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What would your town need to host a nuclear plant?

Cooling towers are costly, ugly, energy hogs. So of course the EPA requires them on all new nuclear plants.

Where should we be on the cost versus release frequency tradeoff curve, and how do we get there?

Any attempt to blame nuclear plant builders for the prohibitive cost of nuclear power plants has to explain why these same people can throw up coal plants on time and on budgets. Why these same people could build nuclear plants for nearly the same cost as a coal plant in the 1960’s.

Remediation of uranium mill tailings is costing the taxpayer billions of dollars a year to move dirt from one place to another in an attempt to reduce dose rates which are already below background on large parts of the planet. The largest such effort is at Moab, Utah.

Assuming fusion can solve a whole slew of daunting engineering problems, it will then face a monumental economic problem: you must recycle a large proportion to the electricity generated back to the reactor to keep the process going.

Navy/NRC style regulation and quality assurance has no problem making did-cost ten or more times should-cost. The LPD is an example. And the quality stinks.

Nuclear power will get Joe Sixpack’s support if and only if it is as cheap as fossil fuel power.

Edmund Teller played an important role in promulgating the Intolerable Harm Lie.

LNTer often fall back on the prudence argument. But LNT’s form of prudence has killed thousands of people, and will kill a lot more.