clear sky, and I would argue they pollute a lot more than a spent nuclear fuel cask does.

For me this looks like pressing enough: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/legacy-danger-old...

I hope that I am just hysterical and there is some solution planned since long time, and maybe there is totally no danger at all and we can continue for long time enjoying sea products from the channel.

But absolutely no one is dumping nuclear waste into the sea at the moment. It's something that has been done decades ago, so why would it be stopping us from using nuclear power nowadays? Don't get me wrong - we've done huge damage to the environment by dumping our waste into seas, lakes and just general carelessness. But using that as an argument to stop using nuclear power now is.....illogical?

Nearly ever country with nuclear power (except the US) processes the 'waste' since only a small portion of it is actual waste. Most of it is U-238 (harmless). Some is useful - plutonium, and isotopes that are used in medicine. Only a tiny amount is harmful and unusable radioactive material that needs to be contained and buried.

You can thank the Carter administration for this blunder.

Building is not even the most expensive part. Once a nuclear power plant reaches it's end of life each little piece is radioactive and needs to be disposed of with specialised tools. It takes decades to deconstruct a power plant.

The people who try to sell nuclear energy as cheap often forget to factor in that cost.

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