We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

Because people want easy answers and don't want to look at inconvenient facts. That mindset will destroy humanity.

Both are toxic waste, but one often ends up in landfill or flytipped, and the other is safely contained underground because its developers are legally obliged to plan for its disposal and long-term storage as part of the design process.

The cost of disposal is often ignored when pricing solar (PV).

https://stopthesethings.com/2020/10/10/lingering-legacy-mill...

>the way to make fusion generate power more efficiently without changing the underlying technology is to make it bigger

Actually there was a front page item on here a couple of weeks ago showing that there's a new superconductor that can generate a stronger magnetic field, which will allow new, much smaller fusion reactors. So according to the guy from MIT who gave the talk, ITER is already obsolete technology.

Having said that, with fusion, it looks like every time they have a breakthrough, they find a new limiting factor when then takes billions to overcome, rinse and repeat.

It's amazing in theory but we have yet to achieve a fusion reaction that is energy positive and the path to that is still fraught. In theory with these Lithium neutron blankets you can even create your own fuel (Assuming Deuterim-Tritium reaction) but the hurdles are still insanely high to get something that's actually practical.

Also, I believe fission and fusion can be synergistic in that you can have a fission reactor that not only produces energy, but it produces some of the fuel for the fusion.

Indeed, one is the kind of waste you can drop a few oil drums of into Yucca Mountain and never have to worry about it again.

On the other hand wind requires huge quantities of rare earth metals mined in open-air hellscapes in the far western reaches of China -- devastating the environment [1, 2]. So, why is it all mined in China you might ask, knowing rare earths are distributed all over the world? Specifically because developed nations are not interested in bearing the ecological burden.

Solar panels frequently contain cadmium and tellurium, which both have to be mined (see above) and then leech out into the environment [3].

Then there's the human toll. Nuclear energy ends up with about 1/4 as many deaths per TWh generated as wind, 1/10 as many as rooftop solar, and 1/2 as many as industrial solar. [4]

[edit] The nice thing about nuclear waste is that radiation is easy to detect. All you need is a Geiger counter and some lead underpants. Cadmium, tellurium, the run-off from refining rare earths? That's what I'm really scared of.

[1] https://earth.org/rare-earth-mining-has-devastated-chinas-en...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-ra...

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5607867/

[4] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

From the article: "No nuclear energy program has ever launched without heavy state intervention — the capital costs are just too high for private entities to take on."

I think this misses the real reason. High capital costs are no barrier to private financing as long as the eventual profits will accrue to the investors. But in this highly-regulated industry, investors can't put money into nuclear plants thinking that in 20 years there will be a high demand, and they'll be able to charge a high price for power. Once the time comes, the regulators will likely decide that they can charge only a "fair" price. And that's assuming that they actually get to build and operate the plant - there's a substantial chance that political winds will change, and the plant ends up being banned or regulated to the extent that it's effectively banned. Government financing is the only solution to this problem, which is created by the existence of government.

We see the same thing in Canada now with pipeline construction - only government can finance them due to the government being capable of destroying any private company that tries to build them.