6 ms·

The idea at that time was for electricity production to replace nuclear&coal with renewable & gas (as backup) for some time, until there are other ways to backu

by lispm 3y ago

The idea at that time was for electricity production to replace nuclear&coal with renewable & gas (as backup) for some time, until there are other ways to backup renewable. It could (!) have had the effect of CO2 emissions going down in total.

mpweiher 3y ago
Except that didn't work. And even had it worked, the emissions still would have been significantly higher than just going with nuclear.
- oezi 3y ago
  'just going with nuclear' = just continue dreaming? Or in other words: when was this ever on the table to go just nuclear?
  - mpweiher 3y ago
    It wasn't in Germany, because Germany has a well-established and well-organized anti-science movement that peddles in magic cures and irrational fears. As an example, a large percentage of the population believes in homeopathy and most of the health insurers even pay for it(!) Similarly, what the German public "knows" about nuclear power is mostly patently and even ridiculously false.
    - lispm 3y ago
      Says the one who did not know that Fukushima had six nuclear reactors, with four of them being destroyed. Nuclear power is a lot "magically thinking". People obsessed with technical solutions are unable to see the other aspects around it: economics, safety, security, public reaction, environment, political, ... Use a spreadsheet and calculate energy needs, built times, costs, etc. and then try to get a feeling for the impact nuclear will have in the next decades compared to other energy production (coal, renewables, ...). It's not much. I've showed you in another answer the nuclear built-up over the last decades, world-wide. It stagnates mostly. https://world-nuclear.org/getmedia/332179b1-b865-47cc-a239-73df453f86db/nuclear-electricity-production-2023.png.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/getmedia/332179b1-b865-47cc-a239-7... Above are real numbers. We are far away from getting 3 times as much electricity from nuclear. Especially given that many of the reactors currently running are several decades old. In the past 35 years nuclear has not expanded at all in west&central europe. Just holding that seems to be a challenge. For a long time the German engineers lobbied for new nuclear technology. One of the ideas was the brilliant pebble-bed reactor. We build one. It later died a silent death, because it did not work in the real world (maintenance was too costly) and the industry was closing it. We were involved in the EPR (-> Siemens). Which is mostly a failure. > Similarly, what the German public "knows" about nuclear power is mostly patently and even ridiculously false. Others will say that about your opinions. I have yet failed to see a convincing argument from you, just the old stuff like that nuclear fuel has not been used to its potential. We heard that argument ten years ago. Twenty years ago. Nothing has happened. How many re-processing plants have been built in Western/Middle Europe in the last twenty years? None. The UK can't even clean up the one it has. What happened to the Thorium reactors? HN was full of news about them. What happened to the Small Modular Reactors? Where are they, beyond the ones used in the military? Too expensive. The technical solutions to make renewable large scale viable are an order of magnitude simpler than the "next nuclear technology" to be developed. Plus they will be easier to deploy. What is Japan doing with its Plutonium from reprocessing nuclear fuel? https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2018-10/features/japan’s-misguided-plutonium-policy https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2018-10/features/japan’s-mis... A bunch of countries would be happy to get nuclear technology under the idea that it is to "save the earth", while at the same time they'll want the option for nuclear weapons. In the middle east we have Israel with nuclear weapons. Iran is working for a long time on that, while claiming to develop nuclear power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_proliferation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_proliferation That's another reason why a world with lots of countries with nuclear technology is not desirable.
