Comment by mschuster91
9 hours ago
> and yet Germany turned off clean, nuclear power
Oh ffs. Nuclear power is not clean. Look what the GDR left us with the Wismut "heritage" - mining for uranium is incredibly toxic, and safely disposing of the spent fuel and all the other irradiated remains is incredibly expensive.
We just don't see it in our Western nations because we get our uranium from Russia, other -'stan countries and remote regions in Australia and Canada where barely anyone lives to care about the destruction.
As for the disposal, over half of the already measly budget for the Ministry of Environment goes to take care of the nuclear waste - 1.4 billion euros A YEAR [1]. In contrast, only 400 million euros are spent on environmental production. Nuclear power wasn't just never clean, it also was never cheap because the true costs were never accounted for.
On the other hand: it is significantly cleaner than power generated by burning fossil fuels, and we don't exactly account for the environmental impact of renewables either. Like it or not, people care only about the direct impact it has on them, and it has been long enough since Chernobyl that nuclear isn't scary anymore. An anti-nuclear argument based on waste might not be wrong, but it isn't going to convince many people either.
Want to convince people that nuclear is a bad idea? Forget about the waste, the dangers, and the overseas environmental impact, and instead focus purely on the cost. The business case for nuclear in a renewable-heavy grid is extremely poor, and very few people like nuclear enough that they would willingly pay massive subsidies to choose it instead of any of the alternatives. For most people nuclear is a necessary evil and a magic-solve-everything solution to the climate crisis: they don't like it enough to stick to it when more attractive options exist.
If nuclear - Thorium not Uranium is a cleaner way ahead for the waste is less of a problem. I've not read anything as to how long a Thorium reactor / plant might last and what the clean up costs at end of life would be but I imagine the metal around the reactors would be equally contaminated by nuclear radiation regardless of the fuel source.
There is a large somewhat unrealised issue of decommissioning large uranium nuclear plants when they reach end of life. [1] [2] Perhaps the newer smaller reactor plants proposed atm might not quite the same level of trouble decommissioning them.
[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7Cs8I-6PkQ [video 27 mins] How a Nuclear Power Plant Is Actually Decommissioned — The Full $20B Process
- can take 30 to 60 years - average US nuclear plant decommission cost sits around 10 billion dollars.