Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

It's not an argument against government subsidies, it's just looking at the economic viability of nuclear power relative to other options.

> The trick is that they keep building the same obsolete US-based design

Wikipedia has a list of nuclear reactors in France.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Fran...

According to the list, most power plants came online in the 1980s, so it doesn't sound like they "keep building" more of them. The most recent ones, Civaux and Chooz-B, came online in 2000. Flamanville appears to be incorrectly stated as having came online in 2020. Clicking the link, you see that its 2 reactors came online in 1986 and 1987, and as for the third one -- "as of 2020 the project is more than five times over budget and years behind schedule. Various safety problems have been raised, including weakness in the steel used in the reactor. In July 2019, further delays were announced, pushing back the commercial introduction date to the end of 2022. In January 2022, more delays were announced, with fuel loading continuing until mid-2023, and again in December 2022, delaying fuel loading to early 2024."

All of the nuclear reactors in France were built by previous generations.

As an aside, I'm pro- wind, hydro, geothermal, solar, and nuclear. (I'm also very pro-smart-design which obviates the need for created energy.) However I only really see nuclear proponents (and those of fossil fuels) attacking renewables. And I only really see fossil fuel and nuclear proponents making widespread demonstrably false statements. My rooftop solar is producing a big yearly surplus, supplying my neighbors with energy for their AC etc. I think nuclear proponents who say that nuclear is so cheap and so easy should prove it by building their own nuclear reactors and make tons of money. Go ahead, just do it. Stop talking and do it.

If that was actually a problem you could use geoengineering to make the planet more reflective overall, letting you use more nuclear power.

AFAICT, you are probably wrong. Here is some points as to why:

> daily energy reaching the earth's surface from sunlight

... which is exactly the same as the amount of energy radiating off, in a state of equilibrium. But here comes the problem, if we add heat, e.g. from fission, we are not in an equilibrium anymore, are we?

Skeptics of anthropogenic climate change make that claim all the time: Absolute numbers are huge, so they do comparisons like

- 99.998% if Carbon does not take part in Carbon Cycle, or

- heat radiation from the sun is more than X by a scale of Y.

But in balance, so any addition without compensation can compound to be fatal to human life on earth.

After increasing the temperature by storing energy, then radiation off the surface and air layers will increase. But the heat build up is strongest at ground level, yet radiating to space is hardest from that layer. So the effectiveness of heat dispersal in a layered, in-vacuum geoid is not ideal.

> Not only[addition by me] by humans adding more heat under the existing blankets.

Volker Quaschning hat an article, in german, on that. A comparable, unfavourable look on heat introduction instead for a post-co2 energy generation, was also cited in minkorrekt podcast (german, too).

But that that is a small factor, too. I did back of the envelope calculation, and - if every of the 8 billion humans increases their consumption to western standards, - their energy from unlimited fusion or unlimited fission, earth still boils.

It might be 2-5 % of the effect of greenhouse gases, by heat introduction is real and at scale deadly, too.

With water, wind and solar, we have no added heat, since moving gases and fluids evoke heat anyway, which just is not converted to electricity in between. And solar changes the albedo of the place where the panel was placed to a reflectivity of that of a green meadow, which might be worse than some kinds of coating, but usually is better then other roof tiling [citing needed, do IR/VIS-white-painted roofs exist?].

TL;DR: Smaller problem by a few orders of magnitude, but unless dangerous geoengineering takes place[1], still unsustainably cooks mankind.

[1]: Please don't. IPCC report says "keep the idea of geoengineering out of media, for it is not a solution but pandora's jar"

After having read the IPCC report, no. A mix of energy is a very viable solution. And if states would not cater to the needs of the nuclear industry, we would have zero plants right now because the price of electricity was never high enough to get the plants insured. Which might change if the price for power climbs, but with renewables on the rise, a limit to that rise or even decline is to be expected.

And for some reason, mainstream social media loves nuclear, so I do question if there is a bias for a technology that every spacefaring state, except for india and china (AFAICT?), has botched at some catastrophic event so far.