      - mpweiher 3y ago
        > did not know that Fukushima had six nuclear reactors, In common use "reactor" and "power plant" sometimes get equated. Whoop de doo. My apologies for being slightly sloppy. > Nuclear power is a lot "magically thinking". No. Hard science. Now the Energiewende. That is a LOT of magical thinking. We'll use intermittent sources and when they are not producing <a miracle occurs> and everything will be just fine! It turned out that the proper name for the miracle was "Russian Gas". Some "Wende" and not a good idea. > We are far away from getting 3 times as much electricity from nuclear. Sadly, yes. 17 years. According to 22 countries. > For a long time the German engineers lobbied for new nuclear technology. Yeah, for good reasons. Eventually they gave up, because it is really difficult to counter base emotions stoked by raw propaganda with reason and facts. It's not even a competition. > Others will say that about your opinions. I am sure some will say just that. Except I can back up my "opinions" with facts, because they are factual. As can be seen from this exchange. Anti-nukies know that nuclear reactors take forever to build. Because they only look at the most extreme examples, the outliers. The fact is that nuclear plants take around 7.5 years to build. With a little variation up and down, but consistent over the last 50 years. That's the actual fact. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-construction-time https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi... (note: the article also does the common thing and not distinguish between nuclear power plant and nuclear reactor) And of course France managed to transition their electricity generation to nuclear in 20 years. Germany has been at it 20 years as well, but we're at best half way done. With dubious results so far and the most difficult parts ahead of us. Speaking of France, anti-nukies know that nuclear is uniquely expensive. Except "cheap" green Germany electricity is almost twice expensive as "expensive" French nuclear electricity. With the former being the 2nd most expensive in the EU and the latter below the EU average. Strange. Anti-nukies know that nuclear is uniquely dangerous, unlike any other technology. When in fact it is either one of the safest or the overall safest energy technology out there, depending on which figures you look at. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy You know what is uniquely unsafe? Hydro power. The largest energy production accident ever was that dam in China. 150000 people dead at minimum, 4.6 million homes destroyed, 11 million people displaced. Nobody knows about it. No anti-hydro activists in Germany demand we dismantle all our dams. No country got out of hydro. The problem with nuclear is psychological, not factual. Anti-nukies know that nuclear waste is uniquely dangerous and an unsolved problem. In fact, nuclear waste is uniquely manageable and, in fact, managed. There is very little of it, temporary storage is fine, and permanent storage a solved problem, with two sites in existence and a third being built. The problems of nuclear waste are (1) political, with politicians being able to kick the can down the road because it is so technically non-problematic and (2) economic, because fresh Uranium ore is so cheap that recycling is not economical. Fuel cost is only around 10% of the cost of running a plant. > just the old stuff like that nuclear fuel has not been used to its potential. That is not an "argument". That is pure fact. We throw away 95% of the fuel. > How many re-processing plants have been built in Western/Middle Europe in the last twenty years? Why would you build reprocessing plants if your potential customer is getting out of nuclear energy? You are not making any sense. UK and France have reprocessing plants. And of course it's even better to build reactors that can use all the fuel. But you would have to invest money into developing those reactors, which wasn't done the last 20 years because people are irrationally scared of nuclear technology and governments pander to fears. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_fluid_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_fluid_reactor German engineers. Had to leave Germany and move to Canada to continue. A great example of just how deep and institutional the irrational hatred for anything nuclear is in Germany: "The reactor design won the public vote for the Galileo Knowledge Prize in the German GreenTec Awards of 2013, although the award committee presiding over the awards changed the rules to exclude nuclear designs before announcing the winner. Dual Fluid participants successfully sued to remedy this." Something nuclear won. Gotta change the rules retroactively (and illegally), because that just can't be. And yes, the public is actually ahead of the institutions on this one: almost two thirds now think the "Atomausstieg" is a mistake. https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/deutschlandtrend/deutschlandtrend-3357.html https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/deutschlandtrend/deutschlan... > What happened to the Thorium reactors? Dunno, this one? https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Operating-permit-issued-for-Chinese-molten-salt-re https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Operating-permit-iss... Was originally scheduled to be completed in 2024. They accelerated and finished in 2021, because it is impossible to build nuclear reactors in time, as we all know. Operating license was just granted. In the West, interest in investing in nuclear was very low. After the disaster of the German Energiewende became more apparent, interest in nuclear energy has gone up markedly. So we're seeing a lot more activity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor#Commercial/national/international_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor#Commercial... The Chinese also recently turned on their pebble-bed reactor, it is now feeding electricity into the grid. We'll see if they can do a better job of it than Germany did. I am somewhat dubious about that one myself, but again, we'll see. > That's another reason why a world with lots of countries with nuclear technology is not desirable. I am talking about the ones who already have it.
