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From your link: "Nuclear construction costs in the US did spiral out of control, especially after the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979. But this wasn't univer

From your link: "Nuclear construction costs in the US did spiral out of control, especially after the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979. But this wasn't universal. Countries like France, Japan, and Canada kept costs fairly stable during this period." Well now Japan had it's own meltdown and keeping the costs stable after seeing it happen in America and, worse, Ukraine, didn't help preventing it. And I don't know about Canada, but France has some good candidates for the next meltdown all over the place...

jessriedel 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... "Coal Kills 4,000 Times More People Per Unit of Energy than Nuclear" http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/coal_kills_4000_times_more_peo http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/coal_kills_4000_times_mor...
- mkesper 11y ago
  http://m.greenpeace.org/international/en/high/press/releases/2016/Fukushima-nuclear-disaster-will-impact-forests-rivers-and-estuaries-for-hundreds-of-years-warns-Greenpeace-report-/ http://m.greenpeace.org/international/en/high/press/releases...
- ifdefdebug 11y ago
  I did not want to engage into another discussion about which technology kills more people. I wanted to point out that nuclear is expensive. Very expensive. And the USA maybe did a good job requiring that money to be paid. And if nuclear doesn't pay out when the real costs are to be paid, then that's it. Because losing, let's say, a major city to a nuclear disaster, that would be several orders of magnitude more expensive.
  - jessriedel 11y ago
    Once deaths are circa zero, people can spend an unlimited amount of money hypothetically reducing them further, with essentially no feedback to know if they're helping.
seren 11y ago
For France, Areva[0] is in big trouble, losing a few billions (yes billions) every year. At the same time, the nuclear regulation authority have found some defects on EPR construction site and in La Hague plant. The government is pushing EDF to take a major stake in Areva to save it. But today in the press there were multiple articles on a 100 billions "wall" that EDF will have to overcome to maintain, upgrade or decommission the current nuclear plants. And this is further complicated by the fact that the price of electricity is fixed by law, so EDF don't have many ways to increase its revenue. (This will likely have to change because it is not sustainable) I don't know about safety, but financially this is looking bad. And with drastic cost cutting measures will likely come more incidents (or accidents..) That's one negative point of nuclear power, we don't really know the price of decommissioning because it has never been done on large scale. So the total life cost of a nuclear plant, and thus nuclear power, can only be estimated. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areva https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areva

jessriedel 11y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... "Coal Kills 4,000 Times More People Per Unit of Energy than Nuclear" http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/coal_kills_4000_times_more_peo http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/coal_kills_4000_times_mor...

mkesper 11y ago
http://m.greenpeace.org/international/en/high/press/releases/2016/Fukushima-nuclear-disaster-will-impact-forests-rivers-and-estuaries-for-hundreds-of-years-warns-Greenpeace-report-/ http://m.greenpeace.org/international/en/high/press/releases...
ifdefdebug 11y ago
I did not want to engage into another discussion about which technology kills more people. I wanted to point out that nuclear is expensive. Very expensive. And the USA maybe did a good job requiring that money to be paid. And if nuclear doesn't pay out when the real costs are to be paid, then that's it. Because losing, let's say, a major city to a nuclear disaster, that would be several orders of magnitude more expensive.
- jessriedel 11y ago
  Once deaths are circa zero, people can spend an unlimited amount of money hypothetically reducing them further, with essentially no feedback to know if they're helping.

seren 11y ago

For France, Areva[0] is in big trouble, losing a few billions (yes billions) every year. At the same time, the nuclear regulation authority have found some defects on EPR construction site and in La Hague plant. The government is pushing EDF to take a major stake in Areva to save it. But today in the press there were multiple articles on a 100 billions "wall" that EDF will have to overcome to maintain, upgrade or decommission the current nuclear plants. And this is further complicated by the fact that the price of electricity is fixed by law, so EDF don't have many ways to increase its revenue. (This will likely have to change because it is not sustainable) I don't know about safety, but financially this is looking bad. And with drastic cost cutting measures will likely come more incidents (or accidents..) That's one negative point of nuclear power, we don't really know the price of decommissioning because it has never been done on large scale. So the total life cost of a nuclear plant, and thus nuclear power, can only be estimated. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areva https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areva