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Comment by helf | Hacker News Reader

the fearmongering and all around nuclear is deeply ingrained in the public consciousness. It will be hard to kill it. Sadly. There are all sorts of designs that are awesome but havent been put to wide use because its insanely expensive to even get permits for a nuclear plant (if it is even possible) not to mention the insane costs to actual build one. Economies of scale never took hold due to a couple of incidents (of OLD designs and OLD installations for the most part) being flung everywhere. And then you'd have prominent scientists, even, getting vocal about being against nuclear. For whatever fucking reason.

Irks the hell out of me.

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Say what you will, but I don't think you'll ever get economies of scale in nuclear like you will with solar (or even wind). You can certainly get some economies of scale, but those cost benefits are almost always a function of number of units produced.

Nuclear just doesn't need that many units produced - so it will never get the same functional benefit.

Unless you're planning on going down to Asimov-esque wearable reactors (and I don't realistically think you are) nuclear just doesn't make enough units to really get the same benefits from scale.

Solar on the other hand... each unit is producing 100watts of power, and you're making a literal shit load of units. Production numbers are very high, and it benefits enormously from economies of scale.

Basically - even the smallest reactor designs we're talking about for nuclear are in the 20mw range/unit.

Solar is 100-300w/unit. (watts - not megawatts). We're making nearly 70 THOUSAND units of solar for every unit of nuclear, at nuclear's smallest size.

The economies of scale for nuclear require far fewer units to have a benefit compared to something like solar panels. Because you aren't building 100s of 1000s of them like you need with solar panels.

Just building two identical plants at the same time creates a huge cost savings.

The main problem is that nuclear is too expensive. You make a commitment that lats for centuries, which makes the actual cost of the energy way more expensive than most anything else. Our children for generations will have to pay for the "cheap" energy we consume today. This has been proven several times now, most nuclear operators in the world have been bailed out by taxpayers at least once, one way or another.

Separately from that there is the undeniable risk of catastrophic failure laying waste to very large areas of land for centuries. The reactor design is not the main reason for this risk, humans are. No matter how amazing the reactor is, as long as it produces waste it's unsafe during a war, for example. We've not had a century without war yet.

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