841–850 of 1001 posts
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No technology is 100% safe, so that is a straw man. However, nuclear energy is the safest form of electricity generation we have.
"Solved problem" was what the parent comment said. Tell me instead that it's going to leak like everything else.
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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…
If you assume a continuous chain of custody for the next 10000 years, it's pretty trivial, but how do you make that happen? It's beyond all known technology. So you can't. When Russia bombs that facility, how big will the exclusion zone be? At some point in the next 10000 years, it's not unlikely, it's not likely, it's guaranteed that there will be a war, and the facility will be bombed, or the custodians will be dra…
Besides - humanity already has such facilities for vast of toxic waste, prime example being Herfa Neurode. It's not like we ban all electronics due to arsenic waste from copper mining
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Waste management has always been a purely political problem, since breeder reactor designs have existed as long as enriched uranium fission reactors. Most of the waste of breeder reactors is radioactively inert; the problem is that mining uranium is profitable in itself, and it probably shouldn't be.
My understanding has been that an additional reason breeder reactors have been discouraged is due to nuclear proliferation fears; the neccessary reprocessing of the fuel also produces weapons-grade plutonium.
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Yes. It is a solved problem. It has been a solved problem as long as I’ve been alive, and the only reason we are in this situation is because a very sophisticated and organized network of activists convinced people that it is not a solved problem. I will never forgive the boomers for what they did here, it’s so incredibly sad. We could’ve had essentially free clean electricity but instead we shut down reactors “for t…
What is the solution? Where are the free nuclear plants? Sizewell C = £40 billion That’s a lot of PV solar and battery storage.
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Ask why it suddenly got so expensive and why delays were introduced. Hint, it happened more in some countries than others.
Hint, being snarky on HN is not as cool as you think. Nuclear "became expensive" because state subsidies declined, labor costs increased, and environmental regulations across all industries tightened.
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And yet China is building new nuclear plants just as fast as it's building solar and wind. It's almost as if the "grinding halt" was political in nature.
Source needed, a quick search if mine showed very different numbers: "China aims to reach 110 gigawatts (GWe) of nuclear capacity by 2030." "China installed over 430 GW of renewables in 2025" In other words china installed last year alone 5x the energy capacity in solar and wind, what the are planning to have in 2030 https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewab…
China does expand ren more than nuclear but the reason is not economics but the capacity to scale (as well as inland ban)
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What is the solution? Where are the free nuclear plants? Sizewell C = £40 billion That’s a lot of PV solar and battery storage.
Trolling/Not Trolling. Imagine if we spent the money we did developing nuclear on photo voltaic and batteries instead. Because seriously we spent next to NOTHING on PV solar and batteries.
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Yes. It is a solved problem. It has been a solved problem as long as I’ve been alive, and the only reason we are in this situation is because a very sophisticated and organized network of activists convinced people that it is not a solved problem. I will never forgive the boomers for what they did here, it’s so incredibly sad. We could’ve had essentially free clean electricity but instead we shut down reactors “for t…
"We could’ve had essentially free clean electricity" Did you ever handled radioactive material yourself? Or watched how Uranium mining works and what gets left behind? I doubt that.
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I don’t think it can. Nuclear is cheap at scale, not when you build a single prototype every 20 years. You need large countries with large programmes to be successful.
> Nuclear is cheap at scale Citation needed. We saw at-scale buildout during the 1970s and 1980, did it result in result in order-of-magnitude cost reductions back then?
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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.
Solar, wind and hydro are all much cheaper, far safer and more efficient these days.
Lol-ed hard... If we look only at modern generation of tech, Gen3 nuclear plants are the safest source of power