| > - 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. |
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.