[freeflight]

> those costs will come down as (if) we start ramping up construction and learn to avoid the cost overruns and get experience decommissioning plants.

Sorry but that's a rather naive expectation. We have plenty of other technologies, which are far more developed than nuclear, and they still end up going over budget quite often.

How long have we been building nuclear reactors? For decades, yet we are nowhere close to "avoid cost overruns", how many decades more of building overpriced and outdated designs do we need to get to that point? And how many Fukushimas, Chernobyls and Three Mile Islands are we prepared to endure until we actually reach this hypothetical point in human history?

We mostly learn from mistakes, but with nuclear, the mistakes are very pricey, not just in economic terms but especially in environmental terms.

[vkou]

> And how many Fukushimas, Chernobyls and Three Mile Islands are we prepared to endure until we actually reach this hypothetical point in human history?

Why are you listing TMI alongside actual nuclear disasters?

There was a reactor meltdown. Containment worked exactly as expected. Not a single person died. If we held the rest of the energy generation industry to such a standard, we'd be living in caves and banging rocks together for warmth.

[freeflight]

> Why are you listing TMI alongside actual nuclear disasters?

Because that's where it belongs, just like Kyshtym.

> Containment worked exactly as expected. Not a single person died.

What a convenient claim to make considering the long term effects of the radiation usually show in the form of cancer and a direct correlation can never be made except when doing massive epidemiological studies on the affected populations, which rarely happens.

It's this very same dynamic which allows people to make outrageous claims along the lines of "Nobody died from Chernobyl radiation, it was all just naturally occurring cancer!"

Meanwhile, people in the US are still wondering how and why cancer clusters happen [0]. Look at that map, look the red spots and with a little bit knowledge of the US nuclear industry you will realize what's around that area. What a coincidence? That's what it probably is, just a coincidence because admitting anything else to the public wouldn't really play that well, so coincidence it has to be [1].

[0] http://edition.cnn.com/2017/01/24/health/cancer-cluster-disp...

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/health-37517770

[vkou]

Yes, why don't we overlay that map of cancer clusters [0] with a map of nuclear reactors. [1]

This is what we get: http://imgur.com/a/VzgMF

Now, I'm no statistician, but to me, it looks like there is... No correlation between the two. Maybe the mundane, unsexy explanation in the article, citing lifestyle choices, smoking, alcoholism, access to healthcare, and poverty as the main factors influencing cancer death.

Cancer valley running through Kentucky has more to do with bourbon, then its non-existent nuclear reactors (It has an enrichment facility in its western part, but that's not where the cancer deaths are).

In short, this is FUD.

[0] http://i2.cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/170124123712-01-can...

[1] https://www.nrc.gov/images/reading-rm/doc-collections/maps/p...