[himinlomax]

Nuclear fission is good enough, available right now, causes much fewer deaths than the alternatives, does not pollute the atmosphere, and accidents are extremely rare and nowhere near as dangerous as they've been portrayed. To wit, Fukushima: 1 dead from the nuclear accident, compared to 10000 from the tsunami.

[Tade0]

All good qualities, but there's one problem - cost and time to rollout.

Even China, which internally can impose any policy it wants, can't build them fast enough to match e.g. wind in terms of GWh delivered. That has been the case since 2012 or so.

[zohch]

> All good qualities, but there's one problem - cost and time to rollout.

Well those are only problems because the people who benefit from climate change, like politicians, UN and organizations like extinction rebellion, do not want the problem solved.

[triceratops]

Fukushima didn't kill many people, but it's projected to cost $187b to clean up.

Chernobyl has supposedly cost over $300b inflation-adjusted. Gorbachev wrote that in his opinion, it was a major contributor to the collapse of the USSR. Both figures are from Wikipedia.

Fission is safe, but even one accident can wipe out decades of profits. Is it still cost-effective when considering that?

[himinlomax]

> but it's projected to cost $187b to clean up.

That seems quite high.

> Fission is safe, but even one accident can wipe out decades of profits. Is it still cost-effective when considering that?

You can put a number on the cost of the Fukushima disaster, but you're not putting one on that of other power sources. Coal burners make the whole world pay, nuclear operators have to deal with their own shit. And yes, I'm not counting Chernobyl-type accidents, because while it would be foolish to claim that events like Fukushima will never happen again, it's equally foolish to not recognize that dodgy old dinky soviet plants with no passive safety measures whatsoever are a solved problem.

[triceratops]

I'm not disputing that nuclear is better than coal, but that's quite a low bar. Usually nuclear is compared to solar (with storage), wind, and hydro. These don't have the pollution downsides of coal. And while dams can fail catastrophically, I don't think the cleanup costs approach those of a nuclear power plant failure.