[m101]

It is depressing reading hacker news threads on nuclear power because of just how misinformed so many people still are. These things are all true, and it's on the reader for not knowing:

- nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power

- nuclear waste is not a problem

- nuclear energy comes in many forms. Not only high pressure reactors

- we are all going to be poorer, and live in a more polluted, higher CO2 world, because of all the people that choose to not inform themselves about the truth on nuclear

- the harms from radiation exposure are mostly precisely zero, and require large exposure to be non-zero

There really is no excuse for people to be misinformed. If you actually want to understand this issue start here, but there are many other sources out there that can also help:

gordianknotbook.com

Or the substack:

substack.com/@jackdevanney

[SXX]

Biggest problem is that people not aware of how many closed down or not built nuclear power plants been replaced with coal power plants.

And coal kills more people in a week than all nuclear incidents killed in all history of humanity.

Not even mention that coal power plants release more radioactive materials too.

[pfdietz]

Which nuclear plants were replaced with coal plants?

If you say "German plants", I'll point out coal consumption for power generation in Germany has gone down since the decision to phase out nuclear.

Coal consumption would likely have gone down even more with nuclear still being used, but that doesn't support your claim as stated.

[jrflowers]

That’s a strange way of wording “Germany burns more coal today than they would be if they hadn’t replaced their nuclear power plants with coal power plants”. Jumbling up the word order doesn’t make Germany replacing their nuclear plants with coal plants a good thing.

[pfdietz]

No, it's not a good thing, but it's also not an example of the claim that countries replaced nuclear with coal.

Still waiting on those countries from the previous poster.

[jrflowers]

What do you call it when you turn off a nuclear power plant and then turn on a coal power plant? This isn’t rocket surgery.

If Germany eventually got more renewables, great. That does not retroactively mean that they didn’t replace nuclear with coal. That’s just replacing nuclear with coal and then doing something else afterward.

It’s like if someone left their first wife and got married to someone else, then did that a second time, you wouldn’t say that, based on who they’re married to today, they left their first wife for their third. That intermediate step happened.

[pfdietz]

> What do you call it when you turn off a nuclear power plant and then turn on a coal power plant? This isn’t rocket surgery.

Still waiting for examples of countries that did that.

Also, that's not replacing nuclear with coal. Plants age out and are replaced even if one is not replacing one kind with the other. We retire pickup trucks and build sports cars; that doesn't mean sports cars are replacing pickup trucks.

[SXX]

This is not just about specific plants. Its about the fact that deployment of nuclear slowed down dramatically in last 30 years.

Coal is still generating a third of whole world power and polluting everywhere a lot.

[pfdietz]

Well if that was what it was about, it's what you should have said, instead of lying about nuclear plants being replaced by coal plants.

[Moldoteck]

Germany has coal and no nuclear? Each MW of closed nuclear could have erased that coal. As simple as that. You can come with mental gymnastics but it doesnt change the fact Germany still has coal.

[pfdietz]

Yes, it could have. But coal didn't replace nuclear. These are different concepts.

[KennyBlanken]

The reason people are not aware of it is because it's utter tripe.

In the US, coal generation has been falling for twenty years because it's more expensive than wind and solar. Same reason nuclear is being phased out - grid operators can get power cheaper via wind, solar, import/export, and battery storage.

[otterley]

That may be true for the USA, but there's the rest of the world to consider. China and India were both increasing their coal generation year after year until, well, just this past year: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi...

[dalyons]

Last two years for china. But yes? That’s because renewables finally got great. They’re momentum is not expected to slow down

[m101]

https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/nuclear-power-is-too-saf...

[therealdrag0]

Random fun fact: the mercury in fish you want to avoid is mostly because of coal burning!

[locallost]

I have a better list:

* every dollar spent on building new nuclear will be put to use so late it effectively increases CO2 emissions

* A country like Poland is the biggest emissions perpetrator in Europe, and the fact they are building nuclear means they will stay that way for literally decades

* The fossil fuel exporter countries are pushing nuclear as their agenda. Why do you think that is?

* Not a single country has a working permanent solution currently for waste storage.

* The UK cannot clean up Sellafield at all. They had the bright idea to process waste and are now sitting in hundreds of billions of pounds of estimated costs to dispose of it.

[Moldoteck]

every $ spent on not building nuclear results in higher CO2 emissions due to gas firming.

Germany plans gas expansion to firm renewables.

