Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

>I am not sure you have actually closely read what I have said.

I am very familiar with the arguments you link to, they are repeated often in these discussions but they don't hold up to scrutiny.

The key mistake for most of these arguments is that nuclear waste is harmless and nuclear plants are safe on their own and don't need to be kept safe at great costs.

Any argument that rests on that idea is not going to hold up.

Just to take one example - one argument presented is basically that nuclear waste only requires a few acres of land where you can place dry casks, then you're good.

Try to find actual scientific and financial support for that idea from anyone else than the author.

>Early nuclear builds were cheaper to build:

Early cars were too, for many of the same reasons. Lower wages, worse quality, less safety.

>Spent fuel is mostly reusable:

How do you handle it while it is being reused? Does it become harmless after being reused or do we still need to deal with it for longer than the US has existed as a nation?

>Low-dose radiation risk is a contested harm:

Low-dose is not what we're talking about here. A kilo of nuclear waste in a van filled with fertilizer is not a contested harm, it's a nightmare scenario.

>And no, solar is NOT free

Building is not free of course but it has no running costs once built.

Nuclear has immense running costs, and they can't be stopped entirely. Even after it has been decommissioned and the company who made the plant has gone bankrupt it keeps costing society money.

It was a government owned utility, it couldn’t go bankrupt in the traditional sense since it has taxpayer backing.

But its finances were completely underwater with no way out due to the debt from nuclear construction.

After the breakup the public were left with $38B in debt from nuclear construction. Which the subsequent nuclear company was unable to pay off, or it would of course not have been restructured.

Do you trust today's politicians to hire competent engineers?

Do you trust today's politicians to provide all the money the engineers ask for?

Besides an engineering problem, they are also a political problem for as long as they exist, and even longer. Remember how Russia bombed Chernobyl in the Ukraine war?

Hopefully not how the yet unfinished Hinkley Point C is going.

I've never played fallout, and this isn't a game for me. I do have an electrical engineering degree, have read dozens of textbooks on (renewable) power generation, thermodynamics and manufacturing, and have spent significant time helping a research group with simulations of solar hybridised biomass gasification (mostly for Fischer Tropsch biofuels). The scale of electrification is huge, make no mistake, and we'll be dependent on either nuclear or coal/gas for the next 50+ years.

> The two big non-electrical energy demands are transport ..

A large fraction of transport is not amenable to electrification in this manner; however transport is the low hanging fruit and I support the rapid electrification of transport where possible. Unlike batteries for cars, generation of biofuels/hydrogen for airplanes/ships/heavy trucks will not be significantly more efficient than fossil fuels - it likely will consume more energy, not less. The fossil fuel technologies are already very efficient (50%+) and renewable alternatives are very inefficient. It is possible to electrify/solarise these processes in the long term, but also complicated and capital intensive. I have worked on technoeconomic simulations of such processes, where I learned first-hand from expert researchers in this field (though I am not a chemical engineer).

> .. and heating. For heat it just comes down to heat pumps

This is not true at all, and you've likely misunderstood what heating means in energy breakdowns.

Heat pumps are most suitable for low temperature heat - municipal heating, (industrial) cooking, etc. Things which are already largely electrified in developed countries. But low temperature heat is widely available as a downstream by-product of higher temperature processes (including power generation as in CHP), and it is there a low priority in the scheme of things.

Heat pumps are not feasible (nor are they even theoretically very efficient) for high temperature industrial processes, of which there are a great many (concrete, bricks, metal processing, plastics and other chemical processing, etc). Many of these processes are already practically 100% efficient, so electrification will use at least the same amount of energy. A factory may use for example a steam turbine with a mere 5% electrical efficiency - the high temp steam is used to heat a chemical reactor, and the small electrical output is used for pumps, etc.

Finally, the direct combustion of fuels, (often bundled under 'heating' in stats), also includes the use of fossil fuels as a chemical reagent, primarily carbothermal reduction of metals (plus many petrochemical processing reactions). This usage is highly efficient, and cannot be replaced with electricity directly. Alternative processes will likely consume more energy not less - there will be additional intermediate processes, separations, and so on, likely requiring melting/dissolving/reacting the materials at high temperatures.