The cost of the power it generates in 50 years aren’t lower than the day it opens. If you amortise the cost of the plant over its life nuclear is stupid expensive per watt produced. It’s expensive enough that renewables + storage is cheaper. Renewables + storage is also a lot quicker to build than nuclear.

Even after the uptick in cost of renewables in the last year (which was dramatic) they’re still the cheapest new build power (even accounting for the integration costs). As an example here’s the most recent annual csiro report on energy costs by type. It doesn’t include full scale nuclear today because it’s known to be unviable, but even 2030 projections on “if smrs are commonly deployed at scale” they’re predicted to be a lot more expensive than renewables with integration costs.

https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/energy-data-modelling/gencost

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Let’s not forget radiation caused by the power plant. Nuclear produces far less radiation than a coal plant.

The best time to plant a tree build a nuclear power plant was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

on a side notw how people have dies from fukushima in the years since and how many have died from coal? Also you can compare the number of long term health problems

I guess this is a joke, but regardless. The current climate is quite different from having an ice sheet 3km thick on the ground. This summer we were nearing 30°C/85°F on some days.

And why is that exactly? Decay means the problem will solve itself, all we need to do is keep the waste away from the outside world until then.

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Coal isn’t the cheapest though. For new build power renewables + storage are. That is to say, the incremental cost of running a coal plant isn’t that massive, but cost to build + fuel one amortised over the lifetime is more than renewables + storage.

So yes, you can enforce “adequate regulation” and nuclear will still be the most expensive.

People are not stupid. They will never choose the financially unwise option

I see you’ve never been to the U.S.

Can you find any recent analysis that supports your claim that nuclear costs are at the same level as solar?

The only one I’ve seen suggest this was from a nuclear industry lobby group, and it inflated the costs or solar by insane amounts.

In Australia this is a bit of a hot topic and all impartial estimates suggest that nuclear will not get close to renewables in any way, even taking into account storage and grid costs.

In the 10 years since this single reactor was built, one of our states has transitioned to almost 100% renewables. Wholesale costs have plummeted, but renewable projects are still profitable in the market. I was involved in a reactor project in a western nation some time ago (it’s still being completed unsurprisingly), and the lock-in wholesale price to support that project was simply extortionate. Solar generation prices are a whole magnitude smaller.

People do often act stupid, but you are seeing it from what I consider to be an incomplete perspective. Nuclear could be financially unwise overall, but someone would still get a payday. That 17B over budget wasn’t burned and unmade, it went into the pockets of the people organizing and building the power plant.

All this to say, the huge majority of the people involved in making the power plant a reality weren’t motivated by the efficiency of the power production on a cost basis. Most of them were probably making more money while it was still being subsidized, planned, and built. And while I think subsidies are generally useful and good, they can be a vector of financial abuse when it comes to unprofitable industries.

Lastly “lifetime cost” is a bit of a useless metric when the majority of that lifetime comes too late. No point to a power source that will cleanly produce power after it has meaningfully contributed to pushing us over the edge and past the breaking point for a climate that can support agriculture as we know it. There isn’t enough time or margin for error in emissions left available to build all the nuclear plants needed to meet energy demands.

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But antimatter needs energy to create, probably more energy than it can produce. Unless you can find some source of it in the environment. Fusion is much more likely.

Antimatter might make a good compact way to store energy for a starship, if it was created in a large fixed facility with access to huge power sources. But it’s not a way to generate energy by itself.

What lie am I spreading? Conventional Light Water Reactor Nuclear Fuel (5-6% U-235 w/t%) can be recycled. This can be done even without using breeder reactors which operate through fast fission of U-235

Yes the plutonium van be stripped out along with the other transuranics, and it does pose a proliferation risk (separate issue), but it definitely can be recycled. France reprocesses their fuel.

So far the problem, if I understand correctly, is all thorium reactors are molten salt reactors. The issue there is, we still haven’t solved the metallurgy problems of dealing with the corrosive salt. It destroys all the pipes. We have slowed it down, but not enough to go production with.

Because renewable depends on the weather, while nuclear doesn’t.

A mix of renewable is absolutely a good thing to do, but still, having a constant source of energy mixed with that ensure stability.

I think the issue is batteries, which are expensive and require rare earth metals which often have environmentally costly acquisition methods. Perhaps an optimal solution would be a baseline of nuclear power, and then enough renewables to meet peaks in demand. That way we have plenty of stable energy while minimizing nuclear risks.

last time I checked the renewables being installed didn’t even offset the new energy demands being created, let alone making a dent in starting to decarbonize existing demand.

and the main reason is, that we need to tackle climate change from as many angles as possible and not eliminate a fine energy source just because something else is cheaper.

I mean for now renewables are cheaper, do you think we have enough raw materials to cover all of earths energy needs?

what happens when the raw materials will start to run dry but we still need to cover a bunch of energy needs, is that when we dust off the good ol Nuclear plants?

not to mention Nuclear plants provide a stable base load, no need for smart electronic devices that use power when it’s most abundant etc. it’s just power, that runs, constantly.

Problem is it’s not profitable to follow the rules, and conservatives have blocked building a national “permanent” storage site for decades. The IS has no where to put it. It’s just sitting in storage facilities, above ground and in many states in places where an earthquake could cause it to leak into ground water and make the area unlivable for centuries, or cost trillions to clean up.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-waste-is-piling-up-does-the-u-s-have-a-plan/

How is solar, wind, or hydro not “clean”? The generating of the power, not the building of the facilities, building anything is never clean.

See earlier in the thread. The waste is highly radioactive, of course, and very hot for some time. First it is dumped in pools. If the pool floods or cracks, you end up with the Fukushima issue. Fortunately that went to the ocean primarily and so was diluted. But in the US, much of the country is landlocked and it would instead enter ground water.

Second, once the material is cooled enough to transport, it is supposed to be moved to a secure location, dropped deep into the ground, and encased in concrete. At this point if there are no earthquakes and water doesn’t enter and damage the concrete, this will stay put for a thousand years or so, but eventually it will get out long before it’s safe considering some of it takes around 250,000 years for it to decay enough to be safe.

As for what France does, as I mentioned, the US has not developed or built that tech because there is ultimately no profit in it and the US is unwilling to spend tax money on it. So it would fall to increased energy cost for the consumer in places where nuclear is used, and no one is going to like that. The cost of building the reprocessing facilities and doing the actual processing outweighs the value of the produced product. And building the first one is going to be the most expensive, and no modern energy company is likely to want to take the hit to short term stock prices in order to take it on. And conservatives won’t approve tax increases at all in the current political climate. And progressive places have already started moving to renewables instead since it’s cheaper.

Or even less if we – gasp, shock, horror! – reprocessed it.

(We don’t do that because of overblown fears about nuclear weapons proliferation.)

The Department estimates that continued operation of the current fleet of nuclear power reactors could ~70,000 metric tons of uranium * increase the total inventory of spent fuel from 70,000 metric tons of uranium to 140,000 metric tons of uranium. Nearly all of this spent fuel is being stored at the reactor sites where it was generated, either submerged in pools of water (wet storage) or in shielded casks (dry storage). The Dept of Energy

Those must be some big fucking trucks. And as far as I know, only Finland has actually developed any long-term storage which could be considered safe.

Nuclear is fine, but their takes are similar to weed fanbois, it’s not a perfect solution.