- lispm 3y ago
  > And even had it worked, the emissions still would have been significantly higher than just going with nuclear. We have basically started the renewable energy revolution, which will lead world-wide to much faster replacement of fossil fuels. Nuclear is at best stagnating in authoritarian surroundings (China, Russia, ...). In the west it is struggling (US, France, UK, ...). Get rid of it and invest the money into the much faster and cheaper growing renewable energy. Why should we invest more money into nuclear? The industry has since decades not being able to demonstrate safe storage of nuclear waste, it has rising costs, there are no cost effective modern reactors, breeders are dead, the technology is still linked to military use, non-state owned companies are not able deal with the cost problems. All we see are rising prices and time delays. That's not the technology to get carbon neutrality. UK: https://www.fr.de/wirtschaft/atomkraft-in-grossbritannien-teurer-rueckzieher-bei-akw-hinkley-point-92733370.html https://www.fr.de/wirtschaft/atomkraft-in-grossbritannien-te... Years too late, cost overruns, state owned EDF gets all the cost increases (-> French tax payer), Chinese investors not paying, time delays, above market prices, ... If France would have not made Areva fully state owned, it would have had to close it because of the mounting losses...
  - mpweiher 3y ago
    > We have basically started the renewable energy revolution We subsidized China's renewable sector with German taxpayer and electricity consumer money. China says thank you! Alas, renewables are not viable as a primary energy source, due to their intermittency (at best) und unreliability. They need vast amounts of backup. The dirty little secret of Germany's "renewable energy revolution" is that it only works with lots and lots of backup...and that backup was Russian gas (because Gas plants can ramp up quickly). Or coal. Neither option is exactly ideal when the purpose of the exercise is to reduce CO2 emissions, and it turns out that Germany, despite many decades and hundreds of billions of investments, has the second dirtiest electricity in Europe. Not the second cleanest, the second dirtiest. After Poland, who just use coal for everything, and are now starting to invest heavily in nuclear. And of course, the solution is even less ideal when the Gas is coming from a maniacal dictator, who uses that dependency to blackmail. (And who miscalculated that the blackmail would work, and thus invaded Ukraine). Germany's solution was to reactivate lots of coal and to essentially buy up all the gas on the international market, at sometimes exorbitant prices. But hey, we're rich, so who cares? Except of course a lot of that wealth is built on industries that are now struggling...and moving. Furthermore, one country buying up essentially all the gas on the free market is not a scalable solution for multiple countries. Which is why, after the Ukraine war and its repercussions, basically the entire world re-evaluated nuclear, and found that the mostly imaginary risks and problems were outweighed, dramatically, by the practical advantages. > Nuclear is at best stagnating in authoritarian surroundings (China, Russia, ...). In the west it is struggling (US, France, UK, ...). Incorrect. It is being dramatically expanded all over the world, and the problems with the EPR are outliers, they are not typical. Average time to build nuclear plant has been remarkably steady at 7.5 years since the 1970s (with some fluctuations above and below that line). > not able to demonstrate safe storage of nuclear waste, Incorrect. Storage of nuclear fuel at interim sites is safe and unproblematic. Which is one of the reasons the purely political problem of a permanent site can be kicked down the road by spineless politicians. Technically, safe final storage is completely solved. Finland's Onkalo site just opened, Sweden is also close to completing theirs and Yucca mountain was also ready. "The Government Accountability Office stated that the closure was for political, not technical or safety reasons." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r... One of the reasons nuclear fuel is unproblematic is that there is just very little of it, because the fuel is so energy dense. For example, just the single Herfa-Neurode site in Germany stores an order of magnitude more of both arsenic (enough to poison the entire world several times over) and heavy metals than there is nuclear waste. In containers that are far less safe. And of course arsenic has no half life, it stays poisonous forever. Last not least, there would be even less nuclear waste (and it would be even less dangerous) if we actually used up the nuclear fuel. Currently, we use less than 5% of the nuclear fuel we feed into the reactor, and throw away the remaining 95+% after it comes out of the reactor. Unsurprisingly, this 95% of the original fuel still contains a lot of energy, and so that is producing the most radiation. We should be recycling this, but alas fresh Uranium fuel is so cheap that recycling is at best marginally economical at this point. And since waste disposal is also not an actual problem (just a political one) there is also no real incentive coming from that side either. > UK: Yeah, the EPR is apparently a difficult design to build, and these are the first reactors of that type built, so it is at the start of the learning curve and last not least, we let our know-how on how to build reactors slip away, so we are now re-learning how to do that. The Chinese already finished their copy of the EPR, and the average time to construct a reactor has remained steady at 7,5 years, including and notwithstanding the outliers. And yes, if it's 7,5 years including the outliers, that means that a lot of reactors get built much quicker, 5 years and less.

