[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!