* Antinuclear movement resulted in DK/DE having worse emissions vs France/Sweden even today.

* Finland will give final authorization for Onkalo this summer https://qazinform.com/news/finland-set-to-launch-worlds-firs... Sweden already started construction at Fosmark. But ultimately conceptually it's not much different from Herfa Neurode

* Most of Sellafield problems are from nuclear weapon test experiments with esoteric waste, not classic commercial reactor waste.

Your list is kinda weak

[locallost]

Germany replaced 2/3 of its coal use in 25 years while simultaneously inventing a whole new industry and a new way of thinking (some people still fail to understand it). This way of thinking has led to hundreds of gigawatts of new clean capacity per year in the last few years and continuously growing. This has already now been way more beneficial to mankind than nuclear has achieved in the last 60 years. The biggest problem in the world right now are people actively resisting this by wasting time and money. Poland could be on Germany's level right now for a fraction of the cost because Germany already did the heavy lifting for the whole world, but they refuse to do so on political and ideological grounds. This is a big problem, the biggest problem we have right now.

But anyway: Danke Deutschland

As for Finland and Onkalo, so my list is correct and there is no country in the world with a working permanent solution right now? Or have we invented time travel and are currently in later this summer period of the year?

Most of Sellafield's problem are related to faulty thinking that we'll figure it out no big deal, which is the exact attitude I was commenting on. But sometimes you don't figure it out later as they found out. Don't let it happen to you.

[Moldoteck]

No it didn't replace 2/3 of coal. Coal demand dropped as consumption dropped and Germany became net importer down from exporting 60+TWh/y

The claim of what Germany did for humanity was more beneficial is such a farce considering it's emissions

Your claim about repository somewhat implies that since there isn't a repository there will not he one which is bullshit. Humanity has tons of repositories for handling dangerous substances, herfa Neurode being a good example. Onkalo will soon get final permit. Fosmark is under construction. You are making this sound like some world ending problem

As said. Most of sellafield problems are from weapons testing era which both created waste of various kind ehich was not stored accordingly. This has nothing to do with commercial operation of commercial plants where final waste "type" is more or less the same, just like how it should be isolated.

[locallost]

Germany was a net importer of around 20TWh of electricity in 2025. If you want to tack that on be my guest, but coal use is still 2/3 down since 2000. It was in the 300TWh range then and it's now in the 90TWh range.

The only farce in the energy world I can see is that a positive example of emissions reduction like Germany is being singled out on ideological and political grounds, whereas the biggest offenders get a free pass. Examples are Poland which will accomplish nothing for 25 years despite the technology being cheap and available, and globally the US which reduced coal use by almost completely switching to gas instead of renewables like Germany, and additionally it uses almost twice per capital than Germany. Basically Germany could be 100% fossil fuels for electricity and be less bad than the US. Wild no?

My claim about the repository is that there isn't one since 60-70 years nuclear has been used worldwide as an energy source. Instead of wasting time interpreting what I mean, you should just ask me. My answer is: it might not be technologically infeasible (I don't know), but it's expensive and politically difficult since nobody wants to store it. That's just the reality of life -- technology is not deployed in a fantasy but in reality. In general, nuclear is a fantasy technology where large problems are handwaved away as if meaningless, but are difficult to tackle. For Sellafield I already said what I had to say. You either understand it or you don't.

All this maybe made sense 50 years ago, but we have better options now. And despite the occasional brouhaha the world is marching on without it. We'll soon have clean cheap energy and nobody will remember this failed attempt, nobody will remember coal, nobody will remember Trump trying to slow down the transition.

Made in Germany.

[chinathrow]

Can you elaborate why waste is not a problem?

[m101]

Ok, in my own words it's something like this:

- nuclear waste, after a period of the order of ~10e2/3 years is only dangerous if ingested. So it's as dangerous as any other poisonous substance after that point. There is no need for radiation shielding from that point.

- nuclear waste is very dense and so physical surface storage is cheap, and a solved problem (see: dry storage casks). We can fix leaks if/when they happen. Waste is concentrated

- current nuclear power stations (light water reactors) burn about 3% of their fuel leaving 97% unused in waste. There are nuclear power solutions which would burn most of the fuel (leaving very little for waste). So if we developed these technologies (see molton salt reactors being one of them) then nuclear waste would no longer be called "waste" as it would suddently become an extremely valuable feedstock for use in reactors.

