We tolerate all kinds of externalities from fossil fuel energy production and environmental degradation due to rare earth mining required to produce solar panels and wind turbines.
Nuclear energy is the only industry required to mitigate all possible externalities, and for that reason it is very expensive.
It’s disingenuous to claim nuclear power is a failure because it’s expensive to build without examining the reasons why that might be.
For proof it can work and is both safe and economical, witness the Chinese currently building 40 new nuclear plants. We could do that here, but choose not to. The only missing ingredient is political will, and resistance from ill-informed people such as yourself.
[–] jmyeet 3 days ago
[–] dpkirchner 2 days ago
Plus, 4. The ability to do long-term planning.
5. An engineering culture instead of a lawfare culture.
There's upsides and downsides to both of these facts, of course.
[–] MisterMower 2 days ago
Suppose you tell a football player, your overriding priority is not getting hurt. If you get hurt or do anything that might get you hurt, you are out of football for life. Now go out there and win this game.
Those, in a nutshell, are the incentives the nuclear industry in the US faces. Whatever you do, you must never have even the tiniest release of radiation. Safety is the overriding priority. Cost doesn't matter. If there is any wiggle room in your cost structure, you must spend it on making the possibility of a release even smaller.
Meanwhile, we accept major amounts of smog and carbon dioxide emissions from gas power plants, we accept significant environmental degradation due to mining minerals for wind and solar plants, and we tolerate radioactive fly ash from coal power plants beyond the levels we would allow emitted from nuclear power plants.
> Fuel processing, spent fuel processing and storage and failure modes are absolutely not completely mitigated or even solved problems.
The French did solve this problem using a large breeder reactor where they reprocessed nuclear fuel, and the US was on track to build something similar in the 1970's until the Carter administration banned breeder reactors in 1977.
Choosing to not use a breeder reactor means spent nuclear fuel has to just sit there and be guarded while we also have to go and mine and process more nuclear fuel from scratch to run our existing reactors. It's hard to imagine a more idiotic regulatory regime.
> Well if 40 power plants are being built, you can't really say that their operational record is that they're "safe and economical" because they have no operational record
China has 60 existing nuclear power plants that have operated safely and efficiently, and there is no reason to think that these would operate any less effectively. They will likely be even more safe and efficient.
China has a single advantage over the US when it comes to nuclear: they can ignore people like yourself who don't understand how nuclear power works and just build it. The US would be wise to emulate that approach, especially given we do already do this when it comes to flock cameras or AI data centers.
[–] krior 3 days ago
Is there a plant where the enviromental costs of building and decomissioning a plant and of extracting and enriching the fuel are completely mitigated?
I love this argument because it's never qualified. What regulations exactly make nuclear unaffordable? How many of them are safety related? Is safety not necessary?
It's just a hand-wavy argument for nebulous deregulation when all the evidence suggests that no industry is capable of self-regulation.
> ... rare earth mining required to produce solar panels ...
Solar panels don't require rare earths.
> Nuclear energy is the only industry required to mitigate all possible externalities
This is just objectively false. Fuel processing, spent fuel processing and storage and failure modes are absolutely not completely mitigated or even solved problems.
> For proof it can work and is both safe and economical, witness the Chinese currently building 40 new nuclear plants.
Well if 40 power plants are being built, you can't really say that their operational record is that they're "safe and economical" because they have no operational record, right? Now China has other nuclear power plants but you're not arguing with those.
China has several advantages no Western country has:
1. A standardized design so economies of scales with components;
2. State subsidies such as ultra-cheap finance; and
3. If people who manage and oversee such plants skimp on such maintenance they'll likely be executed.