> This is why I don't understand nuclear power advocates: For one thing, it's 2022, not 1952. We have vastly better knowledge and engineering expertise to bu

> This is why I don't understand nuclear power advocates: For one thing, it's 2022, not 1952. We have vastly better knowledge and engineering expertise to build safer, better, more efficient, less "polluting" (for some definition of the word) reactors. FWIW, this week in the cold snap in the UK, we've relied on good old fossil fuel and... nuclear, because the wind isn't blowing and the Sun isn't shining. https://gridwatch.co.uk/ https://gridwatch.co.uk/ Also, being old enough to have lived through the press-hysteria of Chernobyl: "we're all going to die or have babies with 3 arms", we ended up with maybe 4000 deaths over 50 years, and an area now rich with wildlife. And that's an uncontrolled nuclear accident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di... Compare that to the number of people that die through coal mine accidents a year and air pollution and so on. Then there's oil slicks killing wildlife, rig accidents, pipelines hundreds, if not thousands of miles long and so on. Or natural gas, with explosions and so on. Plus all the carbon emissions for transporting millions upon millions of tons of the stuff. The world wide number of deaths due to nuclear in its entire history adds up to less deaths than there are probably in a typical week for fossil fuels (deaths mining, transporting, building, and deaths to the general population breathing it in, and let's add deaths from climate change in there, since that's literally what fossil fuels have caused). I'd go further and say the deaths worldwide per day directly (accidents) or indirectly (climate change + pollution) due to fossil fuel usage is more than all deaths ever due to nuclear in its history. I live near a nuclear power station, and I'm comfortable with that. In fact, where I live, there's approximately 1.5m living within 30 miles, and just beyond that... London. On balance, I'd take a fleet of new nuclear power stations over the absolute disaster that is fossil fuels and the days there's no sun or wind. Back to: 'oh but what about waste?' Bury it, with signs. If we've gotten too stupid to read in 500 years, we're likely too stupid to know how to dig down several thousand feet, and are probably banging rocks together and saying 'ug' to each other. It's really not a problem. I can't recall the last time someone stupidly went into an _existing_ nuclear waste dump anywhere in the world and then died. And if they have it's, what, 1 person out of 7 billion. > Nuclear power is the posterchild for the flaws in public-private partnerships ("PPPs"). These simply shift profits to private industry and liabilities to governments. That's it. Don't believe me? Example [1]: Well, of course. Because, built in the right way, you use nuclear reactors to breed weapons grade fuel. So governments are always involved. In turn this means that governments never let market forces, and hence private companies build competing nuclear reactors which would drive down costs because the government won't step out of the way. The UK pretty much had a choice of EDF or EDF to build a new nuclear reactor.