Nuclear Power: Game over (2016) [pdf]

2. This is absolutely false because you are not including the costs of STORAGE. Without massive storage, they are useless in providing year-round baseload.

3. Gen III+ reactors are built to international standards. Racism is not an adequate argument.

You claim that a reactor is more complex than a turbine (I assume you mean a wind turbine) or a solar panel. This isn't an apples to apples comparison because a reactor provides 24x7x365 baseload power, whereas solar and wind would require MASSIVE storage facilities to be comparable. That is both cost-inefficient and complex.

You claim the required number of highly skilled workers is high. Well, is that really true on a PER GWh basis? Reactors generate on average 1GW of power. Solar plants generate 50MW of power, at a highly variable rate. Even excluding the storage requirements, nuclear power likely employs fewer people.

You claim that nuclear physics is difficult and complex and therefore costs money. A refined process and established international design can remove these bottlenecks. In the same way that we have immensely complex silicon wafer chips with tens of millions of 9 nano meter scale transistors in them - for only hundreds of dollars.

You claim that safety costs money. That's true. But is it an unreasonable amount of money for the amount of power we're providing? A lot of the costs are borne from issues we cause ourselves. The Nevada storage facility is capable of holding literally ALL of the nuclear waste in America. Yet is remains closed because of fearmongering politics.

(I think) You claim that storage can be largely solved by national interconnects. But if you look at the massive power distribution systems in Northern Canada - they lose around 25% of the power in transmission alone, going only a fraction of the way that a NATIONAL power transmission grid would require.

The problem with renewables remains the storage problem. There are few practical solutions on the scale that are needed, and I find that most anti-nuclear pro-renewable advocates are simply not doing the math.

No, mostly that blindly mentioning numbers is meaningless, particularly as a "hint" for how long cleanup took.

>Unwilling to see the larger picture, denying of basic facts (like a failure rate of 1%, brilliant) or the enormous costs being handed to tax payers (on top of their electricity bill).

There's no consensus on what the "big picture" is, there is a crisis right now and the best way to solve it may not be your ideal solution.

I would need to be presented with basic facts to be able to deny them, random numbers or statistics with no context aren't facts. The government can pay enormous costs, I generally view that appeal as a scare tactic.

Another problem about nuclear power is it's hard to find a reliable resource of uranium. There is a finite amount of it that is not as readily accessible or abundant as all the other resources.

Nuclear energy is a pipe dream. Whats the point in even building a cheap reactor (4 million USD) if you need to maintain it and then when demand increases so highly that there isn't enough uranium to go around. What then? Do the people in the north just go cold during the winter? It's no more sustainable than the current system, except there is a definitive projection that it couldn't sustain this population long term.

Green renewable energy is clearly the future, however we will never truly be able to convert to it until we can reliable transfer mechanical energy into things like batteries which can power things for a long time. Even major wind farms in Europe only supplement power usage. They cannot keep up with demand since they can only output what the wind gives.

We're a long ways out from a green revolution. Energy storage, capacity, 1:1 conversion of energy to power, and reliable power all need to happen first.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...

They still can't get the stupid things built. It's going to finish somewhere about 200% over budget at $25B for 2000MW and nearly a decade late. Just an absolutely calamity. Over $12k per KW. Natural gas is what, $750/KW? Wind near $1,500? Solar near $2,500? Capacity factor can only buy you so much goodwill when you can build 5x the nameplate capacity in 1/10th the time.

The best thing the nuclear industry could do to save their technology would be to actually build generating plants for anything approaching the cost or schedule that they commit to when contracted.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Chu#U.S._Secretary_of_E...

I don’t know enough about the tech to say whether the molten lead could be exposed to the environment due to unforeseen conditions, or what would happen at that point. But I’ve seen false assertions of safety before, plenty of times.