by lispm 3y ago

mpweiher 3y ago

Except that didn't work. And even had it worked, the emissions still would have been significantly higher than just going with nuclear.

oezi 3y ago
'just going with nuclear' = just continue dreaming? Or in other words: when was this ever on the table to go just nuclear?
- mpweiher 3y ago
  It wasn't in Germany, because Germany has a well-established and well-organized anti-science movement that peddles in magic cures and irrational fears. As an example, a large percentage of the population believes in homeopathy and most of the health insurers even pay for it(!) Similarly, what the German public "knows" about nuclear power is mostly patently and even ridiculously false.
  - lispm 3y ago
    Says the one who did not know that Fukushima had six nuclear reactors, with four of them being destroyed. Nuclear power is a lot "magically thinking". People obsessed with technical solutions are unable to see the other aspects around it: economics, safety, security, public reaction, environment, political, ... Use a spreadsheet and calculate energy needs, built times, costs, etc. and then try to get a feeling for the impact nuclear will have in the next decades compared to other energy production (coal, renewables, ...). It's not much. I've showed you in another answer the nuclear built-up over the last decades, world-wide. It stagnates mostly. https://world-nuclear.org/getmedia/332179b1-b865-47cc-a239-73df453f86db/nuclear-electricity-production-2023.png.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/getmedia/332179b1-b865-47cc-a239-7... Above are real numbers. We are far away from getting 3 times as much electricity from nuclear. Especially given that many of the reactors currently running are several decades old. In the past 35 years nuclear has not expanded at all in west&central europe. Just holding that seems to be a challenge. For a long time the German engineers lobbied for new nuclear technology. One of the ideas was the brilliant pebble-bed reactor. We build one. It later died a silent death, because it did not work in the real world (maintenance was too costly) and the industry was closing it. We were involved in the EPR (-> Siemens). Which is mostly a failure. > Similarly, what the German public "knows" about nuclear power is mostly patently and even ridiculously false. Others will say that about your opinions. I have yet failed to see a convincing argument from you, just the old stuff like that nuclear fuel has not been used to its potential. We heard that argument ten years ago. Twenty years ago. Nothing has happened. How many re-processing plants have been built in Western/Middle Europe in the last twenty years? None. The UK can't even clean up the one it has. What happened to the Thorium reactors? HN was full of news about them. What happened to the Small Modular Reactors? Where are they, beyond the ones used in the military? Too expensive. The technical solutions to make renewable large scale viable are an order of magnitude simpler than the "next nuclear technology" to be developed. Plus they will be easier to deploy. What is Japan doing with its Plutonium from reprocessing nuclear fuel? https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2018-10/features/japan’s-misguided-plutonium-policy https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2018-10/features/japan’s-mis... A bunch of countries would be happy to get nuclear technology under the idea that it is to "save the earth", while at the same time they'll want the option for nuclear weapons. In the middle east we have Israel with nuclear weapons. Iran is working for a long time on that, while claiming to develop nuclear power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_proliferation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_proliferation That's another reason why a world with lots of countries with nuclear technology is not desirable.
