18 ms·

Don't even bother talking about political capital. Nuclear is a worse option because it is overpriced, period. It's not just the downsides that are subsidized b

Don't even bother talking about political capital. Nuclear is a worse option because it is overpriced, period. It's not just the downsides that are subsidized by the government, the actual running cost is hidden behind reams of bureaucracy, hidden program budgets, optimistic amortizations, and underestimated decommissioning costs. And even then the reactors still manage to go massively over budget with the initial construction. People like to feel superior to others by citing fear as the reason nuclear is being avoided, but the real reason anyone should oppose it is straight up costs, without even any disasters factored in. Any other choice with the current and next-3-decades technology is just pissing money away, when it could be spent continuing renewables' rapid decline in cost.

paulddraper 10y ago
Most estimates are inflated. From 2002 to 2008 UCS's estimate for a nuclear plant went from $2 to $8 million, for no real reason. Actual, real-life plants (like from the 60s) have much lower costs than recent estimates have claimed (adjusted for inflation).
- afterburner 10y ago
  I wouldn't want a plant from the 60s, and I would wonder how costs were hidden back then, and how much subsequent safety overhauls cost.
  - paulddraper 10y ago
    > I wouldn't want a plant from the 60s Me neither. Unfortunately, that's all we have, since we're not building any more :(
    - philipkglass 10y ago
      There are 4 new AP1000 reactors under construction in the United States. Unfortunately, they're over budget and behind schedule. UCS is if anything charitable to estimate $8 billion for a new reactor. http://www.enr.com/articles/41134-turnaround-eludes-nuclear-power-plant-vogtle http://www.enr.com/articles/41134-turnaround-eludes-nuclear-... Last spring, at the Plant Vogtle construction site near Waynesboro, Ga., executives representing Georgia Power, its lead contractors and trades groups gathered to commit publicly to turning around the $16-billion nuclear power plant expansion. At least three years behind schedule and billions of dollars over its original budget, the massive effort—the first U.S. project of its kind in decades—is a closely watched bellwether of the country’s nuclear plans, which could fizzle if this project fails to deliver, many believe. Executives with Westinghouse and Fluor, which represent the contracting team that took over on Jan. 1, publicly vowed to do what they already had contractually agreed to do: deliver the project according to schedule by achieving the in-service target dates of June 2019 and June 2020 for Vogtle Units 3 and 4, respectively. Now, nearly a year into Westinghouse and Fluor’s Vogtle project takeover from former contractor CB&I, the site’s workforce has swelled, but productivity and schedule have actually slipped, say state construction monitors. In joint testimony, PSC analyst Stephen Roetger and construction monitor William Jacobs noted, “The contractor has failed to achieve the project’s critical milestones in accordance with the January 2016 Integrated Project Schedule, which reconfirmed the June 2019 and June 2020 Commercial Operation Dates.” Jacobs, the state’s construction monitor, holds a doctorate in nuclear engineering and has more than 12 years of nuclear-plant construction and start-up experience. AP1000s are also behind schedule in China. Whatever problems are causing the schedule/budget misses, they seem to be coming from inside the nuclear industry itself.
      - bjelkeman-again 10y ago
        Meanwhile in Finland the cost overruns are several billion and the contractors are suing each other for billions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Cost https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
      - Animats 10y ago
        That design seemed so promising. The first plant, in China, was supposed to come on line in 2013. Current date is mid-2017. The original structural design was revised for better earthquake resistance. Then there was some big problem with the coolant pump manufacturer.
        TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
        I am a tradesman in the metal fabrication industry, and all these cost overruns and missed milestones makes me wonder... Have we lost something? Have tradespeople lost the ability to deliver these massive projects on time and on budget? Their managers? Which layer(s) is/are dropping the ball. The structural steel fabrication has become increasingly complex. Our workshop has become dependant on robots (a laser cutter and a 20 meter drill-line machine, and a small fleet of button clicking humans to do all the CAD modelling) that a breakdown can bring fabrication to a rapid grinding halt. It makes me shudder a bit to imagine the technical complexity of the design and fabrication of a modern mega-project. At least wind turbines are relatively simple in comparison.
        douche 10y ago
