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I'm always kind of curious as this "expensive" line of thinking. Yes, nuclear is expensive. Extremely expensive. But is it more expensive than a week's worth of

I'm always kind of curious as this "expensive" line of thinking. Yes, nuclear is expensive. Extremely expensive. But is it more expensive than a week's worth of catastrophic grid collapse due to global warming? We have the ability to build nuclear plants. We can reprocess the waste to make more energy with. We can get better at it to drive down the price. It's more reliable as a base load than any renewable. My state gets over fifty percent of its energy from nuclear power plants. I pay a few pennies more per kWh than neighboring states. I'd pay a few more pennies than that to figure out the rest of this issue.

southerntofu 6y ago
> But is it more expensive than... Like you, i don't believe price to be an argument of concern. I'm merely stating this because over and over, both in French media and on HN, i've seen stated that nuclear is the cheapest energy which is a blatant lie. > We can reprocess the waste to make more energy with. Source? From my limited understanding, all nuclear research that produced either less-dangerous waste or re-usable waste was shut down decades ago because there was no foreseeable way to turn that into weapons. The nuclear industry is deeply tied to the military industrial complex and (neo)colonial extractivism (see Françafrique networks for references). > It's more reliable as a base load than any renewable. Source? Here in France there's uncountable accidents/scandals in the nuclear industry and reactors are often stopped for weeks/months at a time. The same cannot be said about hydro power (dams) for instance. > I'd pay a few more pennies than that to figure out the rest of this issue Economic incentives is only part of the problem in my view. We in the industrialized world are aiming for ever-growing (ideally infinite) energy production and consumption, which necessarily leads to ecocide and other environmental damages. Don't you believe reducing our resources/energy footprint as a society is a more sustainable way to address the problem? There are many strategies we can put in place to reduce energy consumption, but these would contradict basic tenets of capitalism. For the most obvious example (from HN's perspective), see planned obsolescence or how/why we build more devices every few years than there are humans on earth (and yet we keep on having to buy new ones, which is severely damaging the environment).
- selectodude 6y ago
  >Source? From my limited understanding, all nuclear research that produced either less-dangerous waste or re-usable waste was shut down decades ago because there was no foreseeable way to turn that into weapons. The nuclear industry is deeply tied to the military industrial complex and (neo)colonial extractivism (see Françafrique networks for references). The existence of La Hague site in northwest France has been very successful at nuclear reprocessing. >Source? Here in France there's uncountable accidents/scandals in the nuclear industry and reactors are often stopped for weeks/months at a time. The same cannot be said about hydro power (dams) for instance. It's not uncountable. There have been like ten in the entire country over the past fifty years. >Don't you believe reducing our resources/energy footprint as a society is a more sustainable way to address the problem? No. The one actual resource we can make and use is energy. We need to use less consumables. Energy isn't a consumable in our timeline. So many things are predicated on significant increases in clean energy. We could literally suck carbon out of the air with enough energy.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- pfdietz 6y ago
  Reprocessing went out of fashion because it's economically pointless. Separated plutonium from spent fuel has negative value -- it costs more to fabricate fuel from it than it would to use freshly enriched uranium.

southerntofu 6y ago

> But is it more expensive than... Like you, i don't believe price to be an argument of concern. I'm merely stating this because over and over, both in French media and on HN, i've seen stated that nuclear is the cheapest energy which is a blatant lie. > We can reprocess the waste to make more energy with. Source? From my limited understanding, all nuclear research that produced either less-dangerous waste or re-usable waste was shut down decades ago because there was no foreseeable way to turn that into weapons. The nuclear industry is deeply tied to the military industrial complex and (neo)colonial extractivism (see Françafrique networks for references). > It's more reliable as a base load than any renewable. Source? Here in France there's uncountable accidents/scandals in the nuclear industry and reactors are often stopped for weeks/months at a time. The same cannot be said about hydro power (dams) for instance. > I'd pay a few more pennies than that to figure out the rest of this issue Economic incentives is only part of the problem in my view. We in the industrialized world are aiming for ever-growing (ideally infinite) energy production and consumption, which necessarily leads to ecocide and other environmental damages. Don't you believe reducing our resources/energy footprint as a society is a more sustainable way to address the problem? There are many strategies we can put in place to reduce energy consumption, but these would contradict basic tenets of capitalism. For the most obvious example (from HN's perspective), see planned obsolescence or how/why we build more devices every few years than there are humans on earth (and yet we keep on having to buy new ones, which is severely damaging the environment).

selectodude 6y ago
>Source? From my limited understanding, all nuclear research that produced either less-dangerous waste or re-usable waste was shut down decades ago because there was no foreseeable way to turn that into weapons. The nuclear industry is deeply tied to the military industrial complex and (neo)colonial extractivism (see Françafrique networks for references). The existence of La Hague site in northwest France has been very successful at nuclear reprocessing. >Source? Here in France there's uncountable accidents/scandals in the nuclear industry and reactors are often stopped for weeks/months at a time. The same cannot be said about hydro power (dams) for instance. It's not uncountable. There have been like ten in the entire country over the past fifty years. >Don't you believe reducing our resources/energy footprint as a society is a more sustainable way to address the problem? No. The one actual resource we can make and use is energy. We need to use less consumables. Energy isn't a consumable in our timeline. So many things are predicated on significant increases in clean energy. We could literally suck carbon out of the air with enough energy.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
pfdietz 6y ago
Reprocessing went out of fashion because it's economically pointless. Separated plutonium from spent fuel has negative value -- it costs more to fabricate fuel from it than it would to use freshly enriched uranium.