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Comment by imnotlost | Hacker News Reader

Just build a bunch of nuclear power plants around the world. If we can spend a trillion or two bombing the taliban back into power we can afford some energy projects.

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Nuclear power plants are expensive and take time to build, though. At the moment we're still burning way too much oil and coal for our energy, and everything that drives up demand, contributes to that.

We’ve had 40 years and we’re still burning all the coal Carl Sagan warned us about.

https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI?si=3uhneUSoiZaUKS9M

So, after 40 years I’m a little tired of hearing it takes too long to build nuclear power plants.

On the bright side, we’ve almost reached peak coal:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/dec/18/coal-use-to...

We had it 40 years and we will have it the next N-Thousand years because of the waste they produce. Also, Nuclear-Power was massive subvention by the gov. Actually a business-case that can not exist without subvention. So we all paid it with the taxes and we still pay because of the nuclear-wast. The idea to build new nuclear-plants, is a new subvention-scam by some lobbyists or tech-giants who want to pass on their costs to the general public.

There has been some discussion about reprocessing and reusing it.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/nuclear-waste-recycling

The reality is a deep geological repository[1] for high radioactive waste. And this is also necessary for reprocessing [2]. Reprocessing will only reduce the high level waste.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_m...

I don't remember anyone complaining about it taking too long, 40 years ago. People were worried about Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, about what to do with the waste, about leakage. But not about time.

But whatever the causes, too little has been done over those 40 years, and at the moment, solar is far cheaper and faster to deploy than nuclear. I'm not stopping anyone from building nuclear power plants, but I think its window has gone. It's too expensive and too slow. But feel free to prove me wrong.

Just stop burning more oil and coal.

Greenpeace is likely opposed to that.

> Nuclear energy has no place in a safe, clean, sustainable future.

https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/climate/issues/nuclear/

Why do you think this “easy solution” would work?

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