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Comment by mseebach | Hacker News Reader

Compared to hitting the jackpot on a SV Unicorn, it sucks. But in the grander scheme of things, it's not bad.

You have to remember that it's a very long-term investment -- considering that well run nuclear reactors have expected life spans of 50+ years, and the price of carbon-free electricity probably isn't going to go down anytime soon, it's starting to look pretty good. After the capex is paid off, you have a 250mm/year cash cow.

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It's not carbon free.

You are correct. It is not carbon free. Nuclear power plants make about 90 - 140 g CO2 per kWh electricity.

Uranium extraction, waste management, construction, and decommissioning being the biggest offenders in the whole process.

90-140g/kWh sounds like a lot when 'carbon free' is also being bandied about. Nei states c02 emissions are 4-50g for the entire lifecycle,including construction mining fuel and decommssioning. Only hydro electric is lower.

http://www.nei.org/Issues-Policy/Protecting-the-Environment/...

That link says 2 to 59 grams too. Apparently the range is very high depending on how the extraction works, and all sorts of factors. Cement and steel for example have very different behaviours for emitting co2. Maybe the steel was melted by wind farm electricity for example.

But anyway, even at the high end of the estimates, that is still way lower than coal.

Neither are solar or wind farms, if you count everything that went into their construction. None of the three technologies have enough CO2 emissions to worry about, though.

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