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Comment by jakehop | Hacker News Reader

No, it’s about the economies of scale of building 50 power plants per year vs 1 per 50 years. Knowledge and know-how is lost and that increases costs.

Wind has become cheaper (but not more reliable) because thousands of turbines are being installed each year. If they were built at the same rate as nuclear, they would be even more expensive (and still not able to provide base load power).

Nuclear fuel can be stored safely (look up Sweden and Finland’s joint project) until it can be burned in next generation reactors, which are being designed and tested as we speak.

Please don’t straw man on HN. It’s destructive to the community and really bad mannered.

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This comment is correct about how to reduce costs of nuclear power plants. Pick one design. Build a lot and preferably small reactors. Keep the factories running even if no new plants are being built. If you find a safety flaw with the existing reactors start building a new series and replace old reactors.

The practice of running dangerous/obsolete plants until EOL is absolutely absurd though. How can one tell the people that modern designs will solve all safety problems if plants older than the one at Chernobyl are still operating to this day?

I disagree about what you say about wind though. Wind power is massively benefiting from the same economies of scale that small reactors would benefit except they do so on a much bigger scale.

Mostly, yes. Some additions: up to a certain size, bigger wind turbines are much more efficient than smaller ones.

Similar considerations apply to some nuclear power designs. In addition, many nuclear power designs are saver per Joule when build on a larger scale.

Of course, safety would still benefit from the experience from building more of any one design.

The absurdity of running old plants past EOL is directly tied to how hard / impossible it is to build new plants.

Crazy enough, the rest of Chernobyl power plant continued to operate for a long time after the famous accident. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...

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