I highly recommend the book “Fossil Future” by Alex Epstein. It’s a great read and goes in depth into all of this much better than I am able to.

The important thing to remember is that energy generation is a comparison. While those are legitimate externalities of nuclear, you didn’t do any analysis of those externalities versus the externalities of hydrocarbons, solar, or wind. The amount of waste from all the nuclear energy we’ve ever used could fit inside a football field for example. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but the relative input goods and relative safety of nuclear make it both the cheapest and safest source of power of any energy source when it is allowed to compete in a free market.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

The football field may seem little, but you have to take in concideration how little of radioactiv material can contaminate hudge areas for decades. In german forests there are still mushrooms you can't eat, because they are still contaminated from wind that was blown from chernobyl to Germany 40 years ago.

Do you have any sources on the cheap price argument? You mean world wide, I assume?

I live in Germany and here it was around 0.50€ compared to solar and wind which are around 0.08€. But government regulations could make it more expensive here compared to the global average. But my source above was global.

Also when I see how France is struggling with there nuklear power plants rn, I am quite happy we didn't took that path.

Didn’t Germany spend 500B on wind farms? Part of the problem with price calculations is that they don’t account for the enormous subsidies behind the construction of hydrocarbon alternatives.

I agree that radiation can spread further than a football field, but we are very capable of mitigating it’s risks and managing it properly. One horribly manage collapse in an authoritarian communist country is not a reason to stop pursuing nuclear as a form of energy.

When I talk about it being the cheapest form of energy, I’m talking about in a free market based on the amount of inputs required for the amount of energy produced. One nuclear power plant on one square mile of land can produce the most energy with the least inputs and the least negative externalities.

Also I apologize for my first NOSTR typos, fired this one off too quickly 🤣

Well, for mining the electricity price will be the most important. Nothing else.

The one with the cheapest energy can stack more hashrate, increase the difficulty by that and push anyone paying more for electricity out of the mining business.

Also speaking of independency, once we you setup renewable energy plants(we don't count nuklear to that) you don't depend for infinty on countries like Australia and Russia to deliver you uranium.