Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

> And what it really comes down to is that nuclear is really expensive and takes way too long to build.

Also other form of renewable are expensive. Unfortunately we are not so good at doing calculation on large scale. Just because installing a few solar panels is cheap, it doesn't mean that if we start installing a lot of them will maintain the same price.

Especially these days there is a shortage (they said due to COVID, but it's obvious that we are in a commercial war with China) of electronic components and semiconductors, guess what solar panels are made of? Where do you produce them, of course you can't rely on importing them from China, because China in a couple of years will not sell you anything, but if you start producing them in the US good luck making them cheap. And where do you even get the raw materials to start with?

Sure, a nuclear reactor does use a lot of materials, but are mostly steel and concrete, something that is produced in every industrialized country.

Do we even talk about energy storage? How do we realize that? Batteries? Lithium ones, good luck finding them at a cheap price.

Overall nuclear power is cheap, is just that we focus on the initial price that is obviously high and don't think that all the cost of transitioning to renewable energy added up are even higher. I don't say that a private investor will ever construct a nuclear power plant, the upfront cost is too high, but it's something that a government should build.

So many things! The country that had generated the most nuclear power IS the United States and it's also the one with the highest capacity

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country

The depiction of it as a "failure" is the industry whining like the defense industry whines about not having 50,000 more airplanes

Despite being at scale and having 70 years to bring down costs, it's still prohibitively expensive in the full lifecycle analysis of the LCOE and it gets heavily subsidized to keep plants open.

People's energy prices have gone up because governments are Interfering With The Market in favor of nuclear: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/17/the-us-is-spending-billions-...

Also it's not green. The mining of the fuel isn't, nor is its transportation, vitrification, fabrication, refinement or enrichment. The concrete and cooling of the plant isn't nor is the waste stream side of the equation. It's the classic hyperfocus on a small part of the chain and writing off everything else as externalities.

Now on to the last point. Yes! The back end is a trivial cost because it Has Not Been Dealt With.

Yucca Mountain 35 years in still has not been built and the only US site that currently exists is only for 10,000 years (1% of what's required), only does nuclear weapons, cost $19,000,000,000, took 29 years to build, and had a sealing schedule of 75 years.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant

Currently the only US option is dry casks which have a shelf life between 30 and 100 years assuming no natural disasters, terrorist attacks, wars, or shoddy craftsmanship. We're leaving this problem for future generations.

In the same way people used to hunt animals to extinction so they could sell them as culinary delicacies, future civilizations will look back on us and curse us for being so stupid when we had far more reasonable options readily available that didn't require literally centuries of management.

Onkalo is going to get breached in the next ice age btw so let's just hope we figure out how to secure it against that in the next few generations

I don't care what your sci-fi shows say, it's a shit technology. And I haven't even touched upon the insane corruption behind plants such as Diablo canyon.

But hey call me an uninformed moron, I'm down

Good. Are you willing to renounce to your current lifestyle? Because renewable energy alone can't, even considering the most optimistic prediction, and even ignoring costs and production scale problem, substitute fossil fuels. That means that we need to reduce the amount of energy that we use, if we don't want to substitute fossil fuel with nuclear, so are you willing to do so?

I think that nuclear is the best compromise, the argument that it costs a lot of money, it doesn't make sense, I live in Europe and we are losing billions of euros each day, most of energy intensive companies have shut down, they are not producing, because energy cost is 10 times higher than usual, there are companies that got millions euros energy bill, they go bankrupt. Now how many nuclear reactors would you have built with this amount of money that is lost every day?

Now let's talk about renewable energy, the same renewable energy that in 50 years that we talk about didn't do mostly anything to reduce the dependency from Russian gas. To the point that the inevitable happened, the thing that everyone knew will someday happen but didn't want to admit that there was that possibility...

The industry told themselves and the community a lie .. that nuclear was cheap (“too cheap to meter”) and that it was perfectly safe.

But, there were always and continue to be cheaper sources of energy, and when incidents did inevitably occur they had an outsized impact on community perceptions.

"Nuclear provided 50 years of low cost energy to France despite an uphill battle in the public opinion. Renewable energy is failing to save Germany this winter despite being hailed as the holy grail for the past few decades."

Its ability to supply France in the past is irrelevant to its ability to power global demand in future. The fuel is too limited and the technology too immature to turn this around. Nuclear is uneconomical as it is, fancy future designs even more so, if they ever arrive on scale. Nuclear has a limited future.

The Germany talking point is deliberately misleading. It was in transition and couldn't reasonably have been expected to predict gas would be switched off overnight. But it could reasonably be expected to predict the serious consequences of runaway global warming. The risk of the former was lower than the risk of the latter and while it was unlucky, it was a reasonable bet as a good global citizen that's done more than almost any country in trying to address a problem that affects literally everyone. So you don't get to knock it for doing what most countries weren't brave enough to even try.

No one credible called renewables the holy grail. No serious environmentalist said green energy is already there. They have been arguing for decades for more R&D, expansion of sustainable power infrastructure, local jobs for installers etc. We should have listened. And you might have heard them if lazy, right wing, straw man talking points weren't drowning them out.

I'm sorry but that's just a quick reality check for you.