The article is full of surface-level thinking.<p>Probably read a propaganda book and is still buzzing with the anecdote-based arguments and "why can't we just play around with cool reactors??" rethorics.<p>Afaik reactors are only really built with national backing due to risk and externalized costs of decommissioning and long term waste disposal.<p>We stopped dumping nuclear waste into the coastal ocean and now it became a lot more expensive.<p>We can't even deal with fricking plastic in the ocean and phtalates in drinking water, I have real trouble taking someone seriously who swats away any sort of concern, wishing back thr good old 60s way of doing things.<p>"Cool" anecdotes about strict regulation seeming rediculous, superficially mind you.<p>I really struggle with the nuclear propaganda as of late, especially with this anti-renewable stance mixed in.<p>Meh, even if I like the technology from a nerd-perspective, fuck nuclear power. We can't even get mainstream software buffer-overflow free. The techno-progress enthusiasm of our grandparents era has long lost it's shine.
Social factors.<p>Today's governments wouldn't have the state capacity and ambition to achieve what those of the 1940s-1980s were capable of. We've regressed; we're incompetent and moat of our effort is directed at virtue signalling rather than progress.<p>Nuclear power is just one aspect of this.
Shouldn't this question be asked in a larger context? Since the moon landing, pretty much every major government-led initiative has been less successful than the one before, as far as I can think of. (Admittedly this is my "general sense" and not based on any exhaustive research).<p>Is nuclear power special? I don't think so. I think it's just more sensitive to the various pathologies that have crept into the US political system over the past 5 decades.<p>If I wrote a history of modern technology since 1960, my first guess at a theme would be "the government led the development of many major new technologies then people decided it wasn't good at this, and it passed all the profits on to private companies--who then stopped working on big breakthroughs (mostly)"<p>Again, maybe I'm wrong, but that's my hypothesis.
Nuclear power's market fit has been seriously eroded over the past 10 years or so. Over the past decade both wind and solar have been exceeding by a wide margin their expected cost reductions. It's very clear now that these cost reductions will continue for at least another ten years at which point nuclear will have no chance at all of being cost competitive.<p>Almost as important, a nuclear power plant represents one big lump of power supply that takes years and years to complete. Whereas wind and solar can be built to completion incrementally in a year or two which is a much more budget friendly way to finance future energy supply. And of course wind and solar benefit from the cost reductions year by year.<p>The only positive for nuclear is that governments would like to keep a stock of nuclear trained scientists on hand just in case they are needed for a weapons initiative.<p>The nuclear industry is aware of all of the above and will engage in a protracted propaganda campaign to try and right the sinking ship. Though at this point it really looks hopeless.
Power generation when it boils down to it, whatever method used, is the conversion of momentum into electricity. Nuclear power, while pretty ingenious, seems like an example of extreme overengineering to solve a problem.<p>I know I'm simplifying here, but essentially, nuclear power is generated using the heat generated by the decay of radioactive material to boil water, to generate steam to spin a turbine.<p>This creates many challenges and hazards and generally, costs a lot of money.<p>There's a lot less extreme ways to generate motion and capture said motion into electricity.<p>Motion is everywhere. All the time. As we get better at capturing and harnessing the natural motion around us, which is the basic idea behind actual renewable energy, there's going to be less and less need for such extreme things as generating motion through radioactive decay.<p>Again, it's an ingenious idea and provides a lot of power in places that would otherwise be powered by fossil fuel, but it's still a short sighted solution with long term consequences that on the scale of centuries is not sustainable.
> <i>But costs [to build nuclear power infrastructure] in the US are around 2–3x that.</i><p>That's a bit of an odd turn in a narrative that begins with a global perspective, including developing nations. USA-only from that point on.<p>It's well-known that the USA has general problems with infrastructure costs, far from limited to nuclear power plants.
