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Comment by bipson | Hacker News Reader

Still not "sustainable".

And not really cheap either.

It is actually quite sustainable. The reactor core is not a large cost for a GW over 15 years.

The US navy swaps out reactor cores for 100-200 million dollars, and those are in submarines and ships. There is basically no maintenance outside of those.

For comparison, a GW of wind capacity is 1.6 billion every 20 years. For solar panels for 1GW of average generation you'll be paying 10 billion dollars or so every 25-30 years.

I think GP meant environmentally sustainable, rather than fiscally sustainable, you need to do something with the old reactor cores.

What does a coal plant do with the emitted radiation, CO2, coal ash, and other waste products? Current spent fuel rods from nuclear reactors sit in concrete casks located on site usually. At least I don't need to breath spent nuclear fuel or have to deal with it's CO2. Not saying we should do nothing about it, but at least the impact to my life today is substantially less.

The reactor core will probably be drained of molten salts and then treated as low level radioactive waste.

Yes it is waste, but I don't see anyone making the argument with wind turbines or solar panels, which will create more waste in total.

> you need to do something with the old reactor cores.

You burry it deep in a geologically stable ground [1]. Was that not counted in the price?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository

That's sustainable long past the point we run out of radioactives. Just how much space do you think buried reactor cores take up and how big do you think the earth's crust is?

You could literally throw it in the deep ocean and it'd still do less damage than a single day of Brazilian deforestation for biofuel production or a month of operation of a coal plant (partially because water is actually quite good at blocking radiation and not becoming radioactive, you can safely swim in a spent fuel rod storage pool).

I’m not fundamentally against the idea of nuclear power. I just remain unconvinced that we’ve “solved” the problem of nuclear waste.

Nuclear waste remains dangerous and harmful on a timescale that can almost be described as tectonic. The earths crust isn’t static or stationary, if you throw waste into the bottom of the ocean its not clear what will happen to that waste in 10 millions years time, or even 300 years time.

I agree that our current climate situation demands drastic actions, and theres a strong argument that solving the real harms today of climate change are worth taking the risk on the theoretical harms of nuclear power. But I don’t agree that nuclear power is currently “sustainable”, it’s almost certainly the best energy source we have today, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will stay that way for long.

I would advise checking the decay curves for nuclear waste and checking what levels of radiation cause harm.

The tldr is that waste that decays slowly is doing so because its releasing less radiation. There's no radioactive stuff that we'd need to worry about on the million year timescale. The 10000 year timescale is the most where human health due to radioactivity might be a concern. And on those timescales your waste at the bottom of the ocean or 100ft below ground is almost certainly going to be still there and unaffected unless we or our successors decide otherwise.

Heck I'd say worrying about anything more than the 500 year timescale is absurd as I'd be very surprised if humans were still around in human form by then. We'll either have been genetically engineered, wiped out by those who have, wiped out by rogue AI or something else or been "uploaded" in some fashion.

> For solar panels for 1GW of average generation you'll be paying 10 billion dollars or so every 25-30 years.

Where do you live that panels cost you $1.5+/Wp?

Furthermore, where do you live that panels will cost you $1.5+/Wp even thirty years from now?

You have to multiply the cost by three for average power to account for clouds, angle, night time, and then you need to pay extra for storage. That will cost you...

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