[Drybones]

The cost of nuclear today has more to do with the fact that we aren’t building nuclear plants. There are minimum companies with small operations making nuclear reactor technologies for just maintenance of existing ones and military contracts. If we were building new nuclear plants with modern reactors, the costs wouldn’t be a big deal anymore because the production of them would have scaled better.

But instead we’re spending tens of billions on windmills and solar panels that won’t last 15 years or operate well in many regions, including Germany and especially south Germany. This is why Germany is now reliant on France’s nuclear power to handle the majority of its power needs and the citizens are paying massive premiums for it. Not the government.

So maybe we should ignore the pesky cost issue cause we certainly ignored the financial and economic cost consequences of solar and wind.

[reso]

The argument that costs will come down if we build more nuclear worked in the 1950s, but we know now where that goes now. Build More nuclear and costs come down. With more plants there are inevitably more nuclear incidents, the public realizes these things can make entire nations uninhabitable if they fail, and then they demand a halt to nuclear, pushing prices back up.

Nuclear prices have baked in the public sentiment on the risk of meltdowns. The prices are efficient.

[godelski]

> With more plants there are inevitably more nuclear incidents

Can we stop making this argument? It is an extremely bad faith argument. There have only been two accidents of commercial reactors in the history of nuclear power that led to the loss of lives. The likely value is well under 10k (<100 directly attributed to Chernobyl). The first was orders of magnitude more dangerous than the second, was early into the development of nuclear power, and was caused by experimentation using a nuclear reactor that the rest of the world refused to use due to the potential for the reactor to fail in exactly the way Chernobyl did. The second, killed a single person, was caused by the largest natural disaster in the region (in all of recorded history), where the science of the day did not think such an event could even happen.

Yes, there's more nuance to this, but we also need to recognize the actual level of danger. These arguments pretend that scientific knowledge has not changed over 80 years. These arguments pretend that there are no deaths and/or environmental concerns with other energy sources (literally every one has these concerns). They ignore the cost of carbon and other environmental damage of the source's lifetime. Most importantly, these arguments pretend that all incidents are equally as dangerous.

Can we please just stop? There are a lot of valid criticisms of nuclear power, but making lazy arguments just results in fighting. Talk about costs, reliance on fuel, the possibility of not even needing them, or any other points (argue with nuance). The public is (sadly) not well informed about nuclear nor most scientific concepts in general, although many members have high confidence in their cursory understanding. (The thesis here applies to a lot of other scientific domains btw, including: climate, health, and even evolution) We need to have real conversations about these issues as there is a lot on the line. Complex issues require complex discussions.

[tester457]

Those were old reactors, we haven't tried the newer safer reactors these past decades.