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by kev00912 hours ago |
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upvoteby rob742 hours ago|
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Then again, if we hadn't had the Cold War and the associated nuclear arms race, we wouldn't have had civil nuclear power either, so...
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upvoteby Tangurena21 hours ago|
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According to the author of The Curve of Binding Energy [0], civil reactors were being subsidized by the purchase of plutonium (from the spent fuel rods) by the Department of Energy [1] to the tune of $1,000,000 per kg of Pu. The end of this program was coincidentally at about the same time as the Three Mile Island incident which leads many people to think that reaction to TMI was the reason that US reactor construction stopped.

When the Senate ratified some non-proliferation treaties, that also ended reprocessing spent fuel in the US which gets blamed on Carter.

Notes:

0 - https://www.amazon.com/Curve-Binding-Energy-Alarming-Theodor...

1 - The DOE owns all of the US nuclear weapons and leases them to the DOD.

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upvoteby 9dev6 hours ago|
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None of you ever manages to answer the waste storage question. That was, and still is, one of the deciding factors in Germany, for example.
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upvoteby account425 hours ago|
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Because its an irrelevant problem. The amount of waste nuclear produces is miniscule.
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upvoteby roryirvine49 minutes ago|
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Miniscule, yet extremely dangerous and incredibly difficult & expensive to deal with.

The estimated cost of making the UK's current stock of waste safe is currently £136bn, for a value of "safe" that leaves at least one of the high level waste pools being at an "intolerable" level of risk of leaking into groundwater until the late 2050s.

For comparison, the estimated cost of achieving net zero in the UK by 2050 is £110bn.

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upvoteby 9dev5 hours ago|
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It’s only irrelevant to you as long as it doesn’t leak into your ground water supply after a few decades down the line, when we discover the containment didn’t resist corrosion as well as we thought. The danger of nuclear waste does not correspond to the amount at all.
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upvoteby lostlogin5 hours ago|
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> The amount of waste nuclear produces is miniscule.

And yet people worry about it and the OP claims it led to the situation in Germany.

Maybe addressing the issue needs to occur, rather than dismissing it?

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upvoteby mejutoco7 hours ago|
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> The paranoia around nuclear power is tied to generational fear mongering of governments during the Cold War

And Chernobyl. And Fukushima. Nuclear is great but it has some very real risks

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upvoteby ndsipa_pomu6 hours ago|
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Don't forget Windscale and Three Mile Island
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