- related to the prior point: why is it that we think we will not find a use for this very valuable and rare reasource in the future. We should think of nuclear "waste" storage as "rare element storage" which will be very useful under some states of the world. We just don't know how yet.

- as with any technology it should also be compared to the alternative when considering it's fitness: waste from the alternatives is far worse

[lemoncucumber]

~10e2/3 is a very unclear what of writing whatever number you're trying to write

[m101]

100-1000 years order of magnitude. I can't remember exactly, but it's well within our ability to engineer and manage, rather than the signs that try to answer the "how do we communicate danger to later species" types of timelines

[chinathrow]

That is a not solved timeframe, at all. We might have a war at a storage facility for years and everything falls apart.

[chinathrow]

If... we developed... that is not the definition of solved.

[Czarcasm]

In 2015-2016 I did some mechanical engineering work at BWXT, designing nuclear waste containers for the Bruce Power CANDU reactor refurbishment program.

I learned that the spent fuel storage is pretty trivial for a few reasons:

1. The amount of fuel waste produced by a reactor is volumetrically tiny. So it's not too expensive to just have a relatively small guarded yard of sealed storage casks next to the reactor, where the fuel can sit and decay until safe for offsite disposal (typically around 60 years).

2. Safe waste storage containers are relatively easy to make. Most containers only need to be a thick stainless steel inner liner and a stainless steel outer liner filled with a special mixture of concrete. The nuclear waste is dropped in, the lid is bolted shut, then the container can be safely left in a guarded open yard for >100 years. They are safe by virtue of just having ridiculously thick welded stainless steel walls. We designed them to fall off a train going over a bridge, fall 300ft onto solid rock, and not break.

3. Reactor technology keeps getting better at extracting more energy from fuel. So what was "waste" in a past decade, can be put back into a reactor that is better at pulling energy out of the fuel. For this reason, there hasn't actually been much actual "fuel waste" in the history of the nuclear industry. It's all just being stored for future use by better reactors.

[doodledoodahs]

What about the waste inherent in decommissioning plants?

[moffkalast]

Why would you decommission them after all that investment instead of re-fitting? What would the ecological consequences would be if you demolished the Hoover Dam? Some things just have to be built to last as long as they physically can.

[m101]

For the parts of the plant that cannot be put into landfill then storage like any other waste. Given how long they last, and how much energy they output, the waste is still very low per unit energy. Try this:

https://gordianknotbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/gordi...

[duped]

Here's a decent page outlining how the industry deals with waste:

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

Basically, nuclear waste from power generation is a much smaller problem than people assume it to be, the solutions for managing it are already in place, and there have been few/if any accidents that have ever caused contamination from waste disposal.

Also I'm not an industry shill, but orphan sources from industrial/medical radiography have killed and injured more people than nuclear plants and their waste. Yet there's hardly the amount of opposition to those systems that you see for nuclear power, despite nuclear power having a far more significant impact on the healthiness and stability of global populations if we stopped banning it.

[legitster]

They could do what the fossil fuel industry does and just disperse it into the atmosphere until it disappears behind background radiation.

Realistically deep geologic storage is absolutely fine, and even if it's not happening now, all of the waste can be safely stored above ground for hundreds of years.

[WalterBright]

After the Fukushima disaster, radioactivity was detected in the seawater off the west cost of America. This, of course, threw people into a panic, despite being detectable only with very sensitive equipment and was not a danger to anyone or anything.

[legitster]

To be more specific, you would not have been able to detect Fukushima waste based on radioactivity, as the radioactivity would not have been detectable above the normal background radiation.

They could only identify the waste by it's distinct radiological profile. Otherwise it was just another source amongst millions of ionizing radiation that bathes us every day.

[WalterBright]

> They could only identify the waste by it's distinct radiological profile.

Which is what happened.

[m101]

https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/600-year-old-spent-nucle...

[Kon5ole]

I feel the same frustration but for the opposite reason. I am entirely confident you must be misinformed, not me.

I suggest you read actual bookkeeping statements from nuclear operators, national budget items, historical records about radiation incidents, nuclear deposits, agreement texts and the like, instead of reading books that can only be true if they adhere to the information in such sources.

- nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power

It it is inherent to nuclear power, because you really need to spend the money and effort to keep it safe. It's very dangerous.

Here is where people usually say "but stats show it's killed fewer people per GWh generated than other sources". But that's not relevant at all. Nuclear power is dangerous entirely independently of that statistic. The reason so few have died is precisely that we spend all that money keeping it safe!