        I think the tolerance for imperfection has gone down considerably since, for instance, the 1930s and 40s, when we were throwing up skyscrapers in a few years and churning out entire Liberty ships in a week. We've traded some safety for an enormous increase in complexity of construction. Meanwhile, those old steel-frame skyscrapers are still standing... I worked a few summers in a small, wood-burning power plant. A couple times a year, they would shut down for one or two weeks, and do some heavy maintenance on different systems. One of the times I was there, they replaced all of the tubes for making steam in the boiler. Every single weld joining together the panels of tubes had to be inspected, and xrayed to ensure that there were no gaps and sufficient penetration. Finding people that can weld to that standard is a more difficult task, because it's not easy, and takes skill, and training, and experience. Moreover, those people who have those skills can command higher rates.
    - makomk 10y ago
      Realistically, even 60s-era plants are expensive enough to construct that the existing plants are going to continue to operate for as long as possible.
      - afterburner 10y ago
        That's exactly how Fukushima happened: "these plants will be so expensive to decommission, we can't afford NOT to keep extending their lifetime!"
        mikevp 10y ago
        Or, "We planned to decommission these plants, but construction on the replacement plants was blocked."
        afterburner 10y ago
        Either way, a major safety decision basically came down to a political decision over finances. And because nuclear power was involved, the downside became huge. Even when nuclear power is designed to be safer, it comes down to the whims of human politics. Why risk making the downside of a poor political decision so massive?
    - afterburner 10y ago
      I feel like you're missing why I said this. I was responding to this sentence in the message above mine: "Actual, real-life plants (like from the 60s) have much lower costs than recent estimates have claimed (adjusted for inflation)." Why were those plants cheap? First a) they probably actually weren't, thanks to hidden costs, and b) they probably weren't nearly as safe.
      - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
        And "not safe" = "increased likelihood of some really big unexpected hidden costs".
- fulafel 10y ago
  This matches observed data, eg. Areva EPR plant cost estimates have (amid major media controversy) risen from ~3 to ~9 billion € as construction has progressed.
- jurip 10y ago
  There's one ongoing nuclear power plant construction project in Finland, and the current estimate is at around €8.5 billion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...
Twisell 10y ago
Except people also forget that renewables' are also highly subsidized. You can't use a double standard here. And cost should anyway be the least of concern as global warming costs will be higher no matter what if we fail to control it.
- jsilence 10y ago
  "renewables' are also highly subsidized" Only this not true any more. Over the last decade Solar has become price competitive sans subsidies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmyrbKBZ6SU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmyrbKBZ6SU Even before that the subsidies for solar have been dwarfed by the subsidies that are in place for nuclear power. Recently in Germany the nuclear companies' lobbyists managed to get rif of the problem of end storage of nuclear waste by shifting that burden to the general public. Great job!
  - robryk 10y ago
    > Over the last decade Solar has become price competitive sans subsidies (...) // I haven't watched the video. Would love to see a text version thereof if it exists. Is it per unit of power that can be produced under optimal conditions or per unit of power averaged over a year? Note that half of the time in a year it's dark, so in order to produce the same amount of energy in a year you need a solar power plant with at least 2x power rating of a power plant that can operate continuously. Does this include the cost (monetary (capital) and in additional energy that has to be generated due to storage losses) of storing the energy over periods of darkness and inclement weather?
    - spangry 10y ago
      It gets worse. Unless we develop viable (and affordable) grid-level battery technology, the intermittency problem of renewables makes most of them a non-starter from a cost perspective. To cover 'always on' baseload demand, you need about 5-6 time that amount of maximum generating capacity, optimally geographically dispersed to ensure at least one or a few are producing sufficient power while the others are essentially 'off'. This also means you need 5-6 times the amount of transmission infrastructure compared to if you have centralised power generation that can be rapidly scaled up and down. Burning coal is one such solution (obviously a terrible one given climate change). Gas is good for intermittent 'peaker' plants, but it's not exactly cheap nor co2 free. Contrary to what's being said above, I think fission absolutely must be explored to avoid a climate catastrophe. Our current fission reactor tech is basically the same tech we had in the 50s and 60s, which manages about 3% fuel efficiency (mostly due to the use of solid fuels). Despite this, it's still at least 'in the ballpark' cost-wise, and also the second safest form of power generation, according to the IPCC, over its entire life-cycle (from mining to waste disposal and remediation). Incidentally, hydro is the first. If we could invest even just a little bit of money into furthering fission research, we could very well end up with an abundant, cheap and safe method of generating baseload power. Or we could yammer on about the cost of 'political capital' and accept a much higher probability of extinction because a section of the population are either misinformed or just flat out ignorant. Yeah, let's do that.
