Comment by naasking

> Total death count is a straw man argument, what matters here is the economic costs.

Paying out lawsuits is an economic cost. Regardless, disposing of low level radioactive components of the reactor had to happen at some point, and the cases where it's not offset by decades of recouping on that investment is are incredibly rare. Regardless, this is mostly moot in new designs because they are considerably safer, as I said. What's left is really the regulatory burden. In France and China, they build reactors in less than a decade. Can't happen here in America.

> Mining isn’t the major cost, nuclear fuel is expensive for other reasons.

Which is besides the point, as I said, you get a lot more energy per gram of fuel with modern designs or fast reactors, which mostly mitigates the objection about fuel cost, regardless of what stage the highest cost to obtain fuel is incurred.

Fast reactors weren't pursued because of nuclear weapon proliferation risk, which leaves the modern designs on the table where this risk is even lower than LWR.