A gun is dangerous even before you shoot someone with it. It's not safe because nobody has shot it yet.

Science will tell you in detail what would happen if radioactive waste was spread in a populated area. There is so much information, please read up on it. So far it hasn't happened. Even Chernobyl was very far from a worst-case scenario.

- nuclear waste is not a problem

Of course it is. Malicious actors can kill millions with the amount of nuclear waste generated daily.

The US gov spends millions per year guarding abandoned nuclear waste. They don't do it for no reason.

Again, you need to realize that it is actually dangerous. That's why it's expensive. You need to spend LOTS of money to keep it safe.

- the harms from radiation exposure are mostly precisely zero, and require large exposure to be non-zero

Not even remotely true, some examples, from a very long list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident

People have died from radiation exposure every decade since it was discovered. People die from minutes of exposure to barely visible amounts of radioactive elements.

Please follow your inclination to be informed. Don't take my word, don't take Jacks, go to the records of actual events and base your opinion on that.

My take - In 2026 we have developed a type of glass that can fetch electricity entirely for free from sunshine and store it in a container of the most abundant element on earth, or even use the surplus carbon from the atmosphere to generate synthetic fuel that can store energy for years.

That's where we should spend time, money and effort.

[Moldoteck]

Nuclear was safe even considering gen2 units which were not subject to all curent requirements. But the biggest impact is supply chain, not regulation.

"Of course it is. Malicious actors can kill millions with the amount of nuclear waste generated daily." - ah yes. And a meteor can kill the entire earth. What's the possibility?

Entire US interim storage of commercial waste costs merely 0.5bn/y until a final repository is built like in Finland. That's dirt cheap.

Nuclear is statistically safe as you said, even accounting with major incidents. Nuclear requires least mining, materials, land per kwh - can be proven too and has one of the lowest env impact per UNECE.

It's your choice to be antinuclear but the data is clear - have the world followed the french/swedish path - we'll not talk about climate change in it's current form. We also know what an antinuclear path leads to - both in Germany and even Denmark which still can't reach french emissions and started pissing off neighbors montelnews.com/news/0138d712-3afd-4590-883e-4b9221fd776a/norways-ruling-party-rejects-renewal-of-denmark-cables https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-pauses-plans-...

[Kon5ole]

>And a meteor can kill the entire earth. What's the possibility?

Both are a possibility but we can't make choices about the meteors. ;-)

Nuclear incidents due to negligence or malice are many orders of magnitude more likely, and get more likely the more waste we make and the longer we keep making it.

Europe was a bombed wasteland less than 100 years ago. Luckily that was before nuclear power plants.

Have a look at the situation in Sellafield, or the Asse II mine. Negligence has caused problems many times already.

Chernobyl is in the news recently due to drone strikes. Had it been a solar plant it wouldn't have been.

Anyway - the point is that the expensive security efforts and precautions are needed, not optional, and the historical safety record is no guarantee for future safety.

>We also know what an antinuclear path leads to

Not yet - we can hope that it leads to solar, batteries and synthesized fuels.

China has shown that it is possible, which was the last hurdle IMO. Now it's just a matter of doing it.

[Moldoteck]

Sellafield problems are due to weapons testing era.

Asse is an experimental facility without plans to extract the waste if experiment fails. Still, no public was or will be harmed since it's mostly LLW, 75% for medical and research sectors. It has nothing to do with proper deep geological repository like Onkalo. It costed 1bn to build and will cost 4bn to operate for a century with periodical topups. That's dirt cheap considering amount of power from nuclear in that period.

Nobody was affected by recent Chernobyl strikes. The tragedy there is of another kind- damaged outer dome which is expensive and equipment that was prepared to start corium cleanup was damaged, postponing the process.

Security efforts are not that expensive if compared to amount of power

China is still one of the worst global polluters and is expanding coal to use it to firm renewables. It also expands nuclear but nowhere near at the rate of France during Messmer or swedish BWR expansion. Synth fuel is nothing more than an expensive pipedream.

[m101]

I am not sure you have actually closely read what I have said.

Early nuclear builds were cheaper to build:

https://gordianknotbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/essay...

Spent fuel is mostly reusable:

https://gordianknotbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/gordi...

Low-dose radiation risk is a contested harm:

https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-two-lies-that-killed...

And no, solar is NOT free..............