    - mpweiher 3y ago
      > did not know that Fukushima had six nuclear reactors, In common use "reactor" and "power plant" sometimes get equated. Whoop de doo. My apologies for being slightly sloppy. > Nuclear power is a lot "magically thinking". No. Hard science. Now the Energiewende. That is a LOT of magical thinking. We'll use intermittent sources and when they are not producing <a miracle occurs> and everything will be just fine! It turned out that the proper name for the miracle was "Russian Gas". Some "Wende" and not a good idea. > We are far away from getting 3 times as much electricity from nuclear. Sadly, yes. 17 years. According to 22 countries. > For a long time the German engineers lobbied for new nuclear technology. Yeah, for good reasons. Eventually they gave up, because it is really difficult to counter base emotions stoked by raw propaganda with reason and facts. It's not even a competition. > Others will say that about your opinions. I am sure some will say just that. Except I can back up my "opinions" with facts, because they are factual. As can be seen from this exchange. Anti-nukies know that nuclear reactors take forever to build. Because they only look at the most extreme examples, the outliers. The fact is that nuclear plants take around 7.5 years to build. With a little variation up and down, but consistent over the last 50 years. That's the actual fact. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-construction-time https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi... (note: the article also does the common thing and not distinguish between nuclear power plant and nuclear reactor) And of course France managed to transition their electricity generation to nuclear in 20 years. Germany has been at it 20 years as well, but we're at best half way done. With dubious results so far and the most difficult parts ahead of us. Speaking of France, anti-nukies know that nuclear is uniquely expensive. Except "cheap" green Germany electricity is almost twice expensive as "expensive" French nuclear electricity. With the former being the 2nd most expensive in the EU and the latter below the EU average. Strange. Anti-nukies know that nuclear is uniquely dangerous, unlike any other technology. When in fact it is either one of the safest or the overall safest energy technology out there, depending on which figures you look at. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy You know what is uniquely unsafe? Hydro power. The largest energy production accident ever was that dam in China. 150000 people dead at minimum, 4.6 million homes destroyed, 11 million people displaced. Nobody knows about it. No anti-hydro activists in Germany demand we dismantle all our dams. No country got out of hydro. The problem with nuclear is psychological, not factual. Anti-nukies know that nuclear waste is uniquely dangerous and an unsolved problem. In fact, nuclear waste is uniquely manageable and, in fact, managed. There is very little of it, temporary storage is fine, and permanent storage a solved problem, with two sites in existence and a third being built. The problems of nuclear waste are (1) political, with politicians being able to kick the can down the road because it is so technically non-problematic and (2) economic, because fresh Uranium ore is so cheap that recycling is not economical. Fuel cost is only around 10% of the cost of running a plant. > just the old stuff like that nuclear fuel has not been used to its potential. That is not an "argument". That is pure fact. We throw away 95% of the fuel. > How many re-processing plants have been built in Western/Middle Europe in the last twenty years? Why would you build reprocessing plants if your potential customer is getting out of nuclear energy? You are not making any sense. UK and France have reprocessing plants. And of course it's even better to build reactors that can use all the fuel. But you would have to invest money into developing those reactors, which wasn't done the last 20 years because people are irrationally scared of nuclear technology and governments pander to fears. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_fluid_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_fluid_reactor German engineers. Had to leave Germany and move to Canada to continue. A great example of just how deep and institutional the irrational hatred for anything nuclear is in Germany: "The reactor design won the public vote for the Galileo Knowledge Prize in the German GreenTec Awards of 2013, although the award committee presiding over the awards changed the rules to exclude nuclear designs before announcing the winner. Dual Fluid participants successfully sued to remedy this." Something nuclear won. Gotta change the rules retroactively (and illegally), because that just can't be. And yes, the public is actually ahead of the institutions on this one: almost two thirds now think the "Atomausstieg" is a mistake. https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/deutschlandtrend/deutschlandtrend-3357.html https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/deutschlandtrend/deutschlan... > What happened to the Thorium reactors? Dunno, this one? https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Operating-permit-issued-for-Chinese-molten-salt-re https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Operating-permit-iss... Was originally scheduled to be completed in 2024. They accelerated and finished in 2021, because it is impossible to build nuclear reactors in time, as we all know. Operating license was just granted. In the West, interest in investing in nuclear was very low. After the disaster of the German Energiewende became more apparent, interest in nuclear energy has gone up markedly. So we're seeing a lot more activity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor#Commercial/national/international_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor#Commercial... The Chinese also recently turned on their pebble-bed reactor, it is now feeding electricity into the grid. We'll see if they can do a better job of it than Germany did. I am somewhat dubious about that one myself, but again, we'll see. > That's another reason why a world with lots of countries with nuclear technology is not desirable. I am talking about the ones who already have it.
