[esarbe]

Ah, yes - "the evil environmentalists." Congratulations, you really torched that straw man.

We stopped building nuclear reactors in the early 1970ies[0], long before there was any large organized civil movement organizing against it - because with the required additional complexity to make them safe, the technology was just too expensive.

(As always - it's the capitalists that messed things up, not civil society.)

Despite having 70 years of progress, nuclear today is more expensive than ever. It just doesn't scale.

France's nuclear operator EDF is €50 billion in debt. They make about €3 billion per year - and have between €150 - €200 billion investments on the table for the next 10 years. Go figure.

[0] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Nuclear-Reactor-Construct...

[fc417fc802]

I'm not sure I agree but lets set that aside for now. Are you seriously suggesting that $50 billion per France equivalent over half a century would have been an unreasonable price to pay to avert climate change? It's just not a logically consistent or even remotely sensible position. The environmentalist movement undeniably got this one wrong and I say that as someone with views that would generally be categorized as such.

[esarbe]

These €50 billion is just what EDF is in debt, not what building and operating these reactors actually cost. Just in the next 10 years EDF will have in invest about €150-200 billion to replace and refurbish their reactors. That's just to keep the current capacity, not to expand it.

Unfortunately "the environmentalist movement" didn't have the information regarding the dangers of climate change and the information about the near-zero threat from low level nuclear radiation in 1970ies. Hindsight is 20/20.

That said; planning and construction of new nuclear reactors peaked in the early 1970ies, before large scale accidents (Three Mile Island and Chernobyl) really mobilized civil society against nuclear power.

The reason the West stopped building is because even with state support, it's not such a financially attractive investment. That's why "the East" continued building more and more reactors until the big incident. (Arguably their reactors were also much less safe and thus probably cheaper by quite a bit.)

[uxp100]

I mostly agree with your larger point, but the anti-nuclear movement predates the 70s by quite a bit.

[TimorousBestie]

> Congratulations, you really torched that straw man.

Who are we to begrudge a man his decade-long windmills-tilting: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...