this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
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The reason is ultimately irrelevant, but I welcome more nuclear energy.
They could just invest in a solar farm or something, they are just a lot more economical.
Nuclear is okay, but the costs compared to renewables are very high, and you have to put a lot of effort and security into building a reactor, compared to a solar panel that you can basically just put up and replace if it snaps.
You probably know this discussion already through.
Edit: Glad to see a nice instance of the discussion going here.
This is false. Nuclear has a very competitive levelized cost of energy (LCOE). Nuclear has high upfront costs but fuel is cheap and the reactor can last much longer than solar panels. The big picture matters not just upfront costs.
Source: https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/08/f25/LCOE.pdf
Yo better check your fuel prices: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/09/21/why-uranium-prices-are-soaring
Plus imagine how expensive uranium will get once we start relying on nuclear. It'll be the new oil.
Raw material is usually a small fraction of the cost of refueling. I would also argue that the Russian-Ukrainian conflict is a small blip in the lifetime of a reactor, ~80 years. Transient pricing will have a negligible effect on the LCOE.
Not only that, imagine how thrilled nature and the environment will be at massive extraction efforts ripping apart landscapes to provide fuel for a method of generating power that is obsolete since at least three decades by now.
Don’t need to, just down-blend from the available fuel used from weapons put out of commission as a result of disarmament treaties.
Now, about those materials used to construct solar panels…