hunterpayne

Not the battery backup system. And batteries are incredibly explosive and will explode sympathetically. Its much like hitting a refinery in that regard. NPPs have been hit during this war with bombs, they survived just fine because they are built in much the same way as a hardened military structure. They can withstand a fully loaded 747 hitting them directly at the speed of sound. That's more boom than all but the largest ordinance.

You are comparing capacity costs (what it costs to deploy). What you pay are utilization costs (total cost). By total cost, NPPs are the cheapest form of power we have even with all the lawsuits. About $0.04/kwh vs $0.14/kwh for renewables. And that's before the unreliability of renewables are accounted for. That's why the countries with lots of nuclear have cheap power and the ones with lots of renewables have expensive power. If what you say were true, it would be reversed. Also, the countries with lots of NPPs have cleaner grids than countries with lots of renewables. What you are saying is just factually false.

It doesn't have to be and probably isn't. That's only because of the fear mongering you are doing. At the behest of and to the benefit of the fossil fuel extractors ironically.

Its also the source of the majority of human caused exposure to ionizing radiation. Coal dust has a small amount of radioactivity (from literally the least radioactive element) and there is an amazingly large amount of coal dust.

A) This isn't true

B) We could reprocess the waste

C) There are reactors that produce 95% less waste, regulation prevents their testing and deployment

D) All the nuclear waste in the US (the country with by far the most NPPs) fits in 1 Olympic sized pool

If the numbers worked out the way you imagine, there would have been a gold rush to do it. NV is actually pretty low elevation and dusty and is surprisingly bad for solar even if it seems like it should be great. You know where is great for solar? New Mexico, Central Mexico and the northern part of the Andes range. Those are places at high elevations with low cloud cover and lower latitudes. That's where solar does well. I know it seems like it should just work in the desert...it doesn't however. The critical factors for solar are latitude, altitude and cloud cover.

It was Chuck Schumer who torpedoed Yucca mt. Vegas had nothing to do with it.

Again, simple ignorance. The reason it lasts so long is that we aren't allowed to reprocess it for rather illogical reasons. Also, most of the "waste" from the reactor are either rare earths or silver (which is stable from the moment it is created) or valuable and useful gases. It can also be reprocessed and the nuclear fuel can be put into another reactor. We don't do this because of the absurdly small chance someone could get some Pu-239 (which would still require very advanced and noticeable processing). Basically things that only happen in James Bond movies and because some politician without any scientific knowledge can imagine it, it gets banned.

Don't quote my ancestor's line. He never meant it to be a rejection of science that you are using it as.

Also, you can't spell.

You do realize that those "experts" were widely criticized by scientists and engineers for their lack of knowledge of the plant, many, many scientific inaccuracies and for basic fear mongering right? Most of the things they said weren't accurate. What was accurate is that the Tsunami took out the power lines around the plant and its cooling pond had a hydrogen explosion. Their backup power was down (which was the design flaw in the plant) because it was flooded. This required the pumping of seawater into the reactor to keep it cool. It never melted down in any way and the death toll was either 0 or 1 depending on how you count. Just in case you actually wanted to deal in facts on this one.

The carbon payoff for the average NPP is 6 weeks. The idealized payoff for a solar panel is 5 years, in practice its 10 in the tropics trending to 20 on a line about where SF or Barcelona is. And a solar panel on average only lasts 20 years.

Hanford could be handled for far less (no idea about the UK's sites but probably the same situation). Its the result of making the atomic bombs during WWII. The acids could be neutralized and the uranium separated out. However, a contract that just keeps putting the material in new containers every few years is much more profitable. The idea it should take hundreds of billions to do is pretty much about an nearly infinite time horizon of maintenance instead of just cleaning up the site.

Also, Hanford has nothing to do with civilian NPPs and the processes used there would never be done as part of power generation.

Finally, the cost of NPPs is almost always about the lawsuits. Look at how much Korea and China payed for their NPPs. It was less than 20% of what we pay, they were online in less than 5 years and they are producing 2.8GW for each country for the last decade.

PS The UK has never deployed a standardized design for a NPP. All of their NPPs are different types of experimental designs. Just buy a AP1400 and be done with it for far cheaper.

"Less doesn't have to mean less comfort."

It really does. You can live without clothes, that's less. You can live on 1500 kcals a day. You would be at the brink of starving all the time but you would be alive. I could lock you in a cage and just give you the bear minimum of bread and water. Just enough heat so you don't freeze and never let you out. That's certainly less. Just how much less do you want?

PS Young people almost always use more resources than the old. When my kid isn't here, our trash and recycling containers are pretty empty. When he is here, they overflow. And he is only a 50% increase in the house's population.

The solution was, is and always will be nuclear power. Electrification is a misdirection so you won't support actual solutions. For example, you can't make ammonia from electricity but you can from heat generated by either fossil fuels or nuclear. And without ammonia in industrial quantities we can't feed everyone because its used to make fertilizer. This is one of several things we get from fossil fuels (and could get from nuclear) but we can't get from electricity alone. Then there is the extra inefficiencies from electricity for things we do with power that aren't kinetic.