admiun 10y ago
I agree. Nuclear fission power seems to be associated with a negative learning curve [1][2]. This means that as the newly installed capacity goes up, price per unit actually increases. As solar is already becoming competitive and is experiencing a positive learning curve (costs going down rapidly as production expands) it would be pretty silly to invest in nuclear at this point. [1] https://thinkprogress.org/does-nuclear-power-have-a-negative-learning-curve-b389ef2de998#.p915rpshi https://thinkprogress.org/does-nuclear-power-have-a-negative... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects
mseebach 10y ago
First, there can be little doubt that a substantial fraction of the high cost of nuclear is down to almost the entire west being scared stiff of the stuff for thirty years. If we gave actual scientists and engineers a real mandate to come up with a pragmatic, realistic (ie accepting a small amount of risk as acceptable, perhaps something on the scale of a single Fukushima every 30 years, just like we accept a small amount of risk everywhere else - driving, living in hurricane country, even flying isn't perfectly safe) regulatory regime, costs would surely come back down. Second, funny how costs suddenly matter when it's about nuclear. Barely a month goes by without some new unimaginable mind numbing (wholly impractical) 'solution' to climate change that we're being implored to consider, because it's about saving the planet for our children. Nuclear is a perfectly practical, much cheaper (if still very expensive), 80% solution to climate change that we can actually start implementing today, but somehow it's not on the table. Somehow it doesn't seem all that plausible that cost is really the issue. In short, climate change is the biggest issue facing the world (except nuclear and fracking). I'm very excited that the NYT is being practical here.
- arviewer 10y ago
  In 30 years, solar will have taken over. Using safe existing nuclear power plants is OK for me, building new ones seems stupid. For some countries, replacing an old unsafe one with a good new one seems plausible, but more seems a bad choice.
  - mseebach 10y ago
    Perhaps the train has indeed left the platform, but the inflection point for solar only happened this year. If the parties to Kyoto had gone home back then and created said regulatory environment for nuclear and gotten on with it, we'd be looking at a 80-90% carbon emissions free electrical grid across the entire western hemisphere today. Climate change would have been more or less solved, and yes, we knew that then, this is not benefit-of-hindsight stuff. There's a lot of histrionics around putting oil companies in the dock for crimes against humanity, but anyone who's campaigned against nuclear in the last 30 years can go right up and sit next to them.
mirimir 10y ago
I'd be OK with nuclear power if they could get adequate insurance on the open market, accepting all risk. It's my understanding that nuclear power plants are not insurable, unless government assumes risk, agrees to handle waste, etc.
- natch 10y ago
  Most of us would not be willing put a price on the lives or health of, say, our children. Any price. I'm not so ok with it, but not just for safety reasons. New designs may be safer but they are still part of a globally destructive system of dirty mining, byproducts that go to weapons, and still non-zero risk of inflicting lifelong and community-wide damage in catastrophic situations. Also it bugs me that nuclear is perpetuating the interests of large players who would prefer to control all the energy. I'd like to see energy democratized more, meaning instead of having contracts or bills from a power company, you make your own energy at home. That's an ideal, and we will probably end up with a mix, but I'd rather see money put into trying to tip that mix toward the decentralized side of things, which means toward locally installable technology like solar.
  - mirimir 10y ago
    I'm sympathetic to all of that, and agree fully with most of it. But my point is that nuclear power plants, in order to be insurable on the open market, with no government involvement, would necessarily be safe enough to address your safety concerns. Regarding decentralization, we'll need some substantial breakthroughs in fabbing. Either that, or some substantial reduction in technology level.
hxegon 10y ago
Except that you can't replace fossil fuels completely with diffuse energy sources like wind and solar.
ared38 10y ago
Honest question: I thought the big problem with solar and wind is what to do on windless nights. AFAIK battery technology is nowhere near good or cheap enough. Nuclear seems like a solution to that gap. What are others?
- pesfandiar 10y ago
  You don't necessarily need batteries to store energy. For instance, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit....

