[locallost]

Cheap nuclear is an oxymoron. Germany dropped it and now the tax payers are hit with over 100 billion in nuclear waste disposal costs. The operators paid 23 billion to legally wash their hands of the mess [1]. The worst part even the green party accepted it because they feared the operators would simply declare bankruptcy since there was no way for them to handle it themselves. This on top of the hundreds of billions of subsidies that in the end didn't accomplish anything. But at least they are not in South Carolina where the consumers are still paying for the 9 billion wasted on VC Summer before they concluded "this project will never be in the black" and quit [2].

Nuclear's tagline since the beginning was "energy too cheap to meter" which turned out to be one of the biggest frauds in the history of mankind.

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/german-government-does-nuclear-waste-d... [2] https://theintercept.com/2019/02/06/south-caroline-green-new...

[panick21_]

Nonsense. Had Germany adopted nuclear in 2020 for the Grünewende they would be done by now, and they would have cost them less then they actually spend in that time and what they will have to spend.

Even with pessimistic assumption of paying 5 billion $ per plant. If Germany had done what France did in the 70/80s they would be much better off now and for the next 100 years. And the cost per plant would be far lower once you start mass production.

If you actually did it right rather then incredibly stupidly, nuclear waste would be a resource for the future, and the idea of disposing it would be utterly ridiculous. Just as with all these idiotic disposal solution that governments like to waste money on. In typical fashion the anti nuclear people first create problems, demand that money is spend on them and then blame nuclear for those problems.

A sensible approach would be have a government fuel bank responsible for securing reserves of nuclear fuel, supplying and recycling nuclear fuel to the nations nuclear fleet. This fuel reserve centrally managed and it controls access to fuel for both commercial operates, research, ESA and so on.

Maintenance of spend fuel is not actually expensive and it places little burden on government to do, even if its for 100s of years. Its literally just a bunch of containers in a warehouse. And that could of course be supported by fees for rate payers.

[locallost]

Complete denial of reality. I've posted actual numbers on real costs, but of course there are always people like you dealing with imaginary money, throwing around numbers they can't back up.

Pessimistic 5 billion per plant -- what a joke. Flamanville 20 years under construction, 20 billion. Olkiluoto 15 years under construction, 15 billion. Hinkley C, deadline for 2027 already clear will not be held, price tag already estimated now to be 40 billion in the end [1].

If Germany had done what France had done in the 70s and 80s it would be in the same situation as France is today: every other month a plant goes into emergency maintenance because of cracks in the pipes, and relying on neighbors to keep its lights on.

If it had invested in nuclear 20 years ago it would be sitting on heaps of unfinished uneconomical plants and it would still use coal for the majority of its electricity. The plants even if finished would take decades to make up for the lost opportunity to reduce emissions during the decades of construction.

Rubbish! Nuclear energy's days are numbered. That industry will need to find another way to take tax payers' money.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/cost-edfs-new-uk-nuc...

[panick21_]

Go look at the UAE, its less then 5 billion for a 1.5GWe plant.

And that is when you produce 4 in a row, when you produce 50, it would actually be much cheaper.

But I know how anti nuclear people always have to look at 1 off builds to justify their position, and ignore evidence from mass builds such as France.

> If Germany had done what France had done in the 70s and 80s it would be in the same situation as France is today

Germany actually did proper maintenance on the plants it had and they had excellent uptime.

France is in this position because the anti nuclear government tried to phase out nuclear and they had so much nuclear that they failed to keep their plants up to date.

Anybody that denies that Germany would be vastly better off if they had followed France in the 70/80 is so blinded by hate that it's actually fucking sad.

[locallost]

France didn't fail to maintain, those plants were never meant to run longer than 30 years. Here is the EDF president from 1979, translated [1]:

> In the extract that we offer to you at the head of the article, Marcel Boiteux described what could be the probable origin of the appearance of cracks in the conduits leading to the tanks, in particular the differences in temperatures. A risk clearly identified from this time as shown by his words: « these tanks are subjected to thermal cycles. When the factory is in full power, it is hot, when it is in low power, it is cold ». The temperature of the water heated by the fission of the uranium atoms reaching according to him at 350 ° C ( it is in fact 320 ° C ). He continued: « The result is that the steel is diluted by heat and contracted when it is less hot. And it is this thermal respiration that is involved. »

> EDF president wanted to be reassuring, stressing that these risks were minimal, insofar as the power stations have a shorter lifespan than that where corrosion of the steel and the appearance of cracks would appear. The longevity of the steel had been calculated « per 12,000 cycles. According to him, there was no risk that this deadline would be exceeded. It was « totally excluded », he said.

> Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber, who was conducting the interview, asked him to specify the effective duration planned for a power plant: « 12,000 days a power plant ? That is to say 40 years ? ». Marcel Boiteux confirmed this estimate, even minimizing it: « Yes, just over 30 years old. »

I don't want to look at UAE, I live in Western Europe. All of the countries comparable to the country I live in are facing exploding costs and incredible time delays. That nuclear builds don't get cheaper as you build more of them is a well documented phenomenon, we have 70 years of proof.

[1] https://www.ina.fr/ina-eclaire-actu/president-edf-risque-fis...

[dermesser]

Had they done what you say, by now they still would not have decided on a location. Just look at the delays and cost overruns with Finland's reactor - and that's with popular support.

[panick21_]

Finland where now green nuclear will be a very large part of their energy mix for the next 100 years? How sad ...

Again, anybody who looks at nuclear other then threw trying to prove its bad, will figure out that 1 off builds are expensive. Had Europe with German/French leadership agree on a single plant design and started building it all over Europe we could be building these plants in 5 years or less of build time.

France in the 70/80s managed to find locations. I turns out that local populations actually love their local nuclear power plants. People living close to nuclear are far more pro nuclear then anywhere else.

The promise of jobs, improvement in rail infrastructure and cheap electricity convinces more villages that it is a good idea then people would think.

France faced a lot of opposition to their plan in the 70/80s and yet they found lots of locations and the population there are the most pro nuclear people now.

Its funny how people always call for European cooperation but EU universally building the same nuclear plant 100+ times was not considered. There is no question that this could have been done at a very low unit cost price. If you build that many with the same work force, and supply chain the price drops massively.

[nickpp]

Most of those costs are because of onerous regulations and lack of competition due to... you guessed it: onerous governmental regulations.

[pydry]

If the ~$800 billion cleanup costs of a Fukushima event werent fully borne by taxpayers then maybe the safety regulations wouldnt have to be as onerous.

But they are, and Ive never heard of a single pro nuclear advocate ever argue that nuclear power is safe enough that this enormous subsidy should be unwound. They generally pretend it doesnt exist.

Meanwhile solar/wind/storage is a lot cheaper even without taking this subsidy into account.

[panick21_]

Funny how anti-nuclear people never admit that the last 30 years of anti nuclear opposition have lead to 1000s of deaths, 100000s of people less health and more cost then any theoretical nuclear accident.

Its totally ok to argue that the government should have shared responsibility for health care. But arguing that government should control the energy production in a sensible way and adopt the risk for that is somehow crazy. And yet they end up doing it anyway as we have seen in the recent crisis.

Had the government simply adopted a nuclear strategy from the beginning it would be vastly cheaper, population would be vastly healthier, grid operation would be far easier and energy security for the next 100 years would not even remotely be in question. It wouldn't have forced the German right to make a devils deal with Russia and the Left would have gotten their carbon free grid.

[largepeepee]

"the last 30 years of anti nuclear opposition have lead to 1000s of deaths, 100000s of people less health and more cost then any theoretical nuclear accident."

Where are you pulling these numbers from? Your ass?

The last 30 years were also one of best times to be alive as an average person on the globe generally.

How nuclear idiots can spin everything negatively is pretty funny.

[kelseyfrog]

It's the number of excessive deaths due to coal fired power plants in the US per year(~3000). Anyone can search for that and critique the methodology.

[locallost]

Nuclear has failed for now 70 years to change anything. It's because it plainly doesn't work. Worldwide only one country has managed to produce the vast majority of its electricity from nuclear and even this country is faltering right now. The french electricity company is deeply in debt, was nationalized as a consequence of it and just posted a 20 billion loss for last year. The plants are reaching their end of life, the prototype replacement in Flamanville is a national embarrassment and is now over a decade and over 10 billion over budget.

