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Comment by sexy_panda | Hacker News Reader

Just to make things clear: Nuclear energy is just cheap because it gets massively funded by the state.

Nuclear power plants are the most expensive way of generating energy and the least sustainable way.

We don't even have a good way to dispose nuclear waste. We were checking for a "Endlager" which means a place to hoard all the nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years. Guess what? No one wanted it.

Bavaria tried to keep themselves out of possible regions for waste disposal, while going full PR pro-nuclear.

So nuclear power plants are basically neither a long term solution, nor a short term solution.

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> Nuclear energy is just cheap because it gets massively funded by the state.

No it doesn't. Not anymore than gas, coal and renewables at least.

The issue of disposal is also simply incorrect. There are plenty of places to store it, France does it, everyone does it. Do you know where the waste from coal goes? Into the atmosphere, where it kills thousands directly and potentially billions indirectly with global warming. So it's comical to criticise nuclear for waste issues.

Barring hydro (which Germany cannot have) and coal/gas, there is no alternative but nuclear. Renewables cannot be a reliable source of energy because they are intermittent. You will always need some stable source, and currently (and for the foreseeable future), it's nuclear.

> The issue of disposal is also simply incorrect. There are plenty of places to store it.

The question is not, whether there are places or not. It doesn't matter if none of the 16 regions in Germany wants to be responsible to store the waste.

If no one wants to deal with it, the effect is the same.

The discussion was on technical feasibility, that Germany is irrational (because it’s not a question of wanting to store, it’s a choice between that and fossil waste = storage in the atmosphere = climate change) is another.

Germany already has nuclear waste, we have to deal with it one way or another. I think permanent storage is a bad solution, most of the energy is still in there and further utilization will also reduce the danger of the waste.

So it's impossible to resolve this issue? We cannot use our partners in the EU or abroad to help solve it? Well I guess we should just kill thousands with coal, and keep feeding the global warming furnace.

    We don't even have a good way
    to dispose nuclear waste.

Sure we do, just aerosolize it and vent it into the atmosphere! At which point...

    Nuclear energy is [...] massively
    [subsidized] by the state.

...You'd have a fair comparison to other modes of energy production. It's not nuclear that's massively subsidized, everything else is.

> Sure we do, just aerosolize it

Sounds interesting, would you mind to expand / link some site that goes into details?

> It's not nuclear that's massively subsidized, everything else is.

Germany massively cut funding for solar power being supplied into to the grid (Einspeisevergütung) back in 2012 [1] and it still isn't funded the way it was before.

But it is and was still worth it for most people, if they just consumed most of the electricity themselves. [2]

[1] https://www.bundestag.de/webarchiv/textarchiv/2012/37990550_... [2] https://www.kfw.de/inlandsfoerderung/Privatpersonen/Bestands...

> Sounds interesting, would you mind to expand / link some site that goes into details?

I think that the comment was ironic, to show a parallel with how coal waste is "utilized"

Partially ironic.

I seriously do wish someone would write a book called "The case for a Chernobyl plant in your neighborhood!".

Such a case wouldn't concede the point about the safety paranoia surrounding nuclear power, but instead suggest that we literally power the entire word with pre-Chernobyl RBMK reactor designs. Or hell! Something even more dangerous if we can find it.

We can then assume that we'd have N meltdowns per year somewhere in the world, i.e. a "Chernobyl-level incident", and we'd still be far ahead in terms of safety compared to where we are today.

And that's not just comparing nuclear to coal, just the deaths and injuries from rooftop solar installations are in the ballpark of a Chernobyl incident every year.

Discussions about nuclear are paralyzed by safety concessions[1] beyond all reason. That's the problem with nuclear, not that it's comparatively unsafe or expensive when the costs and risks are fairly evaluated against the alternatives.

1. https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-are-nuclear-p...

For the record, I am profoundly pro-nuclear, happy with living in France and if i was given a choice between living next to a nuclear reactor and a coal plant I would choose the former immediately (all other things equal).

I think there are basically two problems with nuclear safety:

- one is that a single incident is broadcasted everywhere, no matter if there are causalities or not. This is similar to planes: when one crashes and 200 people die it makes the news. We have in France about 10 people dying every day in car accidents.

- the second one is the nature of the accident. When you fall from a rooftop, well bad luck. The place you fell on is not unuseable for millenia. This may be (and only "may") be the case with nuclear incidents. Now, the newer plants do not explose like Chernobyl did, because physics is going to drive down the reaction. There can be leaks, even dangerous leaks, but they will be quite localized.

xkcd had a wonderful graph on radiation: https://xkcd.com/radiation/

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