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Re:Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will ... by roenxi on Friday October 14, 2022 @09:39PM (#33210794)
I bet what is going on isn't that surprising to industry insiders, or the people who make profit-loss decisions about whether to fund power plants or not.

This is the issue with politics and the power market, the language gets locked into "what should we do" which is then interpreted as "well, the government should do it!".

The problem with nuclear power isn't what the government is funding, it is that the government is saddling the industry with enormous costs in attempting to meet an unrealistic safety standard that _nothing else_ is held to. I suspect solar farms would go bankrupt if their waste was held to the same do-no-harm standard.

If the government just let people build what they thought was best, and demanded a generic fact-based safety standard rooted in observed harms (ie, not the stupid linear model after Chernobyl or some arbitrary radiation exposure limit which is literally undetectable vs. coal killing people on a daily basis) then the market could just sort this out.

Nuclear was on the too-cheap-to-meter path until the bureaucrats turned up to help decide how to run the plants. And EU bureaucrats are particularly bad at managing fast paced technological change they have a multi-decade track record of failure at this point in exactly these two fields - technology and energy policy. China is eating their lunch.

Re:Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will ... by cycomanic on Saturday October 15, 2022 @01:35AM (#33212049)
Yes let's just go free for all and the market sort it out. When was that a good idea when it came to safety critical infrastructure?! The whole let the current generation reap the profits and the market will magically figure things out got us into the current mess in the first place. The nuclear industry is not being held to higher standards relatively than other means of energy production. Wind farms must jump through significant buerocratic hurdles despite the fact that the potential dangers are massively lower.
Re:Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will ... by roenxi on Saturday October 15, 2022 @02:33AM (#33212330)
> Yes let's just go free for all and the market sort it out. When was that a good idea when it came to safety critical infrastructure?!

On days of the week ending with "y". Private markets are the best way to feed people, clothe people, house people, entertain people and keep people healthy. By and large people don't willingly go with a public option in any of those categories if they have a choice. The electricity market is the same.

The evidence at the moment is that someone next to Fukushima when it went bad would be ... perfectly fine. No physical risk. Chernobyl wasn't as bad as a dam collapse. This was all with 1980s tech. The evidence here is that the risk is possible for a private party to handle. Rare evacuations aren't common enough to worry about and are a much smaller problem than making what is happening in Europe at the moment a regular risk.

Note that I'm calling for nuclear to be held to the same safety standards you've been exposed to for your entire life - my objection is that the standards for nuclear are unreasonably high compared to literally everything else.

Re:Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will ... by Joeri on Saturday October 15, 2022 @02:45AM (#33212390)
To give an example of hurdles for wind power: there are some wind mills in the harbor region of Antwerp that aren’t allowed to generate power during the day because one time a single protected bird flew against the turning arm. They’re only allowed to use them when the birds are sleeping.
Re:Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will ... by the_why_of_y on Saturday October 15, 2022 @06:06AM (#33213385)
Are buildings in Antwerp allowed to have windows? This data from Canada in 2013 says for every bird killed by a wind mill about 1000 are killed by "Collisions with Houses".

https://birdwatchingbuzz.com/do-windmills-kill-birds/

Interestingly the article claims that the power lines that connect the wind mills kill more birds than the wind mills themselves.