[f_allwein]

No.

Takes decades to build/ projects run over time and budget/ where would you build?/ where would you store nuclear waste (bonus points for: in your region)?/ contributes little to global energy mix atm/ uranium is limited. Where do you get it from? Etc

[dotancohen]

  > where would you store nuclear waste

This is my favourite objection to nuclear energy. Why wouldn't we just burn the nuclear waste and vent it to the atmosphere? That's acceptable for the fossil fuel industry, so why not for nuclear?

The fact that nuclear energy produces globs of concentrated, easily collected waste is a feature, not a problem. Air pollution from fossil fuels (including radioactive particles) is a leading cause of death worldwide.

[rapsey]

Not only that, that nuclear waste is still incredibly energy dense and could be used in the future, if we actually invested more into developing nuclear technologies.

[rapsey]

Nuclear waste is a hilariously small amount of mass. It takes decades to build because of permitting and excessive regulations, the current UK plant build being one public insanity after another. Mining uranium is not an issue, it is all over the place and so on.

Every one of your points is a non issue, made into a big deal because of ideology.

[expedition32]

Nuclear was built in the 60s and 70s when Europe was still somewhat poor. As countries become decadent standards go up. Folks suddenly have rights and they can afford lawyers. And that house that you want to bulldoze is a half million property.

[lloeki]

>> Takes decades to build/ projects run over time and budget

As much as any large scale energy project.

Per kW it is quite effective.

The implication of GP's reasoning is that were Green not yelling about nuclear these would already be built because the projects would have started long ago.

>> where would you store nuclear waste (bonus points for: in your region)

People don't want solar farms, windmills, or oil rigs in their backyard either. Fun fact, coal emits orders of magnitude more toxic waste (including nuclear!) than nuclear itself; it's just stored in the atmosphere.

Also people largely don't want to cook themselves to death because the atmosphere has turned into a literal oven.

Instead they read the news, yap "oh my god 50degC shadowside that is horrible", turn the newspaper page and Gell-Mann-amnesia-forget about it because it's happening at the other side of the world, comfortably sitting on their couch with their HVAC pumping heat outside further contributing to the problem.

>> contributes little to global energy mix atm

Catch-22. Because there's not enough nuclear reactors.

France has a ~ 70% nuclear 10% renewable 10% fossil 10% hydro mix.

> France generates roughly two-thirds of its electricity from nuclear power, well above the global average of just under 10%. This heavy reliance on nuclear energy allows France to have one of the lowest carbon dioxide emissions per unit of electricity in the world at 85 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour, compared to the global average of 438 grams

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France

>> uranium is limited.

Uranium is aplenty.

> more than antimony, tin, cadmium, mercury, or silver [~40x!], and it is about as abundant as arsenic or molybdenum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium#Occurrence

The problem is enrichment, and it is not even a technical problem. We're doing more difficult things producing nanometer scale compute wafers by the millions.

Nuclear has drawbacks. I don't think it is the endgame. I'm still waiting for anyone to come up with a less bad solution that actually a) addresses nuclear drawbacks and b) works, because all I see is yelling at nuclear and the proposed alternatives are either unobtainium or nothing at all, both equivalent to the status quo that turns the planet into a death trap.

[ZeroGravitas]

>> Takes decades to build/ projects run over time and budget

> As much as any large scale energy project.

We have data on this. Nuclear is not only the energy source most likely to overrun time and cost, it's one of the worst big projects period.

Right up there with big IT and Defence projects, "Nuclear waste storage sites" and "the Olympics".

[modo_mario]

>Nuclear is not only the energy source most likely to overrun time and cost, it's one of the worst big projects period.

Which is a solvable problem. We didn't have these cost and time overruns in the past to this degree. China and other places don't have them much either. I presume they don't set up a board of people and file a tower of paperwork when the lightbulbs in the toilet of an unrelated building are due for replacement but no longer produced.

Imagine if people said renewables were unfeasible and pointed at germany's insane expenditure on it to get only part of the easy output done after decades.

[bonesss]

There’s an ‘interesting’ dichotomy, echoing the original sentiment:

On the one hand environmental issues from oil and coal are creating an existential pressure that requires mass investment and change as a high public priority.

On the other hand the primary cost drivers of the greenest tech to address oil and gas and industrial process heat usage at scale has paperwork and financing issues that are resolvable by MBAs and some straightforward investment strategies.

Existential threats, paper challenges.

Taken at face value, and considering we have mapped out the physics, these ‘environmentalists’ arguing ad nausea about this online want long term entrenchment of high carbon fuel sources and intimate connections between the global economy and oil despots with no real hope of solving transportation, shipping, aviation, or other major drivers of global energy usage in order to prop up half-solutions for electricity to avoid rational investment or cost-control mechanisms in proven scalable nuclear tech.

Stopping a constant cycle of forced First of a Kind construction, regulatory timebombs unaligned with science, and corporate NIMBY campaigns, is the easiest physics breakthrough humanity will ever have to make. It should be an area of obvious victory, not a show-stopping excuse.

… and, not for nothing, but Oil company PR campaigns a few decades back were explicit: they can’t argue climate change away, they can only confuse the issue, push personal responsibility for national policies, and push half solutions that diffuse actual social opposition. All of this angry knee jerking is following that game plan and the substantial greenwashing propaganda those petroleum giants invested heavily in, to the benefit of rich fossil fuel producers and delay of meaningful changes on our greenhouse emissions.

[ZeroGravitas]

China has revised down its nuclear build targets and repeatedly had cost and time overruns on nuclear builds, over decades, with different designs. The data just isn't as public.

They've done better recently by building standardised designs repeatedly.

But done even better on wind and solar.

[modo_mario]

The data is very public for their time spend and verifiably so because they're huge projects and it's quite noticeable when they produce power.

In fact they're one of the main countries pulling the average build time down well below the few notable fuckups in europe recently.

They've also built a number of experimental/new designs and done well.

We did too. And when i read of our fuckups and look at the heaps of nonsensical underlying stories of management and construction in the UK, finland, etc it just seems wild how it can be done like that and be gotten away with.

I've heard of similar in the renewables space (stuff build in contexts/places where it didn't make sense and cost overruns purely for government subsidies) but at least those where individually small fuckups.

[bryanlarsen]

> As much as any large scale energy project

Solar projects are more likely to be under budget than over.