[Kon5ole]

>I am not sure you have actually closely read what I have said.

I am very familiar with the arguments you link to, they are repeated often in these discussions but they don't hold up to scrutiny.

The key mistake for most of these arguments is that nuclear waste is harmless and nuclear plants are safe on their own and don't need to be kept safe at great costs.

Any argument that rests on that idea is not going to hold up.

Just to take one example - one argument presented is basically that nuclear waste only requires a few acres of land where you can place dry casks, then you're good.

Try to find actual scientific and financial support for that idea from anyone else than the author.

>Early nuclear builds were cheaper to build:

Early cars were too, for many of the same reasons. Lower wages, worse quality, less safety.

>Spent fuel is mostly reusable:

How do you handle it while it is being reused? Does it become harmless after being reused or do we still need to deal with it for longer than the US has existed as a nation?

>Low-dose radiation risk is a contested harm:

Low-dose is not what we're talking about here. A kilo of nuclear waste in a van filled with fertilizer is not a contested harm, it's a nightmare scenario.

>And no, solar is NOT free

Building is not free of course but it has no running costs once built.

Nuclear has immense running costs, and they can't be stopped entirely. Even after it has been decommissioned and the company who made the plant has gone bankrupt it keeps costing society money.

[m101]

I don't really see why you think nuclear waste is a large storage problem. If you don't like that website, and as you requested, here's another government resource so i can't be accused of being biased (the government also made the rules here):

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...

"If we take that a step further, U.S. commercial reactors have generated about 90,000 metric tons of spent fuel since the 1950s. If all of it were able to be stacked together, it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards."

"Spent" fuel these days is 95%+ the same as the original fuel. If fully recycled then nuclear waste volumes could therefore be reduced 20x from where they are today. So that 10 yards deep would be 2 feet deep.

Most costs are actually self imposed. There is no reason for nuclear not to be the cheapest form of energy out there. If you don't like my original website, please see this one, which talks about the "regulatory ratchet". Regulations were increased on a highly profitable (read: cheap) sector until the industry was no longer profitable (read: as expensive as it is today)

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html

I don't see why nuclear waste would ever make it into fertilizer.

The problem with nuclear and your cars analogy is that with cars the data is pretty clear that new cars are safer than old - this is not at all clear in nuclear!

[durandal1]

The only fair way to compare the cost to solar and wind, is if wind and solar producers would have to make power guarantees 24/7 and cover the cost of the production gaps (hint: this makes solar and wind very expensive).

[Matumio]

Not sure if that's fair. Sometimes the sun actually does shine, and while you won't get rich selling energy during that time, having electricity available essentially for free during some of the peak hours is worth something. Someone will eventually find a use for free energy. If nothing else, at least we can turn off all coal, gas and oil plants while the sun shines.

[m101]

When the sun shines sure you can power down other power stations, but you still need to maintain them and have them around for when the sun doesn't shine. So when you have lots of intermittent energy it means that you actually cannot shelve your old technology - you still have to maintain it, but now you're paying for the maintenance over less capacity used. This is only one of the reasons why prices are going up in heavy renewable grids.

[kieranmaine]

For UK specific electricity costs I'd recommend looking at https://www.electricitybills.uk/

The UK is a grid that is adding lots of renewables and building some nuclear plants, so the site provides good data around the costs for the added transmission, storage and subsidies (for both renewables and nuclear) needed for a renewables heavy grid supplemented with nuclear.

* Forecast cost for 2030: https://www.electricitybills.uk/2030

* Source data is here https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SHuFAtxxKUf3Q2b7usoT...

[Moldoteck]

it's perfectly fair. The goal is to have decarbonized electricity when you need it, not only randomly. Countries solve this with gas, see DE

[WalterBright]

> we can turn off all coal, gas and oil plants while the sun shines.

Those plants are not designed to be turned on and off, and both must be done gradually and carefully to avoid cracking the turbines.

[crote]

Gas peaker plants are designed to be turned on and off regularly. They can go from cold shutdown to full load in less than an hour, with some able to do it in less than 10 minutes[0].

A decent bunch of that is going to be sheer inertia as you have to spin up a heavy chunk of metal. Keep that rotating (which is actually a good thing in renewable-heavy grids!) and it can be done even faster. Similarly, keeping some parts warm costs very little energy and allows even faster ramp=up.

