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Comment by starbix | Hacker News Reader

This is going to be a huge waste of time and money until we realize that building new nuclear power plants will be too expensive and too late, since we'll have figured out a renewable energy concept that'll handle the load by then. Instead we could also just join a French project, who have way more experience.

We should focus on extending our hydro power storage capacity instead.

There will be a referendum anyways, so I think it's unlikely the ban will actually be lifted.

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"I expect they're too expensive" is a terrible reason to ban them, though.

That's not why they were banned, and in any case lifting a ban on building something that nobody will build doesn't seem like good use of legislators time.

At least one Kanton has already requested a new build.

https://www.nuklearforum.ch/de/news/neues-kernkraftwerk-im-a...

It is when it's tied to "and I expect they're going to ask for giant subsidies from taxpayers".

Which nuclear inevitably does, both in the form of direct requests for money and by refusing to pay for adequate insurance to compensate everyone who will be damaged in the event of a meltdown externalizing the risks.

If you're in "everything not banned is subsidized"-land where absolutely everything is political, you need to work on getting out of that hole, not digging it deeper.

(I wouldn't assume the Swiss are there yet, but I've only visited a couple times for a few weeks. Their politics seemed healthier than I've seen elsewhere, fwiw.)

> we'll have figured out a renewable energy concept that'll handle the load by then

That's a very, very risky bet you're taking here. We know nuclear energy really well, and you're suggesting we ignore it for something that we will "figure out" later. Meanwhile the clock is ticking.

> We should focus on extending our hydro power storage capacity instead.

This is so limited that it's not at all an alternative, though.

Hydro power is often brutal for the local environment. There has been a whole lot of expensive and careful undoing of hydro power around the world in recent years in attempt to save various local species from extinction. There are second order effects too like how silt is typically deposited in an unblocked vs blocked waterway and what that means for downstream land or water quality.

> we'll have figured out a renewable energy concept that'll handle the load by then"

Seems like wishful thinking. If anything with the current electrical trends there will be even more demand for energy in the future and unless some miracolous clean energy source is invented, nuclear (or fossil fuel) will need to be used

> building new nuclear power plants will be too expensive and too late, since we'll have figured out a renewable energy concept that'll handle the load by then.

That's a helluva prediction.

Thorium reactors would be practically limitless in fuel supply, but we aren't getting them without seriously funded nuclear research. That is far less likely during a band on commercial stations.

>Thorium reactors

The same reactors nuclear powers with decades of experience haven't deployed?

We will get two or three revolutions in solar power and battery technology before a single thorium reactor is viable. You could invest all the R&D budget of thorium reactors in perovskite panels and it would generate more MW per CHF invested.

it was mostly because PWR's are cheaper. But Thorium is advancing https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/first-criticality-fo...

You don't need only MW but MW at requested time

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