Nuclear is great, but it does require wheelbarrows of cash, and we don’t have a solution for waste products.

Things are more expensive when we keep reinventing the wheel and trying to do new things instead of just reusing proven designs. Remember that solar power also used to cost wheelbarrows of cash back in the day. When you do something repeatedly, it becomes less expensive over time.

Nuclear is actually the leader in waste management. No other energy source has as complete a story. Eg what happens to solar panels when they EOL in 25 years? They go into landfills and leach toxic chemicals into the ground. These chemicals, like lead and cadmium are toxic forever. They have no 'half-life' in which their toxicity reduces.

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kragen 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Solar panels do not become useless in 25 years and need to be discarded, do not leach toxic chemicals, and do not contain cadmium. They do contain small amounts of lead, but leaching metallic lead out of landfills is very difficult and probably does not ever happen unintentionally.

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Spooky23 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A nuclear plant about 50 miles from my house was closed 15 years ago. The spent fuel rods will be stored there indefinitely until a federal facility is built.

	▲	andbberger an hour ago \| parent [-]
		that seems fine

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toomuchtodo 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Solar panels are recycled at almost 100% of total materials. Redwood Materials (founded by Tesla's former CTO) has already established a supply chain to ingest and recycle EV and stationary storage batteries at scale. The problem is that the hardware is lasting longer than expected, and meaningful recycling volume does not yet exist.

Conversely, ~95,000 metric tons of nuclear waste in the US does not have permanent storage or recycling solutions, as of this comment, and there is no plan for long term storage or recycling. Nuclear generation is experiencing a negative learning curve; we keep spending more the more we attempt to build it.

(solar PV panels have a 25-30 year service life, at which point they will still produce power at ~80-85% initial rating, batteries have a 15-20 year service life, with sodium ion chemistries estimated to have up to 50 year service life assuming once daily cycling)

https://www.epa.gov/hw/solar-panel-recycling

https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/beyond-recycling-...

https://e360.yale.edu/features/solar-energy-panels-recycling

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/09/nuclear-power-energy-radioac...

https://www.gao.gov/nuclear-waste-disposal

https://decarbonization.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-all...

(nuclear power accounts for about 10% of electricity generation globally, as of this comment)

	▲	yawaramin 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Solar panels are recycled at almost 100% of total materials. That's very clever wording. If someone glances at this sentence they might interpret it to mean that almost all solar panels are recycled. But your own citation tells a different story: https://e360.yale.edu/features/solar-energy-panels-recycling > Today, roughly 90 percent of panels in the U.S. that have lost their efficiency due to age, or that are defective, end up in landfills because that option costs a fraction of recycling them. Let's compare to spent nuclear fuel, which we know for sure does not end up in landfills. I am talking about today, not some hypothetical utopian future. Today, NPP spent fuel is safely sequestered while solar panels are dumped into landfills. > nuclear waste in the US does not have permanent storage or recycling solutions It does, it's just not built yet because it doesn't make sense to do it now. In a few decades, maybe a century we will have commercialized fusion reactors. Once we do, we switch to fusion completely and build the deep geological repositories or whatever other solution makes sense then. Or we can even recycle the spent fuel–the only thing stopping us from doing that now is misguided US politics (as usual). > we keep spending more the more we attempt to build it. It's capex. We are investing in nuclear technology. If you have a proven design and build the reactors at scale, the costs will flatten or decline, which is obvious to anyone who knows about economies of scale.