Germany mulls extending nuclear plants' life-span

Maybe Germany can fund TerraPower's travelling wave research and leapfrog Gen IV and -V conventional reactor technology.

No. Nuclear is inherently expensive.

It is expensive because any large unit of capital in a public works context is expensive. (A clear majority of this cost is in unavoidable structural corruption tax.) On top of that, operating a nuke is very expensive: this is where fuel cycle costs come in, including mining, refining, processing, and disposing, as well as others like fixing turbines and guarding access. On top of that, shutting one down is expensive. None of these costs are falling, while alternative cost are, so, relatively, they are all sharply increasing.

(Coal, oil, and gas are also expensive, mainly in environmental effects, and their costs are also increasing, relative to renewables. They do not count here, except in how they contribute to renewables construction cost, where they fall as their contribution to that cost does.)

Insurance for construction accidents, and disposal costs, are figured in: silicon panels and wind turbine blades are inert, so cheap to dispose of. CdTe panels and rare-earth magnets are valuable, already-refined chemicals, and are reclaimed.

Each cost alone makes nukes more expensive than alternatives. All added up, they make nukes ruinously expensive.

Not a modern reactor; see my comment 4 levels up.

> The historical experience of Chernobyl is not remotely relevant to modern reactors that are (by design) unable to melt down. Look at the pebble bed reactors, or the smr reactors from nuscale, or the chinese molten salt reactor designs.

The problem is these modern reactors you mention, the ones that do actually exist in the real world and are not just designs, are not really all that modern. Consider every nuclear power reactor ever brought online, ever. Nearly all of them were built awhile ago and are of the early design where if the plant loses power, yada yada yada, when the batteries run dry, the plant is at risk of meltdown. Towards the end of the nuclear boom, changes in design were implemented, and some plants were built in the US that won't break that way... and this was idk like 50 years ago.

The US and UK development of fission power was a very Big Investment, and I think they did a good job because they ferreted out the least expensive method of generating power with a nuclear reaction, which unfortunately for nuclear power, not only because of the relatively recent (last 20 years) much much much much much smaller investments (compared to US&UK investment in developing nuclear power) in renewable energies like solar and wind, electricity generated in the cheapest possible way from a nuclear reaction can not complete any longer in the energy market (and in fact never could, nuclear was always too expensive, but for a while didn't matter [1]), and this is before we take into account the skyrocketing prices of uranium or the cost of long term storage of waste, and this of course is all long before investors ever show up that want to build and run one of the much newer reactor designs that can't melt down and also produce less waste, because those are even more expensive to build than the old designs that make up nearly all of Earth's global fleet of nuclear reactors, which can melt down and btw they are, all of them, at waste storage capacity... for more than 20 years (iow, their "temporary" waste storage is more or less overflowing with nuclear waste, and has been for quite awhile).

We need to solve nuclear power, but this isn't rushing to build new plants, it is instead biting the bullet to tie off the loose ends of all the damn messes already made with nuclear power, which are considerable but not impossible to fix and keep fixed.

Nuclear power isn't dead. Someone could come up with a damn cheap, safe and much simper design, and when that day comes, we'll all have our own little nuclear reactors, and it will be a great day.

[1] The US, for a brief period, needed fuel for nuclear bombs. Someone somewhere vastly overestimated this need, and in this overestimation, there was a lot of money available to build nuclear power plants, and a lot of them... err... all of them... in consideration of how crazy expensive nuclear power just is and always was... that's how and why they got built — and not because some visionaries thought that nuclear power would solve the energy needs of the country. IOW the reason we have the nuclear power plants that we do in the US is because of the vastly mindbogglingly huge overestimation of the need for fuel for nuclear bombs. Many think you can never have enough ammo, but please trust that we have far more than enough now, the nuclear bomb fuel factories aren't doing well, economically speaking, having effectively lost their major client, the US military, who themselves will, btw, continue to build and operate fission nuclear reactors indefinitely, regardless of expense for valid reasons.

Hey, I'm just parroting what the literal CEO of Tesla said, but you're fully entitled to your own opinion.