The competition is on for Eastern Europe’s #nuclear power market 🇨🇿 🇭🇺 🇪🇺 🇵🇱 🇦🇩
The long-term risks and costs of civilian nuclear power are too high.
France has the most nuclearised electricity:
* The cost of managing closed-down civilian nuclear reactors is huge: they produce no electricity but remain radioactive and must be permanently protected from tourists, thieves and terrorists.
* The plan of how to treat the most dangerous radioactive waste is still very uncertain; it *might* start at #Cigéo in 2025:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestion_des_d%C3%A9chets_radioactifs_en_France
Now, as I mention 2000 m3 of coal waste *per day,* the whole UK nuclear program just that amount over... 50 years! Nuclear plants produce really extremely tiny amount of waste, especially compared to the amount of energy they produce. And this waste can be easily packed, stored and over 100 years it loses 93% of its activity.
@kravietz @boud There isn't a lot of waste and the fuel is incredibly dense, but there is a massive environmental impact in mining fissile material. Massive amounts of raw yellow cake ore has to be refined in centrifuges. It's often mined in places like Australia and then gets transported in full to refinement facilities in the destination country. There is also an environmental impact mining uranium ore. The Yucca Mountain facility isn't even operational yet and there have been leaks in NV.
So at the end of the day what matters are objective comparisons of *lifecycle* usage of non-renewable resources. In case of energy sector I consider these as first priority:
* surface power density (how much land surface per unit of energy)
* greenhouse gas emissions (how much CO2)
* capacity factor (which makes any 1000 kWh of PV only 150 Wh in UK reality)
And then secondary metric:
* levelized cost of energy (LCOE, how much $$$ per unit of energy)
