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.
Nevada is not so populous a state. There seem to be lots of nuclear enthusiasts online. You folks should just move to Nevada and elect more courageous state officials!
A better option would be to move to Australia and campaign for a nuclear waste dump here. The voting margins are lower (often measured in low triple digit votes) and the politicians are more cheaply bought. Those same 500 proponents could more easily effect change in Australia than any state of the USA.
Storing nuear waste is a complete non-starter for me simply because of the timelines involved. Nobody can guarantee the safety of anything for thousands (!!) of years, when the USA itself is only ~400 years old.
The only conceivable risk is for some future civilization coming across the cache, not knowing what it is, and potentially suffering as a result. Which presumes that such a civilization will have declined substantially in scientific knowledge at which point it is unlikely that such access would even affect more than a small group of future peoples.
The risk is practically non existent, especially when compared to the risk of continuing to ignore nuclear now. This is pure, unsubstantiated fearmongering.
In the meantime, progress marches on:
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/images/figure_6_01_d... (Generating unit retirements, Nov 2019 through Oct 2020)
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/images/figure_6_01_c... (Generating unit additions, Nov 2019 through Oct 2020)
Source: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/#tabs_unit-4 (EIA Electric Power Monthly)
Nuclear would've been fine to go all in on 20 or 30 years ago; today, it's too late (considering the timeline between first kwh produced and breaking ground today). Mourning a tragedy isn't a strategy for success. If you can get it built, why isn't it built yet? Or at the very least, under construction.
The entire point of us having these conversations online is to help convince these uneducated idiots in society, exactly so that we can overcome these challenges.
Hence why the argument is already lost. Educated citizens have valid concerns that aren’t being addressed, and the uneducated ones? They still get the same vote you do.
In my local environment the most visible people championing nuclear power are the same ones who turn up in Parliament House wearing their sponsor’s uniform, or bring lumps of coal into the House. They also engage in corporate style group psychopathy of “if what we want to do isn’t illegal, there’s nothing stopping us from doing it.”
With friends like those, nuclear power doesn’t need any enemies. The impression is that the only reason nuclear power is mentioned is because some politicians are looking for a comfortable post-retirement life in a junket lobbying position at Westinghouse.
So between the nuclear advocates here on HN claiming that everyone who doesn’t support nuclear power is a “climate alarmist” uneducated idiot, the only proponents in government being the most visibly corrupt, and the discussion of nuclear power always turning to “proven” thorium technology, nuclear power really has little hope of being accepted by society at large.
The point here is not disagreement with these points, rather than the arguments that brought us to these points are misguided.
> In the meantime, progress marches on:
And so does climate change.