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Comment by asmodeuslucifer | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear power has never been cheap and never will be. Every country that has tried has failed, and that included the Russians, the Chinese, South Koreans, French and the Japanese. And you can't blame it on the environmentalists in Russia and China.

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How has France failed with their nuclear fleet, exactly? Considering they produce so much power they're selling it to their neighbours at a profit.

All the cost were hidden off the balance sheet 40 years ago. They can't build them cost effectively (or on schedule) now that there's more scrutiny on where the money comes from.

And the cost of fossil fuels is future (not to mention current and recent past, I believe Germany has had over 15k heatwave related deaths this summer) human lives, you wanna calculate those into your little napkin math there?

They use it for national security, not price. They did not want to be held hostage to oil.

Unfortunately they have to shut down their nuclear reactors when it gets too warm in the summer, which is only going to get worse. Since nuclear isn't capable of generating baseload, we should instead invest into solar & batteries.

Except some of them are still building new plants today (large ones cause higher efficiency, unsurprisingly). For China and Russia those are entirely separate from the kind of reactors used for plutonium reprocessing or medical isotopes or whatever else, they only exist to boil water at the end of the day. The only incentive here is electricity, and both have plenty of other options available.

Bit of a paradox isn't it? They'd just burn coal or gas instead if that was much cheaper.

They just wish away the decommissioning costs by claiming they will last 60 years, 100 years, or forever.

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