in germany we do not have a long term storage solution that can safely withstand over 1000s of years for nuclear waste.
also capitalisem will always makes the safest nuclear power plant unsafe.
also capitalisem will always makes the safest nuclear power plant unsafe.
A much simpler problem to solve as compared to other challenges due to climate change.
You can build a storage big enough to contain all radioactive waste from current and future nuclear power plants probably in less than one year.
That's factually wrong. There are several deep geological repositories currently in operation.
The US plan is Yukka Mountain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...) proposed in 1987 and not yet open.
Germany has a similar story with Gorleben (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorleben_salt_dome), which was proposed in 1973 and also isn't actually operational. The prototype, also in an old salt mine, nicely showed how difficult these projects actually are when brine flooded the storage area, corroded the containers, and mixed with the contained polonium, cesium, etc.
Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_m... for the full overview. It's full of great sentences like:
> Governments around the world are considering a range of waste management and disposal options, although there has been limited progress toward implementing long-term waste management solutions
According to Wikipedia there are many currently in operation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository#Rep...
Is Wikipedia wrong?
The first active repository in the list I just linked to you is used for nuclear wastes from a nuclear power plant. I just checked the first, there will be more if you just take the time to get informed.
Get your facts straight.
But when the fake environmentalists discovered nuclear power as their new cause around 1980, and realized that The Waste Issue[TM] is their killer argument, they noticed that they had to blow up the time scale. So for political reasons, it was decided that other components, such as plutonium with a half life of 24000 years, are even more harmful. And just like that, a manageable 500-year-problem became an insurmountable million-year-problem that requires the invention of a new religion, and artists coming up with fields of spikey structures, and geologists to come up with formations stable forever, and lots more of careers to be made managing a problem that doesn't exist.
Literally half the bad nuclear disasters happened under communism, the opposite of capitalism. Due 100% to gross mismanagement. That was Chernobyl.
The half that happened under capitalism (Fukushima) was a mild incident compared to the catastrophic natural disaster that triggered it.
Capitalists, funny to say, go to extraordinary lengths to protect their very expensive capital. They want safe nuclear power more than anyone.
Are you serious? The price of the reactor is an insubstantial part of the potential cost of a nuclear accident.
I don't really follow your complaint. Yes. I don't see how the cost of the accident is relevant to the incentives a plant operator works under; the odds of an accident are lower than the odds of being hit by a car (and the effects of a car impact are worse, because someone/several somebodies will likely be dead instead of mass inconvenience as is typical in the capitalist half of all nuclear accidents). So that isn't a major risk as the engineers see it and probably won't affect any individuals behavior as much as the fact that if someone owns an expensive thing they look after it because they are not stupid.
If someone owns an asset that cost >$100 million dollars to obtain they are not going to skimp on maintenance costs in a way that risks it breaking down. Owners who can afford to buy infrastructure are going to keep it in good condition.
If you think it is worth owning something that expensive then it is worth keeping it maintained. Capitalists have a lot of problems, but they are good at maintaining capital. The idea that capitalism can't maintain capital is absurd - what type of capitalist lets their capital decay? They would cease to be capitalist by virtue of having no capital. Doing a good job of maintaining capital is one of the core tenants of capitalism as practiced. The idea that capitalism will "makes the safest nuclear power plant unsafe" is so wrong that it just needs to be called out.
Nuclear is a great example of this because - as mentioned - under capitalism the disasters have been much tamer and required more to trigger them than under an alternative system such as communism.
That was my point
Even if you assume they are rational actors with complete information, it may be rationally in their interests to double their profit in exchange for doubling their risk. Capitalists balance risk against profit all the time. Also their liability only extends to their own capital. A risk of losing twice as much is rationally no less attractive. The excess cost is borne by the community who has to clean up.
So what if they aren't bearing the full cost of the disaster? The incentives are still pretty much all in the direction of keeping the plant in good condition, and direction matters more than magnitude for incentives. The costs are unimaginable once they get past a couple of million anyway. Engineering perspective, I think the official guidance on a human life is ~$10 million for cost/benefit analysis, and I'd be pretty motivated well before that to do the right thing. This isn't a radical idea; the only time I've seen something that expensive be run down is when the government (or other political forces, I suppose) is somehow mandating a shutdown. I've seen a lot more examples of extremely well maintained bits of kit, and I've seen a lot of very expensive machines that still cost nowhere near as much as a power plant. I know engineers who work in coal power plants too, they are not risk takers in any sense.
We've oodles of evidence on this one; the costs are high enough that capitalists will keep the thing maintained at least as well as any other system you care to name. No system is perfect, but there isn't going to be one more systemically capable of maintaining capital than capitalism.