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Comment by legulere | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear also got much, much more expensive than it was in the previous century, making it economically completely unreasonable in the west.

Nuclear is also the only energy source where people get displaced from their homes in thousands of square kilometers in catastrophic events.

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> Nuclear is also the only energy source where people get displaced from their homes in thousands of square kilometers in catastrophic events.

Luckily displacing thousands of people for hydroelectric energy is fully planned [1]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-threegorges/thousan...

The thing is, displacement is often not necessary as explained by the WHO for the case of the Fukushima accident:

> https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/health-consequences...

interesting. so the average lifetime dosage was on the low end of a CT scan. ~10mSv where a CT scan will be 10-30mSv. and three mile island let off even less to the people in a 10mile radius... ~80µSv.

> Nuclear also got much, much more expensive than it was in the previous century, making it economically completely unreasonable in the west.

Because we stopped building them. Of course costs are going to explode when every time you do it the people on the project are doing it for the first time.

To be fair, increased reliability and safety also comes at a cost. But I agree - loss of expertise and lack of economy of scale are a major factor.

No, the reason is construction costs are rising faster than inflation because construction hard to automate.

You can automate construction a lot (biggest issue is making sure deliveries are ordered the right way, and that you keep QA).

But that requires getting getting the pipelines running instead of doing it once a decade.

Dam failures would like a word.

You can live on that land unlike on radioactive wasteland.

Ironically enough, you can only live on it if the dam fails. Otherwise you're consigning up to thousands of square kilometers of often prime real estate underwater indefinitely.

I think the reference was to the downstream land flooded by a dam failure.

> completely unreasonable in the west

So... why did France continue to build fission reactors rather than something else?

In the Fukushima case, completely unnecessarily.

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