• deegeese@sopuli.xyz
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          13
          arrow-down
          16
          ·
          1 year ago

          Actually I do. I was a nuclear booster in the 1990’s because it means cheap limitless pollution free power.

          Except that they don’t actually deliver on that promise. You can have safe nuclear or cheap nuclear, but if it’s safe it’s not cheap, and the public rightfully won’t accept something that can require evacuating hundreds of square miles for decades.

          So wise one, where are those cheap safe nuclear power plants we keep hearing about since 1950?

          • moomoomoo309@programming.dev
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            18
            arrow-down
            3
            ·
            1 year ago

            In France. They standardized the designs so each one isn’t a one-off and they trained more people to work in the field.

            • deegeese@sopuli.xyz
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              8
              arrow-down
              14
              ·
              1 year ago

              Those are not at all cheap and are subsidized by enrichment for weapons purposes.

              France is trying to extend their service lifetime beyond what they were designed for because they can’t face the bill to replace them with newer reactors.

              • grue@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                11
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                and are subsidized by enrichment for weapons purposes in order to reprocess the waste into new fuel

                FTFY. That’s a good thing and we should be doing it here in the US, too.

          • Vendetta9076@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            8
            arrow-down
            6
            ·
            1 year ago

            So the user above me actually gave the the answer so kudos to them but to further answer your question, there are no actually cheap reactors because the fight to actually build one is so insanely expensive. Where I live they’d been trying to build a reactor for over a decade. Constant lawsuits and legal battles after already obtaining permits and everything. Its ballooned the cost by tenfold. Why? Because of constant NGO pressure from the likes of greenpeace. So congrats, you win. They aren’t cheap cause of the hell we’ve made for ourselves.

            • deegeese@sopuli.xyz
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              7
              arrow-down
              9
              ·
              1 year ago

              You’re blaming everyone else for nuclear’s failures.

              Why are even French nuclear plants badly over budget and late? Answer: Nuclear is expensive as fuck.

              • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                1
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                Yeah, that doesn’t scale well at all. Batteries are expensive, dangerous (so lots of safety measures at scale), and consumable, which is why very few places actually try to store energy at any kind of scale.

                Until we have a good, cheap way to store energy, solar will be a supplemental power source to help with peak demand in the daytime. So we’ll need something that’s reliable and inexpensive to provide power the rest of the time. For many areas, that’s coal or gas, but it could be nuclear. If people just accepted that nuclear is safe and effective, costs would come down.

                  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
                    link
                    fedilink
                    arrow-up
                    1
                    ·
                    1 year ago

                    Agreed. If people truly understood just how safe it is, we could make it so much cheaper.

                    I’m stoked about mini reactors, which should make remote factories and whatnot far more reasonable.