Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
Nuclear power looks cheap—right up until you factor in the part where you have to mothball the reactor for a hundred years, entomb the waste in some geologically stable crypt, and pray your great-grandkids don’t get irradiated by a budget cut. The sticker price on a kilowatt-hour is a joke, a little accounting fiction that conveniently ignores the back-end costs, because if you actually priced in decommissioning, storage, and the inevitable government bailouts, nuclear would be about as ‘cheap’ as launching your local power plant into orbit. But hey, that’s the magic of privatization of profits and socializing the fallout.
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Monteluna
@monteluna
This is just statements appealing to fear. Much of my undergrad was learning from and working with top nuclear physicists. Much of the current political narrative is fictitious "worst case" scenario thinking that generates headlines and taps into fear responses of people. Entombing radioactive material has happened for almost 100 years now with no issues. The gains are measurable as cheaper energy allows for human flourishing, and absolutely has measurable quality of life improvements. I can also tell you first hand I haven't met a single person in energy that isn't working hard to make the best outcome, something I can at least compare with the crypto industry as I've met people who will look you straight in the face and tell you they are scamming you or someone else, and think its a flex. The previous bad outcomes are statistically still better than flying a commercial airline, and the benefits outweigh the risks. There are risks, but its *not* worth not doing it.
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miguelito
@mc
His point was about the costs, and the costs of dealing with radioactive waste are both substantial and require secure funding for decades, which governments may prove incapable of guaranteeing Nuclear’s LCOE is not competitive relative to many renewable alternatives
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Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
Nuclear's pricing hides costs. Decommissioning: $300M-$5B/reactor. "Delay and entomb" creates financial risks excluded from kilowatt-hour pricing. Waste storage remains unsolved, excluded from pricing. Yucca Mountain: $15B wasted. Most waste sits in "temporary" storage. Nuclear survives on subsidies, excluded from prices. Price-Anderson Act shields operators. Subsidies exceed wind/solar. "Safer than flying" flawed: airline risk contained, nuclear accidents create generational impacts. Chernobyl: $700B+. Fukushima: $200B+. Nuclear offloads liabilities to type future longer then the English language. Kilowatt-hour cost is fiction built on deferred expenses, externalized risks, and government intervention
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