The cost of nuclear today has more to do with the fact that we aren’t building nuclear plants. There are minimum companies with small operations making nuclear reactor technologies for just maintenance of existing ones and military contracts. If we were building new nuclear plants with modern reactors, the costs wouldn’t be a big deal anymore because the production of them would have scaled better.
But instead we’re spending tens of billions on windmills and solar panels that won’t last 15 years or operate well in many regions, including Germany and especially south Germany. This is why Germany is now reliant on France’s nuclear power to handle the majority of its power needs and the citizens are paying massive premiums for it. Not the government.
So maybe we should ignore the pesky cost issue cause we certainly ignored the financial and economic cost consequences of solar and wind.
The argument that costs will come down if we build more nuclear worked in the 1950s, but we know now where that goes now. Build
More nuclear and costs come down. With more plants there are inevitably more nuclear incidents, the public realizes these things can make entire nations uninhabitable if they fail, and then they demand a halt to nuclear, pushing prices back up.
Nuclear prices have baked in the public sentiment on the risk of meltdowns. The prices are efficient.
> With more plants there are inevitably more nuclear incidents
Can we stop making this argument? It is an extremely bad faith argument. There have only been two accidents of commercial reactors in the history of nuclear power that led to the loss of lives. The likely value is well under 10k (<100 directly attributed to Chernobyl). The first was orders of magnitude more dangerous than the second, was early into the development of nuclear power, and was caused by experimentation using a nuclear reactor that the rest of the world refused to use due to the potential for the reactor to fail in exactly the way Chernobyl did. The second, killed a single person, was caused by the largest natural disaster in the region (in all of recorded history), where the science of the day did not think such an event could even happen.
Yes, there's more nuance to this, but we also need to recognize the actual level of danger. These arguments pretend that scientific knowledge has not changed over 80 years. These arguments pretend that there are no deaths and/or environmental concerns with other energy sources (literally every one has these concerns). They ignore the cost of carbon and other environmental damage of the source's lifetime. Most importantly, these arguments pretend that all incidents are equally as dangerous.
Can we please just stop? There are a lot of valid criticisms of nuclear power, but making lazy arguments just results in fighting. Talk about costs, reliance on fuel, the possibility of not even needing them, or any other points (argue with nuance). The public is (sadly) not well informed about nuclear nor most scientific concepts in general, although many members have high confidence in their cursory understanding. (The thesis here applies to a lot of other scientific domains btw, including: climate, health, and even evolution) We need to have real conversations about these issues as there is a lot on the line. Complex issues require complex discussions.
It is quite misleading to only focus on deaths due to nuclear accidents. Fukushima may not have (directly) killed anyone, but the cleanup is hideously expensive (estimates say many hundred billion dollars). Containing Chernobyl costed a few percent of Ukraine's pre-war annual budget. So far, roughly one in a hundred power reactors have blown up. If this is priced in, the economics get even less favorable.
I'm quite sure, but not 100% that the above number does *not* include research reactors. If it makes sense to include those into the statistics is less clear.
Fukushima had three meltdowns (reactors 1-3), and a hydrogen gas explosion that damaged the spent fuel pool of reactor 4. Together with Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, this corresponds to roughly 1% of all commissioned reactors suffering catastrophic failure with significant radiation release.
You both are making statistical errors. You've aggregated the data improperly. As I mentioned in the original rant, this calculation throws out the temporal component and thus 80 years of development and research. Safety has greatly increased over the last 20 years, let alone 80.
Yes, and these death-based analysis' also ignore the fact that both Fukishima and Chernobyl could have been much, much worse if major interventions were not made at the right moment. I always think about the Fukishima engineers who got the instruments in the control room to turn on by wiring them up to car batteries. If the team on duty that day was just a little less resourceful, the story gets much worse. Those incidents should be seen as a lower-bound to the danger not an upper bound.
No, we cannot stop talking about the danger of meltdowns, because it is a proven danger, and a uniquely catastrophic one. Approximately once per decade, a nuclear reactor melts down and either does (Chernobyl) or nearly does (Fukishima) make a nation-sized area of earth uninhabitable. Asking people to ignore this fact when they consider building nuclear plants in their region is silly.
But instead we’re spending tens of billions on windmills and solar panels that won’t last 15 years or operate well in many regions, including Germany and especially south Germany. This is why Germany is now reliant on France’s nuclear power to handle the majority of its power needs and the citizens are paying massive premiums for it. Not the government.
So maybe we should ignore the pesky cost issue cause we certainly ignored the financial and economic cost consequences of solar and wind.