Mean and median lifetime of a nuclear reactor is well under 30 years. Closer to 20 if you count all the ones that produced for 0 years.

Sure. But do you think Nuclear reactors will still be cheaper than renewables + storage in the 2070s? Nuclear is far more expensive per kWh than renewables, and the cost of storage is falling fast.

I literally studied this exact nuclear design at University - the Westinghouse AP1000. You can look up the WNISR (World Nuclear Industry Status Report) if you don’t want to take my word for it.

Don’t forget, mining and enriching uranium still has a significant carbon footprint, far higher per tonne than any fossil fuel. Yes, it’s lower over time, but we need to be reducing emissions now, not in 50 years time.

It’s the fossils of stars.

We have plenty of nuclear fuel and waste is a drop in an ocean compared to that of fossil fuels.

Natural predator of the laser raptor

They took the average of that and built it 10 years ago

Ideally zero? But given this is the first US reactor in decades, it is by definition normal I suppose.

Those amounts there. For comparison for example another recent plant Olkiluoto 3 in Finland was 13 years late on a 5 year original construction timeline (18 years total construction time) and 10 8 billion euros over budget on original budget of 3 billion euros. (Final estimate it cost constructor 13-14 11 billion euros to build. Technically its fixed price contract so customer price is still 3 billion. However it did bankrupt the builder Areva and litigations are ongoing about, if the French can extract more money from he customer TVO)

So doubling the price budget and doubling the build time is not at all unreasonable first estimate on the announced numbers of the builder and customers at start of project.

True, BUT the cost increase was relatively small (~$3.50/mo) - can’t speak for everyone as I know people’s budgets can be quite tight right now, but that’s a price I’d be willing to pay for more nuclear on my grid.

In finland we have this big hole that goes half a kilometer into stable bedrock. The storage solution is engineered to withstand the next ice age.

Compared to the downsides of virtually every alternative energy source, the downsides of nuclear are peanuts.

Sure we do, put it in the holes we took the other stuff out of. Soon our whole planet will be nuclear powered.

Nuclear power plant waste doesn’t significantly contribute to climate change or pollution? So it’s “clean” by most metrics.

Nuclear waste can generally be stored on-site without issue. Reprocessing would be nice, but not even necessary. Just because you don’t understand the problem, doesn’t mean others are “religiously defending a technology.”

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Yes, we do. Burying it works just fine.

Yeah, this is one of those topics where any mention of the downside of storing spent fuel safely for 50-100,000 years gets you bombed on. Just like reddit.

Not really. All costs considered, nuclear is one of the most expensive energy sources.

while that is certainly an issue, i very much doubt that it is a primary reason (or even remotely a concern) for the average anti-nuclear layperson.

Ah, those activists wouldn’t talk about that mostly, they’d talk about boom and radioactive pollution in places their audience lived in.

Leftists caring about minorities and oppressed communities anyplace far from themselves are a notable rarity.

And since the replacements were coal, oil and gas, which are just as dirty, I’d say your argument isn’t worth shit.

More people died in the evacuation of Fukushima than died fighting the meltdown, which was arguably 1.

1 confirmed from radiation (lung cancer, 4 years later),[3] and 2,202 from evacuation.[4]

The tsunami killed over 15,000 people. Awful disaster.

However, Japanese people are very anti-nuclear so their media made it seem that the impact was horrific when, aside from the exclusion zone, wasn’t all THAT bad. However, losing that land was a big hit to a small country.

I’d agree if our only two options were nuclear or coal/oil plants but we have many options that don’t require everything be powered from centralized power plants.

Who cares about a bit of contaminated area, very localized, every few dozen years, when the alternative is a global climate crisis?

I’m sure all the people and companies that exist in these areas. Land is finite and hospitable land is even more finite. Destroying these areas for decades to come isn’t any more preferable that the occasional natural disaster rolling through over a few day period.

As I said I’m not against nuclear power and I would love to see more advancements come to fruition, but it doesn’t need to be our main source of energy nor is it accurate to claim that the potential issues that come with it are solely overblown conspiracy theories pushed by oil/coal companies.

Does that video talk about how wind turbine blades aren’t recyclable at all so they end up in landfills? Solar panels are 75% recyclable which is excellent but that still means 25% is going into the ground. Nuclear is the only way forward.

The cost of storing nuclear waste for a running plant is only a few hundred thousand a year; basically just just salary for a few people to transport it to a big hole in the ground.

Decommissioning costs a few hundred million, which sounds like a lot, but for a project that lasts for decades it’s basically nothing.

Absolutely, and we should. We should have both. Nuclear has a very long lifespan and very consistent power. Ideal battery setups do to buy long term lithium battery storage is less of a thing, but it’s growing. There are some other battery techs that use other chemistries which are also attractive.

Multiple eggs in multiple baskets.

