[windows2020]

Perhaps the bottleneck is public perception after the accident at Three Mile Island, and then everyone wasting time on alternate (insufficient) renewables. But now it's not about migrating from dirty to clean energy (which nuclear is), it's we need more power and it's time to get serious. Welcome back, nuclear. Microsoft entering an agreement with Three Mile Island nicely concludes a period in energy history. The next one should be most exciting.

[triceratops]

Nuclear is great but we can do without bashing renewables as "insufficient". Solar + batteries are here right now and they're cheaper than nuclear.

[idiotsecant]

Solar is very, very cheap and almost totally worthless without storage. Storage is extremely expensive. Nuke is extremely cheap to generate -once its built. The cost of nuke energy is not because the technology is complex or because resources are scarce. It's because we have very, very burdensome regulations around nuclear reactors (for good reason!) and each nuke plant is a bespoke effort which gets recertified each time. This is enormously expensive. There is reason to believe that small modular nuke plants will vastly reduce this cost. That means we might have a path to cheap nuke, but there is no immediate path to cheap storage barring a technological revolution (not just incremental improvements) in battery tech.

In the long run solar power will kill fossil fuels, but we desperately need a bridge to get us there and not destroy the carbon balance in the atmosphere. Nuke is that bridge.

[destitude]

And yet we still have no place to put that "clean" energy when it is depleted.

[zamadatix]

You can bury the casks in my (literal) backyard if you'd like (please put the grass back). It's an overhyped issue much less impactful than the pollution we've had waiting for an idealized answer to arrive.

[maroonblazer]

I'd rather it be stored neatly in canisters underground than floating up into the atmosphere.

[loeg]

It can be left in canisters on site. It could be dumped in the ocean. It really doesn't matter.

[protocolture]

God I hate this argument. Casks. The answer is casks. The short term solution turns out to be a fantastic long term solution. If that isnt good enough, demand it be reprocessed with thorium or something.

There. No more silly anti nuke gotcha. You can give up on that one permanently.