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> What about the hidden cost of nuclear? The waste storage. The security measures (can't have terrorists walking off with the nuclear waste). The constant need for inspections, audits, etc. And that's before you consider the corruption and the gravy train that is basically associated with funding existing plants using massive amounts of public funding. Nothing wrong with pointing out issues/costs with nuclear, in fact it's good to point out the issues with nuclear so it can be properly weighed. I'm just trying to point out issues/costs of only using renewables, so we can weigh those as well. > Nuclear being too expensive is the main point of this article. That seems upsetting to a lot of nuclear proponents. But I don't see a lot of arguments to counter that core point. I think your missing the point. If you ran your entire grid on just solar and wind, no nuclear, or coal or natural gas peaker plants, you'll find that wind and solar is no longer cheap, and is much less resilient to exceptional circumstances. > I don't get your argument about mining. My point about mining is, our current course to fighting climate change relies entirely on mining, were making the switch from the Oil and Gas industry to the Mining industry for our energy and transportation markets. This change is going to have huge impacts on the world, mines are quite capable polluters of the local environment, setting up mines in developed countries can take a decade or more, which is the same problem nuclear plants face. Mining is also quite controversial for many good reasons, so there is significant push back from locals and environmental groups whenever and wherever a mine is proposed. All of this means a huge portion on mining takes places in countries with lax environmental and or human rights standards, which just exacerbates the problems. |
That kind of is my point: countries are doing this and without blackouts and it's actually fine. You seem to be claiming nuclear is needed to provide an unspecified base load at an unspecified cost. Other people are pointing out that it is about 3x more expensive and just not generally worth investing in at that cost difference.
Your points about mining are a bit beside the point. I don't actually disagree that the mining sector needs to be cleaned up. But our economy generates demand for lots of things we dig up out of the ground. If anything, it seems that the likes of Tesla are vaguely being responsible here and are actually making efforts to clean up that part of their business by working to source what they need in a sustainable way.
You seem to imply that a scale change is needed on the mining front to bootstrap renewables. I doubt that that's as big of a deal that you seem to imply. Also, you could make the point that with clean energy, resources locked up in that become available for recycling at the end of their life. So, things like lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel, etc. actually can be reused. And there are also some efforts to replace some of these minerals with more readily available alternatives. E.g. cobalt free batteries are a thing. Finally, we can offset that by no longer digging up coal, drilling oil, or fracking gas. The difference is that absolutely zero percent of that gets recycled because we burn it.
And lets not forget that uranium mining is probably one of the dirtiest forms of mining. That's just a really nasty business mostly happening under exactly the kind of circumstances you point out. Nothing clean about it. Lots of pollution, radioactive waste, and health issues. And you need to mine a lot of rock to extract very little uranium.