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The issues with nuclear are the same ones you mention as oil only worse: It costs vastly more per kWh to get energy from nuclear than it does from Oil (or gas

The issues with nuclear are the same ones you mention as oil only worse: It costs vastly more per kWh to get energy from nuclear than it does from Oil (or gas or other fuels). And if you think getting people to agree on climate change is hard, try getting them to agree on big subsidies for nuclear, let alone agree to have plants (and waste stores) built on their districts...

mikewarot 4y ago
We're not about to run out of Uranium, we've got tons of it just sitting around, waiting to be reprocessed. We also don't have to drill down 10 miles, then turn sideways to find more of it. Nuclear just needs the fuel cycle to be closed again, as it was originally intended to be. The technology is known, and well proven, we just need to deploy it.
- LatteLazy 4y ago
  The problem is you will run out of money long long before we run out of fossil fuels. And closed fuel cycles are great but they're even more expensive, and you're still going to end up with at least some waste. People think there is an easy simple answer to this. But there isn't. People think it's nuclear, and it is if you ignore the costs, the waste and the political issues. But then fossil fuels are a great solution... if you ignore all the issues.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  "We just need". But we don't. That is absolutely not a thing we need, and doing it would steal time and money away from what we really do need to do instead.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
If you include air pollution and carbon, the price of nuclear is more than competitive with coal. And the electricity it generates can do lots of things cheaper and cleaner than unsubsidized oil and gas can (EVs and heat pumps) and it pretty fungible. So, it's incorrect to say nuclear is more expensive, it's just easier to trace the costs compared with fossil fuels. That might be a hard political argument to make when the government is controlled by the people getting the fossil fuel subsidies from everyone else and using them to buy politicians, but if we're talking about global civilization collapse, then we can't just sweep those things under the carpet and ignore them.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Coal could turn out to be the most expensive fuel ever. That depends on whether we avert disaster. Similarly, when the nukes are mothballed, long before their design life is over because their power is too expensive to find any buyers, the actual cost of each kWh produced up to that end will balloon out of sight, as the exorbitant construction cost is suddenly amortized over much less energy. But comparing nukes to coal is pointless. Wasting money building nukes instead of the much larger amount of renewables the same money could buy brings catastrophe nearer. Burning coal for ten years while the nuke is built brings catastrophe nearer. To avert catastrophe, we will need to build out renewables radically faster than we are doing this far. And, we will need to build out factories for the equipment we will also need, particularly hydrogen and ammonia synthesizers to provide portable fuel for vehicles that cannot rely on batteries.
  - njarboe 4y ago
    I bet nukes, wind, and solar have very different material needs so ramping up all of them as fast as possible should be the course of action. Why exclude nuclear?
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Money is fungible. Our industrial capacity could cope with a great deal more activity than it will be devoting to building renewables. But money directing it to that activity, and not some other instead, is the limiting factor.
- LatteLazy 4y ago
  Right now, you're not charged the cost to humanity. You're charged the cost to you. That is the system. It's wrong, because it let's you externalise a lot of costs. But that is the system. So you very much CAN sweep those things under the carpet. Now as soon as every nation on earth agrees to a carbon price and emission limits and passes those costs down you might be right about the cost of coal being higher. But that isn't the world we live in. That's the problem here: people conflate what is moral with what is actually happening. So you can go bankrupt building nuclear, and you'll be morally right (maybe, I still think the costs are way too high), but you will still be bankrupt and the world will still be emitting...

mikewarot 4y ago

We're not about to run out of Uranium, we've got tons of it just sitting around, waiting to be reprocessed. We also don't have to drill down 10 miles, then turn sideways to find more of it. Nuclear just needs the fuel cycle to be closed again, as it was originally intended to be. The technology is known, and well proven, we just need to deploy it.

LatteLazy 4y ago
The problem is you will run out of money long long before we run out of fossil fuels. And closed fuel cycles are great but they're even more expensive, and you're still going to end up with at least some waste. People think there is an easy simple answer to this. But there isn't. People think it's nuclear, and it is if you ignore the costs, the waste and the political issues. But then fossil fuels are a great solution... if you ignore all the issues.
ncmncm 4y ago
"We just need". But we don't. That is absolutely not a thing we need, and doing it would steal time and money away from what we really do need to do instead.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

If you include air pollution and carbon, the price of nuclear is more than competitive with coal. And the electricity it generates can do lots of things cheaper and cleaner than unsubsidized oil and gas can (EVs and heat pumps) and it pretty fungible. So, it's incorrect to say nuclear is more expensive, it's just easier to trace the costs compared with fossil fuels. That might be a hard political argument to make when the government is controlled by the people getting the fossil fuel subsidies from everyone else and using them to buy politicians, but if we're talking about global civilization collapse, then we can't just sweep those things under the carpet and ignore them.

ncmncm 4y ago
Coal could turn out to be the most expensive fuel ever. That depends on whether we avert disaster. Similarly, when the nukes are mothballed, long before their design life is over because their power is too expensive to find any buyers, the actual cost of each kWh produced up to that end will balloon out of sight, as the exorbitant construction cost is suddenly amortized over much less energy. But comparing nukes to coal is pointless. Wasting money building nukes instead of the much larger amount of renewables the same money could buy brings catastrophe nearer. Burning coal for ten years while the nuke is built brings catastrophe nearer. To avert catastrophe, we will need to build out renewables radically faster than we are doing this far. And, we will need to build out factories for the equipment we will also need, particularly hydrogen and ammonia synthesizers to provide portable fuel for vehicles that cannot rely on batteries.
- njarboe 4y ago
  I bet nukes, wind, and solar have very different material needs so ramping up all of them as fast as possible should be the course of action. Why exclude nuclear?
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Money is fungible. Our industrial capacity could cope with a great deal more activity than it will be devoting to building renewables. But money directing it to that activity, and not some other instead, is the limiting factor.
LatteLazy 4y ago
Right now, you're not charged the cost to humanity. You're charged the cost to you. That is the system. It's wrong, because it let's you externalise a lot of costs. But that is the system. So you very much CAN sweep those things under the carpet. Now as soon as every nation on earth agrees to a carbon price and emission limits and passes those costs down you might be right about the cost of coal being higher. But that isn't the world we live in. That's the problem here: people conflate what is moral with what is actually happening. So you can go bankrupt building nuclear, and you'll be morally right (maybe, I still think the costs are way too high), but you will still be bankrupt and the world will still be emitting...