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Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

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Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#431

Post by qwe----3 »

pocksuppet wrote: post #425
bilekas wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switzerland has an amazing opportunity to be the standard setter in the EU with nuclear though. The technology is so unbelievably safe and efficient these days. It a real shame to leave it all on the table because of poorly designed and managed disasters.

Do you trust that any of today's politicians will not be poor at nuclear reactor design and management?

Do you trust today's politicians with tall buildings, or bridges, or chemical plants, or guns, or fighter gets, or ammunition production?

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#432

Post by pfdietz »

m101 wrote: post #389
pfdietz wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we know nuclear is actually super great, because of all the merchant nuclear plants that have been built around the world. Here is a complete list of those plants:

Nuclear used to be built cheaply, before regulatory uncertainty made private construction effectively impossible: https://gordianknotbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/essay...

You can't look at the early plants built in the US that were "turnkey" plants. These were bid at prices not reflecting what they would cost to build, but what was necessary to compete with coal. The vendors took a bath on these plants.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#433

Post by mjmas »

pocksuppet wrote: post #425
bilekas wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switzerland has an amazing opportunity to be the standard setter in the EU with nuclear though. The technology is so unbelievably safe and efficient these days. It a real shame to leave it all on the table because of poorly designed and managed disasters.

Do you trust that any of today's politicians will not be poor at nuclear reactor design and management?

No, but they aren't the ones designing them. Politicians normally aren't engineers.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#434

Post by legitster »

gpm wrote: post #415
legitster wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear power is fundamentally expensive. It's large pieces of infrastructure, involving handling and securing extremely dangerous materials. The actual operating costs are extremely low. Most of the cited $/kwh figures include the capital costs of the extreme 10+ year approval process. There's also no economies of scale right now. If you add up all of the deaths directly from radiation exposure in the nuclear powe…

Chernobyl killed 30 or 31 directly (i.e. acute radiation poisoning), and thousands indirectly (i.e. cancer) though the count for that is disputed... I don't know where your 28 number comes from but there's no dispute that the direct number is higher than that... There's been a handful of other purely civilian disasters that killed people with radiation from sources meant for nuclear power, and a large number of milit…

> and thousands indirectly (i.e. cancer) though the count for that is disputed

That's the thing, these numbers have been extremely inflated. The LNT model we've used for nuclear safety has never withstood any serious scrutiny. If anything, we've learned humans are extremely resilient to non-acute exposure.

Excess death numbers at places like Fukushima and Chernobyl have found almost no noticeable change in cancer rates, even for people with serious exposure.

Ironically, if you compare excess death numbers to traditional fuel sources (coal, gas, etc) they are much worse.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#435

Post by Mawr »

Krasnol wrote: post #395
indoordin0saur wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand the waste problem is tremendously overblown. Move it to some storage facility somewhere, that's fine. Just keep it on site, that's fine too. A typical gigawatt reactor produces about 20 tons of waste annually, which sounds like a lot but remember this stuff is quite dense, so it would actually take 4 years to fill up a standard shipping container. The storage units for this stuff is incredibly…

Waste which will be here for many generations of humans and can seriously harm them is overblown? It never cases to amaze me how much blatant misinformation circulates around this topic. Just a few years ago, nobody sane would have predicted Trump. How can anybody seriously predict what would happen to this waste in a few years? I'm not even talking about generations here.

You realize we're literally dispersing coal, gas & gasoline fumes into the atmosphere that we all breathe, right? 24/7?

Yeah, small amounts of solid waste sitting somewhere is as much of a non issue as can be.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#436

Post by awesome_dude »

throwthrowuknow wrote: post #418
awesome_dude wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has to be snark - Waste is never safe to store - the containment has to prevent leeching - over a lifespan of thousand, or tens of thousands of years And it only takes one earthquake, or animal digging to completely upend that strategy

What kind of animal is going to dig through concrete and steel and also be hundreds of meters underground in solid rock?

Neither concrete nor steel have the lifespans we're discussing thousands, or tens of thousands of years.

And. Bacteria.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#437

Post by awesome_dude »

zeafoamrun wrote: post #409
awesome_dude wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Ukraine nuclear power plants are a massive liability - they make for easy targets for the Russians to obliterate the country - is that what you want for Switzerland? 2. The waste - nobody wants it - it's a hazard for tens of thousands of years - what's the plan for managing it? Yes energy generation (and independence) is important, no nuclear ain't it.

No country is going to bomb Switzerland because they all have money stashed here.

I like that answer, but never say never

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#438

Post by esarbe »

Gud wrote: post #160
esarbe wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also incredibly expensive and brittle and cannot be moderated without additional costs[1]. At this point nuclear is just a dead horse. It hasn't managed to displace fossil fuels in over 70 years - a feat that renewables have done within 20 years. Nuclear is too slow and too expensive. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/france...

Every time this argument comes up, “it’s too slow and expensive “, I ask that person to please explain to me how my home country Sweden managed to build all those reactors in the 70s and 80s both fast and cheap? They’ve been amazing for us, despite the fact that some of them was recklessly shutdown prematurely by an ignorant political class.

The same way that France did it; by building quite safe nuclear in series with massive government subsidies. A bit like China today.

After the accidents showed that these designs where just not quite safe enough, redundancy in the safety systems were added. The thing is; as soon as those reactor designs got a bit more safe, they got much more expensive quite quickly. Just look at France's history of nuclear reactor development.CP0, CP1 and CP2 were somewhat cheap and they were able to churn out the things in quite a number.P4 and P'4 were already much more complex, more expensive and it just wasn't possible to mass produce these things like before. By N4 the economy of scale had broken down almost completely.

That's the problem with nuclear reactors. They are simple in principle, but fiendishly difficult in practice and enormously complex. So complex indeed that the learning curve doesn't yield any compounding returns. That's what we've seen play out in the last 50 years.

I don't know how things evolved in Sweden, but I assume that Swedish reactors don't have all the safety features of modern reactors. I guess that's what made them cheap, just like the CP-series in France.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#439

Post by noosphr »

awesome_dude wrote: post #388
chpatrick wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's not that hard of a problem in general. There are plenty of abandoned mines with tons of space where you can forget about it forever.

This has to be snark - Waste is never safe to store - the containment has to prevent leeching - over a lifespan of thousand, or tens of thousands of years And it only takes one earthquake, or animal digging to completely upend that strategy

And yet we had a natural nuclear reactor that's been self contained for 2 billion years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#440

Post by pfdietz »

jrflowers wrote: post #429
pfdietz wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which nuclear plants were replaced with coal plants? If you say "German plants", I'll point out coal consumption for power generation in Germany has gone down since the decision to phase out nuclear. Coal consumption would likely have gone down even more with nuclear still being used, but that doesn't support your claim as stated.

That’s a strange way of wording “Germany burns more coal today than they would be if they hadn’t replaced their nuclear power plants with coal power plants”. Jumbling up the word order doesn’t make Germany replacing their nuclear plants with coal plants a good thing.

No, it's not a good thing, but it's also not an example of the claim that countries replaced nuclear with coal.

Still waiting on those countries from the previous poster.

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