Basically, converting from one form of energy to another usually can be done at 50%. The lone exception is voltage potential (electricity) where we can get 90% for motion but 10% for anything else. And when you use motion for transport you have all the problems of a heavy battery reducing efficiency. This is why we can make an EV but not an electric plane. Then there are the problems to do with storage (remember 2 conversions so 25% efficiency there unless you use a battery). Finally, remember that capitalism is really good at efficiency. When people started trying to find energy uses to cut, this was easy in less developed places but in the US it was nearly impossible. Every cut caused problems elsewhere (even for something as minor as an HVAC fan). Ironically we learned this during COVID when the older "inefficient" buildings were healthier than the newer ones because they moved less air.

The only real (ie large) nuclear accident happened under communism. And the reason why we don't have even safer nuclear designs is because of regulation. This entire discussion is entirely backwards and isn't looking at the data. Look where and why incidents happened. When you do, you will find various causes, none of which are fixed by political ideology. They are fixed by engineering and insurance costs.

Chernobyl happened because the son of a central committee member needed data from a dangerous experiment that was conducted at the powerplant. They literally disabled safety systems with wrenches. Both the design itself would have never allowed in the west nor would the experiment that caused the accident. Also, the HBO movie was very inaccurate so please don't bring up something you saw there, many of the things in the movie aren't even scientifically possible.

They also need a way to extract power from 1,000,000C heat. Since we have absolutely no idea how to do that, fusion is still a non-starter...FOR ENERGY PRODUCTION. Fusion can be used for other things but power production won't be one of those things in any of our lifetimes if ever. That being said, we still should do the research and use fusion for what it is useful for. Its just that those uses don't include power production.

This is complete non-sense. Nothing about what you are saying is factually accurate in any way, scientifically or otherwise. What is happening is that enough people have finally learned that the environmental movement's policies weren't based upon actual science or data. This lost them support. They have finally lost enough support to verge on complete irrelevancy. Now that that has happened, they are trying to reverse that trend.

"the most important two reasons to join the EU"

You misspelled NATO

Serbia has been basically ruled by gangsters for the last several decades. So no, I don't think the academic environment has people like who the Serbian government has to deal with.

Honestly, its not the hubris. Politicians are a pretty arrogant group of people. Its the lack of life experience and lessons learned from negative consequences that they lack. The hubris just makes it more galling and thus makes for better sound bites.

I've worked and known many, many academics in my life. I'm sorry, but if you think this is anti-intellectual, then there are some basic things you don't understand about people.

Academics really are naive and out of touch people. In a weird sort of way, being an academic means sacrificing your personal growth for either a) a deep love of their area of research or b) love of teaching. This means that the wider life skills one gains as an adult, they never get. They get to avoid consequences for being wrong but at quite a price. One of the worst things I have seen are what happens to academics who leave for the private sector later in their career. When they can't make it in the private sector, it is pretty crushing to many of them.

That being said, one of the prices of being an academics is being very "out of touch" with the rest of society. And that will take away your ability to read political situations or govern things well. Academics injecting themselves into such situations will almost always be disastrous as a result. Its just a consequence of how academia works. It doesn't have to be that way, but unless academia changes profoundly, it will be.

Fun fact: The US has only had one academic hold the presidency. He is also considered to be the worst US president in history.

Academics don't have a great track record in politics or governance pretty much anywhere at anytime in history.

Its the EU and the UK pushing for this stuff. Take your meds...

You realize you posted this on a site run by a US located tech VC firm right? Or maybe you just forgot the /s?

Paris actually isn't that dense compared to some US cities. NYC for example has far more people in the same space as Paris. Not that that is a goal to shoot for but there you go. That being said, at the moment Paris isn't a very nice place to be with all the smoke and looting and all.

"Self expiring legislation would very likely end up the same way."

Most laws in most countries (including the US) have sunset clauses. They are incredibly common and have existed for centuries.

Ironically, the thing we learned in the US about public housing is that it can't be in high-rise apartments. It has to be duplexes or small 1/2 story apartment buildings. It also must minimized all public space so that each part of the land "belongs" to one unit. If you don't do this, the public areas get messed up really quickly. This tends to lead to the rest of the residents being less willing to take care of the area and it all spirals from there.

The Soviet solution to this was 3 ft thick concrete walls but the crime and other problems that get created by public housing were never addressed there.

Given the rent required to live in Berkeley, its basically the nightmare scenario that we are all talking about. The only people who benefit from Berkeley's laws are the landowners/landlords. Everyone else suffers including the local businesses and especially the renters. Even taxpayers in other states are penalized as lots of federal money is used to subsidize poor renters which ends up both increasing the rental prices even more while benefiting the landowners even more. Basically, whatever Berkeley is doing, do the opposite and you will be fine.

Then why do they have the nice schools? Somehow, suburbs both have the best amenities and the lowest taxes but they are unsustainable? That link is a word salad BTW. In reality, since suburbs have low crime, the policing is cheap. And policing is by far the biggest expense in most cities. Most incorporated suburbs have balanced budgets. Mine does. It also has the best schools in the county. But somehow the large city next door, with billions in debt and all the jobs (and thus the payroll taxes) has terrible services and terrible schools. I think you just don't like suburbs and will twist your logic into knots to claim a rational reason for it. Truth is, you just don't like suburbs. Most people do, get over it.

I see the GCP marketing staff has found HN.