There's a lot of straw men being fought in the comments again.<p>The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the storage of nuclear waste, for which many countries <i>still</i> don't have a long-term solution.<p>Proponents of nuclear power like to pretend the opposition exists merely on the basis of "but what if it goes boom!", so they don't need to face the reality that countries like Germany are sitting on a lot of nuclear waste right now that is just "temporarily" stashed away in various places - some of which already had issues with flooding, like Asse II.
I've been thinking about nuclear this last week and i have some assumptions that i would appreciate if somebody more knowledgeable can quickly filter:<p>We want more energy per person in the future.<p>Stable energy is required to make industry sustainable.<p>Stable 'free' energy allows you to do really cool new things (like melt trash for resources?)<p>Waste & environmental impact is negligible compared to fossil fuels.<p>A nation needs to agree to the risk/reward of a nuclear power plant, it must be owned and payed for primarily by the government.<p>Having a country/state that offers free energy will pay itself back easily.
Cost should not be an issue, 20 % of GDP should be on the table.
( Money is made up, Jules are real ).<p>Solar and wind are mostly done innovating. Nuclear has a relatively clear path of improvements ahead in terms of $/joule.<p>Storage based on hydrogen or thermal are too inefficient and don't scale well enough to power homes and industries during the winter.<p>Any comments are welcome.
I hope that in the future we will seriously consider <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power</a><p>Compared to current methods of producing nuclear energy, thorium:<p>- produces significantly more energy per ton<p>- produces significantly less waste<p>- the waste is significantly less dangerous (cools down in x00 years, instead of x0000 years)
Here we go again:<p>1. Nuclear has much worse failure modes. The Cybernobyl Exclusion Zone is quite literally 1,000 square miles [1];<p>2. Advocate like to talk about reprocessing as a solution to the waste problem. It seems to be missed that this is limited to spent fuel reprocessing. This appears to have significant cost and safety issues;<p>3. Separately to spent fuel, you also have to store enrichment byproducts (eg UF₆, UF₄) that have their own problems;<p>4. Stored nuclear waste is a security issue; and<p>5. Transportation of fuel and spent fuel is a security issue.<p>The big problems with nuclear aren't technical they're political but they are no less significant. For me, I just don't trust humans--either government entities or for-profit enterprises--to safely and responsibly build and manage a nuclear power plants as well as all the infrastructure to mine, process, transport, reprocess and store any byproducts.<p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone</a>
My only concerns are the timelines required for nuclear plant construction, and also that no one wants one constructed near them.<p>I believe that HVDC conduits going to solar farms in Spain, even under the Mediterranean to Africa could be built faster than nuclear plants.<p>I also believe that most people would prefer a compressed gas storage system built in a old coal or salt mine built nearby over a nuclear plant.
David MacKay's book "sustainable energy: without the hot air" has a section that estimates if nuclear fission might work as a large scale long-lived energy source<p><a href="http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_161.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_161.shtml</a>
<a href="https://nonuclear.se/files/g100rs_en.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://nonuclear.se/files/g100rs_en.pdf</a> if all those costs would be factored into the price, nuclear power wouldn't be so cheap...
I see a lot of fair concerns about nuclear waste. Here's a crazy thought: Can we just send it to space?<p>With all recent developments in space technology, I'd expect it to be extremely safe and reliable in the next decades.
If you're worried about nuclear waste, why not build small nuclear reactors way out in the desert and encase them in concrete for a couple hundred years once you're done with them?
It still remains a waste of money if you have other sources:<p><a href="https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2009/ee/b809990c#!divAbstract" rel="nofollow">https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2009/ee/b8099...</a><p>Nuclear is just too slow to fix our CO2 problems<p><a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nuclear-energy-too-slow-too-expensive-to-save-climate-report-idUSKBN1W909J" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle...</a>
Am I the only person who thinks we're just going to be sending nuclear waste into space/storing it on moons with SpaceX Starships/whatever comes next?<p>Can somebody tell me why this won't be a viable option? Seems simple enough, and it's not like we've not done worse.
Nuclear power seems incredibly expensive and complicated, even more so than large coal power plants. The logistics alone are crazy.<p>Nuclear power's inherent radiation danger to living organisms and our shiny new 3nm GPUs is also real. Additionally uranium ore seems quite limited on earth and thus makes nuclear fission seem like a non-scaleable technology. Maybe this resource is better used to solve rare edge cases like powering infrastructure in space and implementing big red buttons for our presidents, supreme leaders and chairmen.<p>Nobody can rule out accidents or malicious things going on with the spent fuel anyways.<p>Wind and solar are very cheap and the sun won't turn off anytime soon. Can't we cover the planet's deserts with photovoltaics and wind turbines? Couldn't we ship the converted energy using high voltage DC lines or hydrogen/methane pipelines?<p>Is it really so hard to cooperate with or convince the nations involved who own the biggest deserts?