>- They are inherently safe, no need to worry about meltdowns.

I don't worry about designed meltdowns, I worry about someone bunker-busting it, crashing a plane into it, detonating a convoy of trucks filled with fertilizer inside it, someone deciding that an old mine close the the ground water is "good enough" to store the waste from it, that war, forest fires, floods or famine will leave the sites unmanned until the storage pools dry out and the waste starts burning, or any number of similar scenarios which become so much more likely the more of these things we have.

But mostly I worry that they are more expensive than anything else even in a best-case scenario.

Why should we invest in more expensive electricity, that also carries a significant risk for immense disasters, when we have solved cheap solar, cheap batteries and synthesized fuels? The path forward seems obvious, even though it's less traveled.

▲

ziotom78 a day ago | parent [-]

They are so safe that nobody has ever attempted a terrorist attack against them since the first fission reactor (1941). Terrorists have targeted the Twin towers, the Pentagon, the White House, the Bataclan, Nice, but no fission reactors nor waste deposits. (If terrorists are reading this, I suggest them to plan an attack to the Baogang Lake [1], which is considerably less guarded and potentially more effective in terms of people killed.)

And if reactors are really so expensive (5 G€/reactor, while Italy spends 10 G€ per year in subsidies for renewables), why are Italians like me paying twice as much for electricity as the French, even though 70% of their energy comes from uranium and 0% of ours?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baogang_Tailings_Dam

	▲	Kon5ole a day ago \| parent [-]
		>They are so safe that nobody has ever attempted a terrorist attack against them since the first fission reactor (1941) Attempts are made regularly, and nuclear plants all over the world implemented additional security measures after 9/11. "A foiled Chechen rebel assault on the Russian city of Nalchik in October 2005 would have involved an attempt to hijack and fly one of five aircraft into a nuclear power station. Papers released in the UK in February 2005 under the Freedom of Information Act (2000) revealed there were more than 40 cases of potential security breaches at UK civil nuclear sites from 2004 to 2005." https://www.rusi.org/publication/countering-threats-nuclear-... >why are Italians like me paying twice as much for electricity as the French, even though 70% of their energy comes from uranium and 0% of ours It's complex but a simplified answer is that Italy pays what it actually costs, while the French leaves a lot of the cost to their children. The children (of the people who built the french nuclear plants) recently had to pay over 50 bn euros to cover the debts of EDF, and will likely have to pay another ?? bn to cover lack of maintenance on the aging reactors. (Google it). For 50+ years, france sold nuclear electricity at a loss, mostly unknowingly. Once they have paid the sins of the parents, the remaining costs to maintain the plants for another 20+ years again will likely be postponed to the next generation, since covering the cost today would make the electricity too expensive to sell. Note that France is running their economy at a much larger deficit than Italy for the past few years. Nuclear power that is not paid by electricity consumers now, but instead by the government, is of course not the entire explanation but it's part of it.