Comment by panick21_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by panick21_ | Hacker News Reader

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Nonsense. Had Germany adopted nuclear in 2020 for the Grünewende they would be done by now, and they would have cost them less then they actually spend in that time and what they will have to spend.

Even with pessimistic assumption of paying 5 billion $ per plant. If Germany had done what France did in the 70/80s they would be much better off now and for the next 100 years. And the cost per plant would be far lower once you start mass production.

If you actually did it right rather then incredibly stupidly, nuclear waste would be a resource for the future, and the idea of disposing it would be utterly ridiculous. Just as with all these idiotic disposal solution that governments like to waste money on. In typical fashion the anti nuclear people first create problems, demand that money is spend on them and then blame nuclear for those problems.

A sensible approach would be have a government fuel bank responsible for securing reserves of nuclear fuel, supplying and recycling nuclear fuel to the nations nuclear fleet. This fuel reserve centrally managed and it controls access to fuel for both commercial operates, research, ESA and so on.

Maintenance of spend fuel is not actually expensive and it places little burden on government to do, even if its for 100s of years. Its literally just a bunch of containers in a warehouse. And that could of course be supported by fees for rate payers.

Complete denial of reality. I've posted actual numbers on real costs, but of course there are always people like you dealing with imaginary money, throwing around numbers they can't back up.

Pessimistic 5 billion per plant -- what a joke. Flamanville 20 years under construction, 20 billion. Olkiluoto 15 years under construction, 15 billion. Hinkley C, deadline for 2027 already clear will not be held, price tag already estimated now to be 40 billion in the end [1].

If Germany had done what France had done in the 70s and 80s it would be in the same situation as France is today: every other month a plant goes into emergency maintenance because of cracks in the pipes, and relying on neighbors to keep its lights on.

If it had invested in nuclear 20 years ago it would be sitting on heaps of unfinished uneconomical plants and it would still use coal for the majority of its electricity. The plants even if finished would take decades to make up for the lost opportunity to reduce emissions during the decades of construction.

Rubbish! Nuclear energy's days are numbered. That industry will need to find another way to take tax payers' money.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/cost-edfs-new-uk-nuc...

Go look at the UAE, its less then 5 billion for a 1.5GWe plant.

And that is when you produce 4 in a row, when you produce 50, it would actually be much cheaper.

But I know how anti nuclear people always have to look at 1 off builds to justify their position, and ignore evidence from mass builds such as France.

> If Germany had done what France had done in the 70s and 80s it would be in the same situation as France is today

Germany actually did proper maintenance on the plants it had and they had excellent uptime.

France is in this position because the anti nuclear government tried to phase out nuclear and they had so much nuclear that they failed to keep their plants up to date.

Anybody that denies that Germany would be vastly better off if they had followed France in the 70/80 is so blinded by hate that it's actually fucking sad.

France didn't fail to maintain, those plants were never meant to run longer than 30 years. Here is the EDF president from 1979, translated [1]:

> In the extract that we offer to you at the head of the article, Marcel Boiteux described what could be the probable origin of the appearance of cracks in the conduits leading to the tanks, in particular the differences in temperatures. A risk clearly identified from this time as shown by his words: « these tanks are subjected to thermal cycles. When the factory is in full power, it is hot, when it is in low power, it is cold ». The temperature of the water heated by the fission of the uranium atoms reaching according to him at 350 ° C ( it is in fact 320 ° C ). He continued: « The result is that the steel is diluted by heat and contracted when it is less hot. And it is this thermal respiration that is involved. »

> EDF president wanted to be reassuring, stressing that these risks were minimal, insofar as the power stations have a shorter lifespan than that where corrosion of the steel and the appearance of cracks would appear. The longevity of the steel had been calculated « per 12,000 cycles. According to him, there was no risk that this deadline would be exceeded. It was « totally excluded », he said.

> Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber, who was conducting the interview, asked him to specify the effective duration planned for a power plant: « 12,000 days a power plant ? That is to say 40 years ? ». Marcel Boiteux confirmed this estimate, even minimizing it: « Yes, just over 30 years old. »

I don't want to look at UAE, I live in Western Europe. All of the countries comparable to the country I live in are facing exploding costs and incredible time delays. That nuclear builds don't get cheaper as you build more of them is a well documented phenomenon, we have 70 years of proof.

[1] https://www.ina.fr/ina-eclaire-actu/president-edf-risque-fis...

Had they done what you say, by now they still would not have decided on a location. Just look at the delays and cost overruns with Finland's reactor - and that's with popular support.

Finland where now green nuclear will be a very large part of their energy mix for the next 100 years? How sad ...

Again, anybody who looks at nuclear other then threw trying to prove its bad, will figure out that 1 off builds are expensive. Had Europe with German/French leadership agree on a single plant design and started building it all over Europe we could be building these plants in 5 years or less of build time.

France in the 70/80s managed to find locations. I turns out that local populations actually love their local nuclear power plants. People living close to nuclear are far more pro nuclear then anywhere else.

The promise of jobs, improvement in rail infrastructure and cheap electricity convinces more villages that it is a good idea then people would think.

France faced a lot of opposition to their plan in the 70/80s and yet they found lots of locations and the population there are the most pro nuclear people now.

Its funny how people always call for European cooperation but EU universally building the same nuclear plant 100+ times was not considered. There is no question that this could have been done at a very low unit cost price. If you build that many with the same work force, and supply chain the price drops massively.

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