Comment by adrianN

> it should be a no brainer for a place like Europe without significant energy resources.

The uranium needs to be regularly replaced. Europe currently imports virtually all of the uranium used by its nuclear power plants. While Europe has some decommissioned uranium mines, they would have to be reopened, but the known deposits are estimated to cover less than the 50 years you cite, at current levels of nuclear production (much less when expanding production).

So if this is about energy independence rather than cost, I’m not sure that it would be such a great win.

Cost and time seem like a pretty important con to me.

Yes no real cons if we exclude the small con of being completely economically unviable.

>Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment,

That's not true. It's extremely expensive to operate for one, so expensive in fact that nobody in the private sector wants to do it without having nation states basically guarantee profits for the lifetime of the plant or accept all liability. Which in several countries means that he operator is the nation state. Like in France.

The profits are guaranteed by collecting extra taxes from the population, not by increasing the price of electricity. Which is why people believe France has cheap electricity when they really don't.

Also of course each nuclear plant carries a nonzero chance of a trillion dollar incident (we've had two so far) as well as a nonzero chance of millions of casualties. Both these cons are entirely unique to nuclear power plants. No hydro plant, solar plant, wind farm, coal, oil or gas plant can cause as much damage as a nuclear plant.

>t's that or buying gas from Russia.

Not at all, there are many options (including buying gas from someone else). Some options got viable so recently people still haven't realized it. Like batteries. They're cheap now, you know, and China can build as many as we want. China has also caused a severe drop in the cost of hydrolyzers, used to create e-fuel. E-fuel means you can use solar power in winter and during night, which removes the remaining weakness of renewable sources. Europe should spend every eurocent in that direction instead of nuclear. That's the path to true energy independence.

And anyway, europe still gets 70% of it's nuclear fuel from Russia. How is that better than gas?

Cost of deployment is a massive consideration in our not-yet-post-scarcity society.

It takes billions to certify a nuclear power plant, and it takes billions more to re-certify it every few decades, to say nothing of the costs of modernization.

To be clear, I consider myself generally pro-nuclear power, but let's not ignore the massive upfront and ongoing capital and operational costs that really undermine this idea that it's free power.

How about nuclear fuel still being dependent on either russia or us? and that is just one reason.

> Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment

... and cost of operation and the fact that you have radioactive material you need to securely and safely store for quite a bit (which no one has figured out yet)

Oh it has tons of cons:

1. It's the most expensive form of electricity;

2. Even that cost is only obtained by accounting tricks, basically arguing the life of the plant is 60 years;

3. The true cost in the last 30 years just isn't known (eg Hinkley Point-C);

4. Processing of uranium ore into fuel creates is an unsolved problem when it comes to waste byproducts eg UF6;

5. Processing and storage of spent fuel is an unsolved problem. No, you can't just stick it in a cave. Most spent fuel requires active cooling for years, possibly decades;

6. Long term investment in maintenance is super-important and something that particularly private companies are incredibly bad at as evidence by the infrastructure management of every private utility in the US;

7. They take 15-25 years to build, typically, if you're anyone but China. Who know how cheap the alternatives will be by then? Look at solar's price collapse;

8. SMR does not work and will not work. It's a myth sold to government to siphon grants;

9. The cost of a catastrophe of a single plant is many orders of magnitude higher than any other power plants. Examples: Chernobyl, Fukushima. And yes I can already feel the hand-waving away of "outliers";

10. No nuclear power plant has ever been built without significant government subsidies; and

11. No nuclear power plant pays the true insurance cost. Those costs will ultimately fall onto the taxpayer who will typically enjoy none of the proits.