paulddraper 10y ago

Most estimates are inflated. From 2002 to 2008 UCS's estimate for a nuclear plant went from $2 to $8 million, for no real reason. Actual, real-life plants (like from the 60s) have much lower costs than recent estimates have claimed (adjusted for inflation).

afterburner 10y ago
I wouldn't want a plant from the 60s, and I would wonder how costs were hidden back then, and how much subsequent safety overhauls cost.
- paulddraper 10y ago
  > I wouldn't want a plant from the 60s Me neither. Unfortunately, that's all we have, since we're not building any more :(
  - philipkglass 10y ago
    There are 4 new AP1000 reactors under construction in the United States. Unfortunately, they're over budget and behind schedule. UCS is if anything charitable to estimate $8 billion for a new reactor. http://www.enr.com/articles/41134-turnaround-eludes-nuclear-power-plant-vogtle http://www.enr.com/articles/41134-turnaround-eludes-nuclear-... Last spring, at the Plant Vogtle construction site near Waynesboro, Ga., executives representing Georgia Power, its lead contractors and trades groups gathered to commit publicly to turning around the $16-billion nuclear power plant expansion. At least three years behind schedule and billions of dollars over its original budget, the massive effort—the first U.S. project of its kind in decades—is a closely watched bellwether of the country’s nuclear plans, which could fizzle if this project fails to deliver, many believe. Executives with Westinghouse and Fluor, which represent the contracting team that took over on Jan. 1, publicly vowed to do what they already had contractually agreed to do: deliver the project according to schedule by achieving the in-service target dates of June 2019 and June 2020 for Vogtle Units 3 and 4, respectively. Now, nearly a year into Westinghouse and Fluor’s Vogtle project takeover from former contractor CB&I, the site’s workforce has swelled, but productivity and schedule have actually slipped, say state construction monitors. In joint testimony, PSC analyst Stephen Roetger and construction monitor William Jacobs noted, “The contractor has failed to achieve the project’s critical milestones in accordance with the January 2016 Integrated Project Schedule, which reconfirmed the June 2019 and June 2020 Commercial Operation Dates.” Jacobs, the state’s construction monitor, holds a doctorate in nuclear engineering and has more than 12 years of nuclear-plant construction and start-up experience. AP1000s are also behind schedule in China. Whatever problems are causing the schedule/budget misses, they seem to be coming from inside the nuclear industry itself.
    - bjelkeman-again 10y ago
      Meanwhile in Finland the cost overruns are several billion and the contractors are suing each other for billions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Cost https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
    - Animats 10y ago
      That design seemed so promising. The first plant, in China, was supposed to come on line in 2013. Current date is mid-2017. The original structural design was revised for better earthquake resistance. Then there was some big problem with the coolant pump manufacturer.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
        I am a tradesman in the metal fabrication industry, and all these cost overruns and missed milestones makes me wonder... Have we lost something? Have tradespeople lost the ability to deliver these massive projects on time and on budget? Their managers? Which layer(s) is/are dropping the ball. The structural steel fabrication has become increasingly complex. Our workshop has become dependant on robots (a laser cutter and a 20 meter drill-line machine, and a small fleet of button clicking humans to do all the CAD modelling) that a breakdown can bring fabrication to a rapid grinding halt. It makes me shudder a bit to imagine the technical complexity of the design and fabrication of a modern mega-project. At least wind turbines are relatively simple in comparison.
        douche 10y ago
        I think the tolerance for imperfection has gone down considerably since, for instance, the 1930s and 40s, when we were throwing up skyscrapers in a few years and churning out entire Liberty ships in a week. We've traded some safety for an enormous increase in complexity of construction. Meanwhile, those old steel-frame skyscrapers are still standing... I worked a few summers in a small, wood-burning power plant. A couple times a year, they would shut down for one or two weeks, and do some heavy maintenance on different systems. One of the times I was there, they replaced all of the tubes for making steam in the boiler. Every single weld joining together the panels of tubes had to be inspected, and xrayed to ensure that there were no gaps and sufficient penetration. Finding people that can weld to that standard is a more difficult task, because it's not easy, and takes skill, and training, and experience. Moreover, those people who have those skills can command higher rates.
  - makomk 10y ago
    Realistically, even 60s-era plants are expensive enough to construct that the existing plants are going to continue to operate for as long as possible.
    - afterburner 10y ago
      That's exactly how Fukushima happened: "these plants will be so expensive to decommission, we can't afford NOT to keep extending their lifetime!"
      - mikevp 10y ago
        Or, "We planned to decommission these plants, but construction on the replacement plants was blocked."
        afterburner 10y ago
        Either way, a major safety decision basically came down to a political decision over finances. And because nuclear power was involved, the downside became huge. Even when nuclear power is designed to be safer, it comes down to the whims of human politics. Why risk making the downside of a poor political decision so massive?
  - afterburner 10y ago
    I feel like you're missing why I said this. I was responding to this sentence in the message above mine: "Actual, real-life plants (like from the 60s) have much lower costs than recent estimates have claimed (adjusted for inflation)." Why were those plants cheap? First a) they probably actually weren't, thanks to hidden costs, and b) they probably weren't nearly as safe.
    - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
      And "not safe" = "increased likelihood of some really big unexpected hidden costs".
fulafel 10y ago
This matches observed data, eg. Areva EPR plant cost estimates have (amid major media controversy) risen from ~3 to ~9 billion € as construction has progressed.
jurip 10y ago
There's one ongoing nuclear power plant construction project in Finland, and the current estimate is at around €8.5 billion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...