lispm 3y ago
> And even had it worked, the emissions still would have been significantly higher than just going with nuclear. We have basically started the renewable energy revolution, which will lead world-wide to much faster replacement of fossil fuels. Nuclear is at best stagnating in authoritarian surroundings (China, Russia, ...). In the west it is struggling (US, France, UK, ...). Get rid of it and invest the money into the much faster and cheaper growing renewable energy. Why should we invest more money into nuclear? The industry has since decades not being able to demonstrate safe storage of nuclear waste, it has rising costs, there are no cost effective modern reactors, breeders are dead, the technology is still linked to military use, non-state owned companies are not able deal with the cost problems. All we see are rising prices and time delays. That's not the technology to get carbon neutrality. UK: https://www.fr.de/wirtschaft/atomkraft-in-grossbritannien-teurer-rueckzieher-bei-akw-hinkley-point-92733370.html https://www.fr.de/wirtschaft/atomkraft-in-grossbritannien-te... Years too late, cost overruns, state owned EDF gets all the cost increases (-> French tax payer), Chinese investors not paying, time delays, above market prices, ... If France would have not made Areva fully state owned, it would have had to close it because of the mounting losses...
- mpweiher 3y ago
  > We have basically started the renewable energy revolution We subsidized China's renewable sector with German taxpayer and electricity consumer money. China says thank you! Alas, renewables are not viable as a primary energy source, due to their intermittency (at best) und unreliability. They need vast amounts of backup. The dirty little secret of Germany's "renewable energy revolution" is that it only works with lots and lots of backup...and that backup was Russian gas (because Gas plants can ramp up quickly). Or coal. Neither option is exactly ideal when the purpose of the exercise is to reduce CO2 emissions, and it turns out that Germany, despite many decades and hundreds of billions of investments, has the second dirtiest electricity in Europe. Not the second cleanest, the second dirtiest. After Poland, who just use coal for everything, and are now starting to invest heavily in nuclear. And of course, the solution is even less ideal when the Gas is coming from a maniacal dictator, who uses that dependency to blackmail. (And who miscalculated that the blackmail would work, and thus invaded Ukraine). Germany's solution was to reactivate lots of coal and to essentially buy up all the gas on the international market, at sometimes exorbitant prices. But hey, we're rich, so who cares? Except of course a lot of that wealth is built on industries that are now struggling...and moving. Furthermore, one country buying up essentially all the gas on the free market is not a scalable solution for multiple countries. Which is why, after the Ukraine war and its repercussions, basically the entire world re-evaluated nuclear, and found that the mostly imaginary risks and problems were outweighed, dramatically, by the practical advantages. > Nuclear is at best stagnating in authoritarian surroundings (China, Russia, ...). In the west it is struggling (US, France, UK, ...). Incorrect. It is being dramatically expanded all over the world, and the problems with the EPR are outliers, they are not typical. Average time to build nuclear plant has been remarkably steady at 7.5 years since the 1970s (with some fluctuations above and below that line). > not able to demonstrate safe storage of nuclear waste, Incorrect. Storage of nuclear fuel at interim sites is safe and unproblematic. Which is one of the reasons the purely political problem of a permanent site can be kicked down the road by spineless politicians. Technically, safe final storage is completely solved. Finland's Onkalo site just opened, Sweden is also close to completing theirs and Yucca mountain was also ready. "The Government Accountability Office stated that the closure was for political, not technical or safety reasons." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r... One of the reasons nuclear fuel is unproblematic is that there is just very little of it, because the fuel is so energy dense. For example, just the single Herfa-Neurode site in Germany stores an order of magnitude more of both arsenic (enough to poison the entire world several times over) and heavy metals than there is nuclear waste. In containers that are far less safe. And of course arsenic has no half life, it stays poisonous forever. Last not least, there would be even less nuclear waste (and it would be even less dangerous) if we actually used up the nuclear fuel. Currently, we use less than 5% of the nuclear fuel we feed into the reactor, and throw away the remaining 95+% after it comes out of the reactor. Unsurprisingly, this 95% of the original fuel still contains a lot of energy, and so that is producing the most radiation. We should be recycling this, but alas fresh Uranium fuel is so cheap that recycling is at best marginally economical at this point. And since waste disposal is also not an actual problem (just a political one) there is also no real incentive coming from that side either. > UK: Yeah, the EPR is apparently a difficult design to build, and these are the first reactors of that type built, so it is at the start of the learning curve and last not least, we let our know-how on how to build reactors slip away, so we are now re-learning how to do that. The Chinese already finished their copy of the EPR, and the average time to construct a reactor has remained steady at 7,5 years, including and notwithstanding the outliers. And yes, if it's 7,5 years including the outliers, that means that a lot of reactors get built much quicker, 5 years and less.