If the world decides to go all in on nuclear it would take decades to decarbonize a tiny percentage of the grid and horrendous costs.

[nickpp]

The world doesn’t have to decide to go "all in" on anything. It can simply lift all the unnecessary burdens it placed on the nuclear industry and let the free market sort out the best solution, like always.

If nuclear works for the world's subs, it works on land too. It will probably be a mix of energy sources anyway, each with its own strengths and weaknesses and it’s own place in ecosystem.

[pydry]

>If nuclear works for the world's subs, it works on land too.

Kind of like saying that if solar panels work on the ISS then they work on land too.

It's surface level true while missing the broader issue.

[locallost]

In that case nuclear is completely dead. There probably hasn't been a nuclear power plant built without government subsidies in history. French nuclear for instance is essentially bankrupt because they can't even run them let alone build new ones, so the government nationalized it last year.

But sure, get rid of all subsidies on everything and let the market sort it out. We can agree on that.

[panick21_]

> Nuclear has failed for now 70 years to change anything.

Its almost as if nobody tries to do something it doesn't happen, shocking insight.

> It's because it plainly doesn't work.

Except that its actually proven to work and renewables are not proven to work. Because there is actually a major world industrial economy that worked on nearly 100% nuclear and there is not such a nation that runs on only renewables.

So maybe if there is prove of anything, its that one works the other doesn't.

> The plants are reaching their end of life

Complete nonsense ... there are many far older plant operating. Nuclear reactors can run 80-100 years.

> the prototype replacement

Like the innovative Superphénix that was killed of by the Green-Leftis coalition.

> was nationalized as a consequence

France has had 40 decades of the lowest energy prices in Europe and still has very low cost. All the construction cost of the whole nuclear fleet were on the books of the utility and were paid off over decades. If French utility was allowed to charge as much as energy prices in Germany, it would be wildly profitable.

The French state forced them to invested profit from nuclear into solar that hurt their own networks operation and also forced them to cheaply sell bulk nuclear electricity to support fossil and then the utility had to buy that capacity back at a way higher price, losing billions in the process.

France has for 25 years now had governments that didn't like nuclear, they have let go the whole industrial base that built up. The were so spoiled by nuclear that they didn't do any of the basic maintenance and upgrades done in pretty much every country in the world (including ironically Germany). Had they just done so, they wouldn't have had any of the problems they had last year.

France treated its amazing nuclear capacity from the 70/80s like the tree in 'The Giving Tree'. The reality of course is France saved incredibly amounts of money in their health care system because they had 50 years of nuclear rather then 50 years of coal. Nuclear in France was one of the best energy policies ever done by anybody.

> If the world decides to go all in on nuclear it would take decades to decarbonize a tiny percentage of the grid and horrendous costs.

Lets look at a case study, UAE. They decided in 2009 to do nuclear, first plant active in 2020 and finishing 1 reactor a year. So a nation with no nuclear and no experience in 1 year will have 25% nuclear and these plants will last 100 years or more. The could have just continued this and by 2030 the could have 100% nuclear. But this is political.

Let me do some basic math for you. Even at the still high unit prices UAE was charged. Starting in the year ~2000, when Germany really adopted 'Grünewende'. At that point they had 20% of well functioning nuclear. At that point the total cost of going 100% nuclear in Germany, even with a very high very conservative cost of 5 billion $ per plant, for like 250 billion Germany could have gone 100% electric. That is approximately 5% increase in debt to GDP. Realistically it would be much less as data shows that if you are building many of the same plant with the same workforce it gets vastly cheaper. Germany could have done this in 20-30 years no problem, if France can do it so can Germany. This would have guaranteed Germany clean green energy for the next 100 years or more.

The failure of nuclear was and is about politics, not about the technology.

[nickpp]

The cleanup after a nuclear incident is also regulated through the wazoo. Thus it's expensive, deeply corrupted and probably unnecessary. We'd probably be better off simply closing the area for a couple hundred years until the most radioactive (and thus dangerous) stuff half-lifes away.

Meanwhile coal plants keep spewing slightly radioactive ash into the air and into our lungs and the cost is paid by us all in life expectancy. And soon by our whole civilization in global warming.

[Schroedingersat]

Cool. We'll start with removing the vienna convention.