Twisell 10y ago

Except people also forget that renewables' are also highly subsidized. You can't use a double standard here. And cost should anyway be the least of concern as global warming costs will be higher no matter what if we fail to control it.

jsilence 10y ago
"renewables' are also highly subsidized" Only this not true any more. Over the last decade Solar has become price competitive sans subsidies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmyrbKBZ6SU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmyrbKBZ6SU Even before that the subsidies for solar have been dwarfed by the subsidies that are in place for nuclear power. Recently in Germany the nuclear companies' lobbyists managed to get rif of the problem of end storage of nuclear waste by shifting that burden to the general public. Great job!
- robryk 10y ago
  > Over the last decade Solar has become price competitive sans subsidies (...) // I haven't watched the video. Would love to see a text version thereof if it exists. Is it per unit of power that can be produced under optimal conditions or per unit of power averaged over a year? Note that half of the time in a year it's dark, so in order to produce the same amount of energy in a year you need a solar power plant with at least 2x power rating of a power plant that can operate continuously. Does this include the cost (monetary (capital) and in additional energy that has to be generated due to storage losses) of storing the energy over periods of darkness and inclement weather?
  - spangry 10y ago
    It gets worse. Unless we develop viable (and affordable) grid-level battery technology, the intermittency problem of renewables makes most of them a non-starter from a cost perspective. To cover 'always on' baseload demand, you need about 5-6 time that amount of maximum generating capacity, optimally geographically dispersed to ensure at least one or a few are producing sufficient power while the others are essentially 'off'. This also means you need 5-6 times the amount of transmission infrastructure compared to if you have centralised power generation that can be rapidly scaled up and down. Burning coal is one such solution (obviously a terrible one given climate change). Gas is good for intermittent 'peaker' plants, but it's not exactly cheap nor co2 free. Contrary to what's being said above, I think fission absolutely must be explored to avoid a climate catastrophe. Our current fission reactor tech is basically the same tech we had in the 50s and 60s, which manages about 3% fuel efficiency (mostly due to the use of solid fuels). Despite this, it's still at least 'in the ballpark' cost-wise, and also the second safest form of power generation, according to the IPCC, over its entire life-cycle (from mining to waste disposal and remediation). Incidentally, hydro is the first. If we could invest even just a little bit of money into furthering fission research, we could very well end up with an abundant, cheap and safe method of generating baseload power. Or we could yammer on about the cost of 'political capital' and accept a much higher probability of extinction because a section of the population are either misinformed or just flat out ignorant. Yeah, let's do that.

