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by The_rationalist 2473 days ago
"nobody can make nuclear plants cost efficiently anymore." Wrong, China and South Korea does,some private enterprises too.

Unlike most technologies nuclear power plant building cost has increased over time (5 times) Mostly among other things (e.g lack of standardization except France), the huge current cost is because of irrational, overengeenered safety specifications. America could trivially build cheap power plants like in 70s and it would still make statistically less deaths than wind or solar and be the most cost effective energy source on earth.

Even taking into account modern occidental power plants, they are still mostly competitive with fossil and destroy other clean energy sources. Source: https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-a...
1 comments
makomk 2473 days ago
Ah yes, the good old seventies, when nuclear plant construction workers could get away with stuff like using a candle to find air leaks in the highly flammable insulation within an already-live nuclear plant: https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featureremembering-the-... Let's not go back there. That could've turned out a lot worse than it did.
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Knufen 2473 days ago
An absurd strawman, the guy you are responding to said building a plant whereas you are talking about finding leaks.
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makomk 2473 days ago
It's not a strawman, this was how the US built nuclear plants in the 70s. The folks looking for leaks were construction workers building Unit 3 of the nuclear plant, using a candle to test the newly-installed seal on the reactor building for leaks. Units 1 and 2 were already live. The fire spread through the cable ducts into the wiring for the in-use reactors, taking out both redundant sets of control and monitoring systems. (Which is of course a design flaw too and lead to much tighter regulations.) There's a reason we don't build nuclear power plants like in the seventies.
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nickik 2473 days ago
Its still a absurd strawman. Nobody advocates for doing things like we did in the 70s. And complaining about harmful regulations now does not mean going back to that.

Everybody who works on these regulations realizes how absurd they are. They were driven by political rationals and not technical once.

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