Replying to Avatar Crunch Man

I heard a theory that the real reason is because developing nuclear energy is one step away from building nuclear weapons. So they want to keep nuclear energy away from some countries so they don’t get to close to developing nuclear weapons. But I don’t know how true this is because I don’t know anything about nuclear so.
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jb55 1y ago 💬 2

They didn’t choose a much safer version of nuclear (thorium) back when they first started building them. They instead went the tech tree route that also unlocked nuclear weapons.

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ynniv 1y ago

We also expect costs to go down as a technology matures, yet over the first 30ish years the costs of generating a watt of nuclear energy went up two and a half times in constant dollars. A cynic might wonder whether other energy industries may have lobbied for onerous regulations in order to limit the impact of this cheap new source.

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sister_sam 1y ago

Very simple. That was the major Cold War build up. Very difficult and uneconomical to produce bomb grade material from a thorium based system. Also US military was in charge of nuclear energy use at the time.