But that's actually not relevant because battery storage is far more attractive for that kind of short-term demand. The renewable grid will need gas plants which can fill in the gap left when it is both dark and wind-less - which due to meteorology is trivially known 72 hours in advance, leaving plenty of time to prepare the plant for use.

[0]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45956

[dalyons]

And I’m supposed to care? Old tech will be pushed off the grid by cheap renewables, and rapid dispatch gas will remain. Sounds great.

[m101]

If only that were not just the start of the issue. Regulation means nuclear is probably an order of magnitude more expensive than it could be.

[gpm]

> - nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power

Nuclear power is fundamentally expensive. It's large pieces of infrastructure, involving handling and securing extremely dangerous materials.

Solar panels, wind, and batteries have all dropped in price so much that solar backed by batteries to create stable powers (and/or wind doing the same, or a mix), is in the vast majority of the world vastly cheaper than nuclear.

> - nuclear energy comes in many forms. Not only high pressure reactors

All of which are fundamentally expensive.

> - we are all going to be poorer, and live in a more polluted, higher CO2 world, because of all the people that choose to not inform themselves about the truth on nuclear

Every kw of nuclear production we create is resources we could have instead put into adding more than 1 kw of solar backed with batteries at this point. Moreover the other renewables would come online and displace fossil fuel usage faster. Thus spending money on nuclear results in a more polluted higher CO2 world, not the other way around.

There was a time when nuclear was the cheapest way to build clean energy, that time has passed and isn't coming back.

> - the harms from radiation exposure are mostly precisely zero, and require large exposure to be non-zero

Many people have died from radiation exposure. Many people have gotten cancer from radiation exposure years later. Many many square kilometers of earth have been rendered uninhabitable by distribution of radioactive isotopes. This is misinformation and spreading it is frankly dangerous. A very healthy dose of respect is required whenever handling radioactive materials and people should not be told otherwise.

[legitster]

> Nuclear power is fundamentally expensive. It's large pieces of infrastructure, involving handling and securing extremely dangerous materials.

The actual operating costs are extremely low. Most of the cited $/kwh figures include the capital costs of the extreme 10+ year approval process. There's also no economies of scale right now.

If you add up all of the deaths directly from radiation exposure in the nuclear power industry it's literally 31 - and 28 came from Chernobyl. It's a fraction of rounding error compared to every other energy type.

Nearly all of the dangers of radiation were cooked up by the oil and gas industry based on a series of now discredited fruit fly studies in the 1950s.

[gpm]

Chernobyl killed 30 or 31 directly (i.e. acute radiation poisoning), and thousands indirectly (i.e. cancer) though the count for that is disputed... I don't know where your 28 number comes from but there's no dispute that the direct number is higher than that...

There's been a handful of other purely civilian disasters that killed people with radiation from sources meant for nuclear power, and a large number of military ones.

But if we're looking for civilian radiation deaths the majority outside of Chernobyl aren't nuclear power, they're radiotherapy, because the nuclear power industry was appropriately regulated after the early mass casualty events resulting from military nuclear reactors (e.g. the Kyshtym disaster at 200 to 8000 deaths) and the Windscale Fire at (100 to 240 deaths) and it's harder to regulate the more wildly distributed health care applications.

That we're handling things with appropriate care isn't evidence that they're not dangerous.

[legitster]

> and thousands indirectly (i.e. cancer) though the count for that is disputed

That's the thing, these numbers have been extremely inflated. The LNT model we've used for nuclear safety has never withstood any serious scrutiny. If anything, we've learned humans are extremely resilient to non-acute exposure.

Excess death numbers at places like Fukushima and Chernobyl have found almost no noticeable change in cancer rates, even for people with serious exposure.

Ironically, if you compare excess death numbers to traditional fuel sources (coal, gas, etc) they are much worse.

[m101]

https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/nuclear-is-too-expensive

https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/what-is-nuclears-should-...

https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-two-lies-that-killed...

https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-case-for-1-msv-per-d...

[yodelshady]

Batteries cost > $100 / kWh, the industry still considers that a target to brag about: https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/lithium-ion-...

This is WHOLESALE BOM price, which is about as useful as the price of uranium.

That is horrifically expensive.

[gpm]

$100 / kWh capacity, over 10000 cycles, is $0.01 kWh delivered. It's dirt cheap.

Also that's not the cost though. You're looking at vehicle packs not stationary storage packs at that cost. We've seen stationary storage packs get down to $50/kWh last year - with an average pack price of $70: https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/new-record-l...