admiun 10y ago

I agree. Nuclear fission power seems to be associated with a negative learning curve [1][2]. This means that as the newly installed capacity goes up, price per unit actually increases. As solar is already becoming competitive and is experiencing a positive learning curve (costs going down rapidly as production expands) it would be pretty silly to invest in nuclear at this point. [1] https://thinkprogress.org/does-nuclear-power-have-a-negative-learning-curve-b389ef2de998#.p915rpshi https://thinkprogress.org/does-nuclear-power-have-a-negative... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects

mseebach 10y ago

First, there can be little doubt that a substantial fraction of the high cost of nuclear is down to almost the entire west being scared stiff of the stuff for thirty years. If we gave actual scientists and engineers a real mandate to come up with a pragmatic, realistic (ie accepting a small amount of risk as acceptable, perhaps something on the scale of a single Fukushima every 30 years, just like we accept a small amount of risk everywhere else - driving, living in hurricane country, even flying isn't perfectly safe) regulatory regime, costs would surely come back down. Second, funny how costs suddenly matter when it's about nuclear. Barely a month goes by without some new unimaginable mind numbing (wholly impractical) 'solution' to climate change that we're being implored to consider, because it's about saving the planet for our children. Nuclear is a perfectly practical, much cheaper (if still very expensive), 80% solution to climate change that we can actually start implementing today, but somehow it's not on the table. Somehow it doesn't seem all that plausible that cost is really the issue. In short, climate change is the biggest issue facing the world (except nuclear and fracking). I'm very excited that the NYT is being practical here.

arviewer 10y ago
In 30 years, solar will have taken over. Using safe existing nuclear power plants is OK for me, building new ones seems stupid. For some countries, replacing an old unsafe one with a good new one seems plausible, but more seems a bad choice.
- mseebach 10y ago
  Perhaps the train has indeed left the platform, but the inflection point for solar only happened this year. If the parties to Kyoto had gone home back then and created said regulatory environment for nuclear and gotten on with it, we'd be looking at a 80-90% carbon emissions free electrical grid across the entire western hemisphere today. Climate change would have been more or less solved, and yes, we knew that then, this is not benefit-of-hindsight stuff. There's a lot of histrionics around putting oil companies in the dock for crimes against humanity, but anyone who's campaigned against nuclear in the last 30 years can go right up and sit next to them.

mirimir 10y ago

I'd be OK with nuclear power if they could get adequate insurance on the open market, accepting all risk. It's my understanding that nuclear power plants are not insurable, unless government assumes risk, agrees to handle waste, etc.

natch 10y ago
Most of us would not be willing put a price on the lives or health of, say, our children. Any price. I'm not so ok with it, but not just for safety reasons. New designs may be safer but they are still part of a globally destructive system of dirty mining, byproducts that go to weapons, and still non-zero risk of inflicting lifelong and community-wide damage in catastrophic situations. Also it bugs me that nuclear is perpetuating the interests of large players who would prefer to control all the energy. I'd like to see energy democratized more, meaning instead of having contracts or bills from a power company, you make your own energy at home. That's an ideal, and we will probably end up with a mix, but I'd rather see money put into trying to tip that mix toward the decentralized side of things, which means toward locally installable technology like solar.
- mirimir 10y ago
  I'm sympathetic to all of that, and agree fully with most of it. But my point is that nuclear power plants, in order to be insurable on the open market, with no government involvement, would necessarily be safe enough to address your safety concerns. Regarding decentralization, we'll need some substantial breakthroughs in fabbing. Either that, or some substantial reduction in technology level.

hxegon 10y ago

Except that you can't replace fossil fuels completely with diffuse energy sources like wind and solar.

ared38 10y ago

Honest question: I thought the big problem with solar and wind is what to do on windless nights. AFAIK battery technology is nowhere near good or cheap enough. Nuclear seems like a solution to that gap. What are others?

pesfandiar 10y ago
You don't necessarily need batteries to store energy. For instance, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit....