alt Hacker News- Spent fuel is a solved problem, we just store it securely
- Who can be relied upon: who do you rely upon to run your drinking water?
- Failure modes of accidents: have been extensively studied and essentially designed out
- Multiple catastrophic failures: sounds bad until you realize that you can name only two:
1. Chernobyl: old flawed reactor design, basically impossible today, a few unfortunate deaths among first responders in the cleanup, that's it
2. Fukushima: no radiation deaths. You would get a higher dose of radiation flying to Japan to visit Fukushima than from drinking the irradiated leaked water there.
> upwards of $1 trillion if not more.
Where are you getting this number? According to https://cnic.jp/english/?p=6193 it was estimated at JPY 21.5 trillion (roughly USD 150 to 190 billion).
> Spent fuel is a solved problem, we just store it securely
This is simply untrue. Depending on the type and enrichment of the fuel it will need to be actively cooled for some period, possibly decades. After that you can bury it. You need facilities for all of this. You need personnel (done by the NRC currently) to transport and install new fuel, remove old fuel and transport it to suitable sites as well as manage those sites. Before they even make it to storage sites they'll typically be stored onsite or in the reactor for years.
> Who can be relied upon: who do you rely upon to run your drinking water?
Given the current administration, almost nobody. The state of drinking water in places like Flint, MI is a national disagrace. The continued existence of lead pipes that leech lead into drinking water in many places is a national disgrace. The current administration gutting the EPA and engineering the Supreme Court to overturn things like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act are just the cherry on top.
A significant ramp up of nuclear power would necessitate a commensurate ramp up of the NRC in all these capacities.
> Failure modes of accidents: have been extensively studied and essentially designed out
Like I said, hand waved away.
> Where are you getting this number?
Multiple sources [1][2]. Fukushima requires constantly pumping water to cool the core. That water needs to be stored (in thousands of tanks onsite) then processed and ultimately released back into the ocean, which itself is controversial. Removing the core requires inventing a bunch of technologies that don't exist yet. The decomissioning process itself is something most of us won't live to see the end of [3].
The $1 trillion and a century for 1 nuclear plant. Pro-nuclear people will point to the death figure because it suits their argument. It's economically devastated that region however.
And as for Chernobyl, billions of euros was spent building a sarcophagus for the plant, only to have the integrity of that shield destroyed by a Russian drone.
[1]: https://archive.ph/EBhF7
[2]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...
[3]: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/fukushima