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Comment by nickik | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear is expensive in the US NOW because of insane amounts of regulation, constant law-suits and the fact that almost no new plants were build in the last 30 years.

Back before 3 Mile Island a nuclear plant was cheaper to produce then coal plant and had 2x the amount of live time with 10x cheaper fuel cost.

> France is going to need to address its expensive, aging nuclear generators at some point. By then, of course, solar will be much cheaper than it is today, and there will be more HVDC transmission lines shuttling power between EU countries.

France has the lowest electricity prices in Europe had them for quite a long time.

Nuclear is not expensive if you are building many of them, just like everything else.

One of the major problems with nuclear is that it is extremely national and most western nations don't have a demand for scale.

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Back before 3 Mile Island

And then the 3 Mile Island disaster happened, and people tighten up regulations. That seems reasonable, no?

And Chernobyl. And Fukishima. Yes, nuclear disasters are rare, but when they do happen it takes extraordinary resources and time to remediate. Solar panels and batteries fail more gracefully.

Even that is overestimated.

Solar panels create mountains of waste, much of it being disassembled by kids in Africa who then get sick because of it.

Solar production facility can have chemical spills that are comparable to Three Mile Island in terms of effect.

Compare a nuclear civilization against a solar one and you will see that waste management of nuclear is far smaller.

Overall less then 2000 people died from these 3 disasters and essentially all of them because Chernobyl that uses a technology that we don't use in the west.

"Solar panels create mountains of waste, much of it being disassembled by kids in Africa who then get sick because of it."

Source? Electronics associated with solar panels might be an issue but modern inverters use less and less toxic elements (and are definitely RoHS compliant).

As for solar panels themselves, 99% by weight consists of glass (75%), plastics (10%), aluminum (9%) and silicon (5%) which can all be recycled.

I don't want solar to be the enemy. I just wanted to point out that its not quite so simple and that 'nuclear waste' is a far smaller problem then people realize.

http://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/6/21/are-we-h...

Nobody in the nuclear industry was against some of the changes and more regulation.

The problem was that it turned into an absolute shitshow from a regulator perspective, process perspective, utility regulation perspective, political perspective and so on that. There were 100 plants in construction and all of them go canceled.

Large part of the nuclear industry when bankrupt and so on.

Since then regulation has prevented most progress on any of these issues. Nuclear startups all move to Canada, China or some other place because the US is simply not good place to work on nuclear.

The actual changes that would have been needed after Three Mile Island were mostly about the human to reactor interaction, ie. UI. Why that should destroy and industry make the cost 10x higher is quite hard to understand.

Your reaction underscores the point that fears over nuclear power stem from widespread lack of education about nuclear energy as a whole. TMI was blown ridiculously out of proportion. A pressure valve got stuck resulting in a leak that was... wait for it... undetectable compared to background! Does shutting down a comparatively clean energy supply and driving an entire industry effectively out of business seem like a rational response to that?

Umm...so who pays for cleanups and other damage in situations like Fukushima? Perhaps you should read this article before trying to promote something like this: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clearing-the-radi...

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