nuclear vs wind energy maybe. just look at it. which do you think is 30x cheaper?
the more interesting question is why the oil and water-energy exporter Norway got so much more expensive domestic energy prizes since it joined the European energy market.
I know it is tiring to see this comment. But, the cost of nuclear power quoted everywhere does NOT include the cost of safely handling the waste from it for hundreds of years right?
Until it is included it is like Saudi Arabia claiming that oil is the best thing in the world because it costs €1/barrel because they only need to factor the cost of digging for it.
Nuclear power strike prices usually do include much of the long term costs, and money has to be committed into a trust (or some similar scheme) as part of getting approval in the first place.
And it would be more like Saudi Arabia claiming that oil only costs $100 per barrel because they don't need to pay for pollution remediation, healthcare costs, spill cleanup and their share of all climate change effects from the time they sold the oil until the time that oil's effects have been removed from the system. Which they don't.
> Nuclear power strike prices usually do include much of the long term costs
In theory yes, but given that they aren't able to predict correctly the cost of building a nuclear station, I don't see why we should trust them on predicting the real cost of dismantling them..
It's very easy to accurately predict the building costs of a nuclear reactor.
The overruns you're talking about come from politicians showing up halfway through the project and changing the rules to show their voters that they are involved
In France the new nuclear reactors have been plagued by hardware issue, delays..
So no, it isn't 'easy' to predict the building costs, it's easy only when you're replicating an already existing reactor and only if it was built recently!
The third project, in China (Taishan-1 & -2) was officially 5 years late and 60% overcosts (and very probably not break even for the builder). After 1 year one of the 2 reactors was stopped mid-2021 after an incident.
The fourth project, in the U.-K. (Hinkley-Point C), started in 2018 and already announced overcosts and late delivery.
The Fukushima cleanup, unique in history and resulting from radically unlikely natural disasters, cost less than half what the fuel it replaced that decade would have
This is without considering the cost of climate change or all those prevented deaths
The hard truth is: even a predictable cause can trigger a disaster. And many aren't predictable.
Fukushima is by many criteria a "lucky" case, as many reactors were properly shutdown when the wave came, operators reacted globally adequately...
The question isn't "is a disaster possible?" but "when, and of which magnitude?".
This patently insufficient ability to foresee also sheds a light towards the "we know that dangerous nuclear waste will not be a problem for anyone during the next 100000 years or so".
Renewables can do the trick without all those threats.
In France the 'nuclear success story' led to a state law (2015-992, from 2015, the "loi relative à la transition énergétique pour la croissance verte") stating that the part of nuke-produced electricity must fall to less than 50% in 2025, from 72% then, and that renewable sources must replace it.
Moreover those victims are past ones, and a new major nuclear disaster may cause many victims while solar-panels induced major disasters aren't even possible.
Every nuclear disaster is unique yet nobody is willing to bet on any of them being the last. Fukushima was also unique in that it caused coal usage to skyrocket in Japan - a problem Germany is not currently suffering from.
To me, the way to prove that something ISNT safe is to shout loudly about how safe it is and to absolutely refuse to shoulder the costs of anything going wrong.
This is what the nuclear industry does and the government backs them.
No nuclear disaster in history has added up to a bad single bus accident.
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> and to absolutely refuse to shoulder the costs of anything going wrong. \n This is what the nuclear industry does
This is, of course, the exact opposite of true. Nuclear power is the only kind of power expected to carry full disaster insurance (not even dams, which have death counts in the six digits.)
No, nuclear isn't fully insured, in any nation (there are funds, providing for damages up to a low-caped total amount).
Power-producing dams failures are very rare and preventable, and albeit they are way more numerous and old than nuclear reactors the history path is clear:
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
I'm not interested in holding a discussion with someone who denies the Banqiao dam burst deaths, and wants to take unsourced blog statistics by a single dude over the World Health Organization and the United Nations
I am not interested in someone who says "here's a list of numbers, the United Nations must be wrong, the causes are a matter of polemics."
Polemics are generic archetypal verbal attacks. The United Nation's health statistics do not get interpreted in terms of verbal attacks.
You make vague references to "Russian academicians" and claim they said things, but don't provide evidence. The Russian academics still haven't admitted Kyshtym happened.
There is a point at which if someone listens to clowns but not the world's authorities, they and everything they believe should just be discarded without further commentary
The science is clear: arguing with an anti-vaxxer or a flat earther just drives them further into their delusion. The common sense is also clear: the regular person does not get satisfaction, but rather more frustration, at the end. The current position of psychology is that the reason anti-vaxxers exist is that they have genuinely mis-identified their addiction to argument as being seen as knowledgeable, and that even when legitimate experts show up with evidence, their unwillingness to budge convinces them that they're even righter. They really think this makes them look good.
Psychology currently frames this as the result of severe self doubt, as "you need to argue with me so that I can show myself that I could win."
Of course I'm not going to waste my time arguing with someone who denies basic facts, and refers vaguely to evidence they haven't provided. Nobody should. That's how you get flat earthers.
Deniers don't deserve argument, and trying to talk to them like normal people hurts them mentally.
It's an island nation, and we're calling a tsunami "radically unlikely"? Given the time frames involved in cleaning up an event like what happened in Fukushima, once every 100 years is not very unlikely.
Digging miles into the ground with a 4 story mechanized oil rig is much more complicated than putting some dirt into a barrel and walking past it with a Geiger counter monthly, buddy
A bit less than nuclear energy if there's a good mix of pumped storage + wind + solar.
It all gets built way quicker too. No 15 year lead times setting up solar panel farms can be done in 6 months. Pumped storage projects can be done in a couple of years. Each small scale quick and cheap project takes a chunk out of our reliance on natgas.
People way underestimate just how fantastically expensive nuclear power is and how unviable it is without lavish subsidies that other renewables dont need.
It'll keep getting built in countries with nuclear arsenals though coz it can share some of those costs. Thats ultimately why we get barraged with so much pro nuclear power propaganda. It aint about reliability, it's about the military industrial complex foisting costs off on to rate and taxpayers.
Obviously when Iran does this we are made aware of how awful and wrong it is but it's greenwashed under the carpet 100% of the rest of the time.
the more interesting question is why the oil and water-energy exporter Norway got so much more expensive domestic energy prizes since it joined the European energy market.