| > The idea of nuclear energy being clean that we see repeated here in Hacker News is not as widespread as it looks, HN is just another bubble. People are not hearing about it. It will take a while for the population to change their mind, and longer still for the government. German here. We Europeans also have another issue: where to put the waste. Unlike Americans who have lots of deserts where no one gives a flying f..k about anything you dump there because there is no human life in a hundred km range, Europe is densely populated and surprisingly people don't want to live near a nuclear waste dump. Additionally, unlike Americans we have personal experience with nuclear disaster from Chernobyl - to this day, many decades after the event, you have to check wild pigs and fungi in Bavaria for radioactivity if you want to sell them. And current operators of nuclear plants haven't been exactly trustworthy, given many thousands of incident reports of which quite a number can be boiled down to shoddy construction or maintenance. On top of that, we have had massive fuck-ups of our governments in the attempts to find a permanent storage site: - former salt mine "Asse" which was used from 1967-1978 turned to be a colossal disaster - the barrels rusted and leaked, to make it worse it was known at the time that the barrels would only last three years, and now it's estimated to need billions of euros for retrieval of all the waste - former salt mine "Gorleben" was inspected from 1979-2000 as a permanent storage site, but (again) it came out that the location was chosen for political reasons, not scientific - former GDR site "Morsleben" is unstable, needing billions of euros to prevent collapse - current projects to search a new final site are expecting to take until (at least) 2031 with finalization of storage in year 2095-2170 (!!!), at a total cost of 50-170 billion euros. As a result of all of this - especially the last point, who can even guarantee there will be a German nation in over 150 years of time from now?! - German public is extremely skeptic of nuclear energy. In other European nations, French and British projects for new nuclear reactors (Flamanville and Hinkley Point C, respectively) have managed to surpass the infamous disaster airport BER in budget and time overruns. Even if there were public support for nuclear energy, no one trusts government to complete such projects in time and budget anymore, further weakening nuclear energy. Edit: Totally forgot about the boatload of issues involving power plants europe-wide, see e.g. https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eus-ageing-nucl... for a list. You really have anything there, from fundamental construction issues over your run-off-the-mill accident and old age (many plants are 30 years or older) to outright gross negligence. To put it short: We Europeans can't operate nuclear power responsibly, no matter if organized under capitalist, communist or modern-ish government control. There won't be much of a future for nuclear fission power in Europe, no matter what some of our bought-off leaders (Macron, Orban) spout. |
You might say, well, hydrocarbon waste is much less dangerous. But that's negated by the fact that you need about 1,000,000x as much coal to replace the energy provided by nuclear. And in fact, the total amount of radioactive contaminants in that quantity of coal is roughly equal to the amount of nuclear fuel you would have required in the first place had you just used nuclear alone!