Slovakia’s likely future coalition wants to build a new nuclear reactor
Slovakia’s likely future coalition wants to build a new nuclear reactor
But... why? Building a new nuclear reactor takes decades, is insanely expensive compared to every other power source, is inflexible and relies on uranium that is tradionally sourced from Russia.
Running it creates even more expensive byproducts requiring expensive extremely-long-term storage.
I honestly don't get it.
Although I can get behind Progressive Slovakia's stance of letting the market deal with it, because there is literally no market for these things.
Those byproducts are still viable as fuel and can be sent to second- and third-stage reactors rather than being locked away in a cement vault somewhere. Also, Australia has an absolute shitload of uranium out in the outback, which is kind of a win-win since it's far from civilization and largely uninhabitable anyway. If the fuel actually gets used until it's spent, nuclear is extremely clean and very safe.
The issue is that uranium is so cheap nobody wants to use non-virgin fuel. You could recycle the uranium, or use breeder reactors, but both of those have political issues. The current usage of uranium is extremely wasteful and produces lots of unnecessary waste, but I’m not totally convinced that this will change anytime soon.
You can get uranium from many sources, and it’s really cheap. Actually, the low price is the reason why we produce as much nuclear waste as we do, as there’s little incentive to use all the energy in the uranium. That said, the amount of waste produced is very low compated to any other category of waste. It’s very overblown.
Nuclear is insanely expensive, but what’s the alternative backups for renewables? Coal, that’s what. Gas is too expensive without Russian supply. Battery storage on a scale of more than 5 minutes is an unsolved problem. To bring the irony full circle coal plants are actually very radioactive.
Nuclear is such a inefficient source of electricity.
Hope they do !