Unless there are a few cloudy days in a row… My panels produce a lot less than normal during cloudy days.

Remember that blanketing the world with solar panels isn’t exactly great for the environment. Rooftops makes a lot of sense, but the cost goes way up, an maintenance becomes a nightmare. The footprint of nuclear is much smaller

What price per kw generation are you using?

or we could do both

Also I would like to see the enviromental impact of building your 33GWh battery.

Except those reactors are off 30-50% of the time due to shoddy construction

For French nuclear power, the lowest load factor ever recorded is 54% in 2022. The cause is the number of maintenance operations postponed because of COVID, plus a corrosion problem detected on several reactors of the same generation, which have since been repaired.

• This is an extremely unlikely combination of circumstances, on the one hand
• On the other hand, it wouldn’t have had any consequences if we’d had more redundancy, and hadn’t suddenly stopped building reactors for 25 years.
• Despite this, nuclear power still has a load factor 2x higher than French wind or solar power.

The rest of the time, the load factor of French nuclear power hovers around 70-75%, and that’s not due to bad design, it’s a strategy. I’ll let you read this link to learn more.

€1.5/W in 2023 money is pure fiction

Of course it does. But the fact is that french nuclear power has paid for itself dozens of times over. It’s factual, it’s historical.

and overnight costs with free capital aren’t real costs once you adjust for inflation and stop cherry picking the first reactors before negative learning rates kicked in.

Go argue with the Cour des Comptes, not me

Chernobyl and Fukushima. These two events, which between them account for a few thousand deaths at most (compared with the tens of thousands of deaths caused by coal in Europe alone, for example), triggered a panic fear of nuclear power.

For decades, the nuclear industry has been abandoned and sabotaged, with projects such as Phénix, Superphénix and Astrid in France, and virtually all new reactor projects, cancelled due to anti-nuclear opposition.

Competent nuclear engineers and technicians have retired without being able to pass on their know-how, and cutting-edge nuclear-related industries have disappeared or been converted.

We can also thank the Germans for sabotaging the EPR. We started the project together, they forced us to add a lot of totally unjustified redundancies and safety features that made the prototype very complex and therefore costly to build, and then they slammed the door on us.

Every year a reactor operates is a year of experiencing new ways they suck. The fixes and added complexities are rolled into the next reactor.

Thr grifters running the show also learn new ways to grift, so the small new delays and costs are amplified.

For older reactors the costs this imposes are rolled into operational budgets (and more often than not reactors are closed as unprofitable and the public or ratepayers are left holding the bag).

Additionally regulatory agencies keep finding new instances of fraud, stopping these adds costs to the regulator and regulatee.

This has happened since well before three mile island, so all misdirections to “scare mongering about meltdowns” are lies (the rate of cost escalation actually slowed significantly after three mile island).

• pumped hydro -> not exactly something that can be built anywhere and also not very cheap
• battery -> huge environmental impact until we can get something like sodium based batteries
• Flywheels, not exactly something that gets you through the night is it.

Those can only hold enough power for minutes or hours.

We need to be able to store power from the summer until the winter. Months. We need to store energy from when the sun is shining in July until it’s not in December.

The only possible way to do that now is to store it as hydrogen or hydrocarbons. That infrastructure is currently very lossy, expensive, and only hypothetical.

Ah I’d not consider these! That gives some hope too then :) I hope we get the battery advances we need asap, the urgency from the climate crisis is strong lately.

That’s a limitation of the secondary power conversion side and is true for any power generation methodology that relies on steam generation. That said, there’s alternatives to the traditional Rankine cycle that could be deployed without modifying the nuclear side of the plant.

I don’t recall them being shut down (that would be a drastic step). They were forced to reduce output, though (making the energy more expensive).

there are a bunch of new reactor designs that don’t use water.

Yes, Pump Storage Hydroelectricity is a great option for storage. It’s not the most efficient but it allows to store massive amount of energy.

I think today it’s the main utility scale storage solution in the world.

There’s also compressed air and flywheels for energy storage.

You’re describing dams, and basically all the good locations are taken already.

These days EVERYTHING has like 10 lawsuits attached to it before anything can happen. Then we wonder why everything is always at a stand-still. We had a local brwery and pub in a perfect location get sued because the restuarant next door (which is kind of run down) was afraid of the competition. Now the Brewery is actually considering pulling out. Such BS especially the influx of people coming to the area would probably end up helping both businesses.

His username checks out!

That said, you might share his opinion if you were a Georgia Power ratepayer who’s been paying extra on their power bill for years and years now even though it’s only now just come online (and while the Georgia Public Service Commission has allowed the high profit margins for Georgia Power stockholders to be maintained even despite all the cost overruns).

“If you wish to make a nuclear reactor from scratch, you must first invent the universe” -carl sagan