Cost.<p>No, not the cost of construction, though that's fairly pricey.<p>No, not the cost of production. That's actually the best part about nuclear energy. It's remarkably cheap and safe for energy production.<p>The biggest, costliest and most horrific thing about nuclear energy is what you do after you have finished using that nuclear power station.<p>You have, quite often, thousands or even millions of tons of radioactive waste to dispose of. Where do you put that? How do you dismantle the construction without causing contamination of the site and the surroundings for miles around? What about the medical costs of looking after the demolition workers as they develop cancers later in life?<p>But don't take my word for it. Look at Chernobyl and Fukushima. If the task wasn't so difficult, why are those disaster areas still existing? Chernobyl was nearly forty years ago. Fukushima was ten years ago. Still causing problems.
My pet armchair theory: that's because nuclear power requires humans to be consistently superhuman (smart, precise, meticulous, thinking ahead). Solar, wind, oil and gas don't -- a normal human can run all these things perfectly fine.
The article says: "nuclear power produces very little waste"<p>Is that true? Does it take into account all the nuclear waste that takes millions of years to fade out?<p>Wouldn't it be fair to calculate "waste produced" as "amount x (duration to be fully recycled)"?<p>Example calculation based on my amateurish guestimates give us then: residual waste takes maybe 500 years until it's organic earth for planting again. Nuclear waste takes 5 million years, so does a nuclear plant really produce 500 years / 5.000.000 years = 1/50.000th of waste than comparable powerplants?
Nuclear power is (and I presume even more so will be) the best option for outer space energy provision use-case, and at the same time it does not present that much of an edge in using it here on Earth, considering the alternatives. Consuming it on Earth here and there in small proportion just to develop and improve the technology as the primary goal makes sense, but relying on nuclear energy large scale generation? It feels like wasting this invaluable and (literally) non-replenish-able resource that may be badly needed in the future.
A typical nuclear reactor produces 1 gigawatt (GW) of electricity. That doesn’t mean you can simply replace it with a 1 gigawatt coal or renewable plant. IDK how it is a flop.
>Nuclear incumbents aren‘t upset that billions of dollars are thrown away on waste disposal and unnecessary cleanup projects—they are getting those contracts. For instance, 8,000 people are employed in cleanup at Hanford, Washington, costing $2.5B a year, even though the level of radiation is only a few mSv/year, well within the range of normal background radiation.<p>While I largely agree with the author, this misunderstands what is being cleaned up at Hanford. Hundreds of millions of gallons of nitric acid containing hundreds of tons of Plutonium are sitting in huge 70+ year old tanks that are slowly leaking. Stabilizing this waste is not throwing money away. Obviously the background radiation is no higher than anywhere else.
Why?<p>Cost and regulation, but even if it was cheaper and unregulated it`s a terrible technology for electrical generation. It`s an over-hyped steam turbine. You heat shit up real hot and then turn a wheel. That`s it! It`s laughable and with the addition of being massively dangerous to human health and then all those other additions such as cost, etc. Nikola Tesla was producing electricity with metal plates and hand built capacitors in the 20th century for cheap and people think we need a nuclear plant to produce electricity for a nation? Give me a break. Ridiculous, just ridiculous.
> The only deaths from the Fukushima disaster were caused by the unnecessary evacuation of 160,000 people, including seniors in nursing homes.)<p>This kind of revisionist statement is why people are suspect of people saying "it's bad, but not all that bad". They are usually lying about lots of things, when they supposedly have the facts on their side.<p><a href="https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/radiation-from-fukushima-disaster-still-affects-32-million-japanese" rel="nofollow">https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/radiation-from-fukushima-disaste...</a>
<a href="https://world.wng.org/2014/09/locals_suffer_long_term_effects_of_fukushima_meltdown" rel="nofollow">https://world.wng.org/2014/09/locals_suffer_long_term_effect...</a>
etc<p>Many of the barriers are due to simple game theory. If a project mischaracterizes or has an unlikely event that results in a leak, you cannot take it back. The damage is done and likely is out of the project's control, to some degree.