There is an endless stream of pro-nuclear articles ever since the nuclear lobby figured out that their best bet to get re-instated as a viable source of power is to hitch their wagon to climate change. But it doesn't change a thing about the underlying issues: non-proliferation, radio active waste, potential for accidents, very bad economy over the total operational life-span.
It seems like you assume that other sources of energy are without waste and accidents. Nuclear power has by far the lowest number of deaths / produced energy and the total volume of waste is not that much. During all time of nuclear, the total volume of waste is about the annual waste produced by solar cells.
Have you even looked at the statistics? The point kinda is that injury and death tolls tell you precisely how often it doesn't go well for different types of energy production (including the mining of resources, storage/dumping of waste, etc.). I can't imagine you wrote that comment knowing how much less risky fission is.
If a solar panel has a catastrophic incident, you replace it. If a windmill has a catastrophic accident, you replace it. If a gas plant has a catastrophic accident, you replace it and have five funerals.
If a nuclear plant has a catastrophic accident, Western Europe could be uninhabitable for generations. Likely? No. But completely possible.
This is pure fear mongering. There is no way for currently running nuclear power plant to make Western Europe (!) uninhabitable. Worst meltdown is that - meltdown. It stays where it happens.
Waste has never been a problem and especially isn't a problem with modern reactors. They're safer than coal burning plants. Their economies are much better than alternatives when you account for the cost of environment, life, and pollution for things like coal burning plants. I feel like I've had to debunk all of these points literally a dozen times on HN and I'm really tired of putting in the effort.
Sure, pull the other one. You can't credibly debunk any of these because they've been a problem with every reactor built to date. You can pretend that they won't be a problem for any of the 'new and untried designs', however, I'm pretty sure that by the time that we build them and operate them for a couple of decades they'll turn out much the same as the previous lot, which were also supposed to be cheap, non-polluting, reliable and absolutely never subject to anything remotely like an accident.
Why people keep falling for this is a mystery to me.
Comparing with coal burning plants is nonsense, compare to wind/hydro/solar on a long enough timescale rather than to compare with the most polluting fossil fuel. That's stacking the deck in favor of nuclear.
I'm sure nuclear has its place in this whole story, but let's not pretend that it is without problems, at best it will be a stepping stone.
> Comparing with coal burning plants is nonsense, compare to wind/hydro/solar on a long enough timescale rather than to compare with the most polluting fossil fuel.
Well Germany is replacimg part of nuclear energy with natural gas plants so it is a really important debate indeed.
Oh, ok. I must be following different news sources than you do then. According to the most recent push for nuclear it is all a-ok, safe, clean, infinite supply and even 'green' for whatever that means. If there are problems they certainly aren't given much airtime, if any, and if there are alternatives they are much less well funded from a PR perspective, because nuclear is 'big business' and solar and wind much less so.
All this is is a way to sway public opinion, nothing actually gets solved in the short term.
Whereas solar panels and wind energy of course have no lobby whatsoever and are only being promoted by idealistic, well meaning activists that can be trusted 100%.
Why not? I mean, maybe not, but what makes you so sure? The solar and wind lobby stands to make trillions of dollars from government spending, but we are supposed to think they don't do any lobbying? Only the nuclear industry is in it for the money?
Maybe it is the decade-and-a-half that I've been studying the energy situation in some detail?
The nuclear industry has a typical installed unit cost of $25B or thereabouts (that's usually not the original estimate or even close to that). A typical windpark is a fraction of that and solar deployments are much smaller as well.
Besides that the market for solar and windpower is much more fragmented, with nuclear there are only very few parties on the supply side.
"Maybe it is the decade-and-a-half that I've been studying the energy situation in some detail?"
OK but you can not expect everybody else to take your personal experience at face value.
The average windpark may be smaller, but companies producing panels and rotators presumably are quite big.
A lot of money has already been invested by governments, and much, much more is to come. I don't think the individual costs of nuclear power plants proves anything one way or another.
Interesting to consider how much that lobby has quietly funded CO2 research projects, to prove anthropogenic effects. Also interesting that the big push to consider CO2 and it's impacts, started about the time a 30 year moratorium on nuclear power was coming to an end.