And prices continue to decay. Those are the most expensive prices you'll ever see going forwards.

And there's other benefits. Batteries distribute well, letting us lower grid related costs by making more constant use of the chokepoints in the grid for instance.

[Moldoteck]

So ABWR is fundamentally expensive? So is Hualong?

"Every kw of nuclear production we create is resources we could have instead put into adding more than 1 kw of solar backed with batteries at this point. Moreover the other renewables would come online and displace fossil fuel usage faster. Thus spending money on nuclear results in a more polluted higher CO2 world, not the other way around." - what a nice nonsense argument. With the same success I can say without nuclear - if you build ren and keep fossils for firming, you'll pollute in fact more over time, because you'll still use them. That's also why DE wants to expand gas capacity. And this plan was laid out not by CDU but Fraunhofer ISE itself

Not that many died from rad exposure or cancers from power plants. I mean, depends with what you compare. Entire Chernobyl deaths are expected to be 4k or less depending on data. That's how many ppl die in Germany in 2y from car accidents. That's probably how many died from early phaseout of nuclear https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10640-025-01002-z

You are right that radioactive material still needs special handling. Just like many other toxic materials like https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj6nly288j4o

[shin_lao]

Could you please read the resources above that debunk the points you just made?

[LinXitoW]

What choices make nuclear expensive that we could actually get rid of WITHOUT IMMEDIATELY increasing risk (which is low because of regulation)?

Moreover, it's crazy that so much regulation was provably written in blood paid by workers and public after a company got greedy. Sure, let's build 50 AND reduce regulations.

Finally, the biggest fucking thing: It is MORE expensive NOW than the green alternatives, AND green energy has proven over the years to actually keep it's promises of improvements, compared to fission and SMRs, which are always just 5 years away.

[MobiusHorizons]

Renewables have been incredibly effective at providing more capacity at good cost, but they still have drawbacks. Aside from the obvious variability everyone harps on, location does play a nontrivial role. Switzerland is not as good a candidate for solar or wind as many other countries due to constraints in usable land and availability (valleys have more shade than steppes for instance). I don’t think anyone needs to be saying no to renewables when they consider investing in nuclear. The two technologies serve very different purposes in an electric grid. Base load is still a problem even with battery storage, and it makes a lot of sense to have reliable power available that is not from fossil fuels to deal with that demand. There is plenty of fossil fuel based generation to replace, it doesn’t have to all be nuclear or renewables, in fact all one or the other doesn’t make much sense.

It’s true nuclear is expensive. It’s also true a lot of that expense was the regulation that has made it so incredibly safe. It’s unlikely a cheaper but still safe enough compromise will be reached in countries with existing regulatory structures quickly, but there is certainly room to improve over time.

[m101]

The Gordian Knot and Jack Devanney's website is a goldmine of information which will address almost any question anybody has on the subject.

[m101]

https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/how-can-nrc-style-regula...

[Forgeties79]

> the harms from radiation exposure are mostly precisely zero

You had me until this. “Mostly precisely”? What does that even mean man?

[m101]

The reason is that your body has mechanisms to fix the problems of radiation. For example, when you drop a stone in water would you say that you "break the surface of the water"?

Our DNA is very similar - DNA damage occurs naturally. Our body has processes that fix DNA strand breaks. Radiation that occurs because of most exposure that has ever occurred is so minimal that the body's natural defences against radiation damange means that the harm is precisely zero. The body literally repaired itself much like that water surface repairs itself.

Harm does occur however when the rate of radiation exposure exceeds our body's ability to repair itself. However this threshold is well above any threshold we regulate around.

For more information the key words are "dna double strand breaks" and "LNT vs SNT"

[lloeki]

I read it thusly: not "(mostly precisely) zero" but "mostly (precisely zero)"

i.e in most reasonable cases the risk is exactly zero and conversely it takes extreme scenarios for the risk to be non-zero.

[pfdietz]

Yes, we know nuclear is actually super great, because of all the merchant nuclear plants that have been built around the world.

Here is a complete list of those plants:

[m101]

Nuclear used to be built cheaply, before regulatory uncertainty made private construction effectively impossible:

https://gordianknotbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/essay...

[pfdietz]

You can't look at the early plants built in the US that were "turnkey" plants. These were bid at prices not reflecting what they would cost to build, but what was necessary to compete with coal. The vendors took a bath on these plants.