I found this surprising. Even considering the costs of construction and decommissioning, nuclear does not compare too badly to renewables.
This doesn’t seem to be just made up. It cites this which cites this, which cites this. And as far as i’m willing to dig, there’s nothing bogus about it.
I have a few comments though:
- in the Warner article, do the costs represent proper decommissioning, like making it as safe as a decommissioned solar farm would be? It’s not clear.
- The OWID article doesn’t distinguish between different types of wind/solar, which the source material does! So maybe that’s how they are fudging the data? Somebody needs to take some time and improve the OWID dataset.
- It’s really pathetic if renewables still aren’t safer and cheaper than nuclear. Nuclear is so wasteful. If we need a decade or two of research before we can ditch nuclear, then let’s do it.
The rest of your points are fine but here we gotta come full stop. Nuclear power plants don’t create radioactive waste, they transform already radioactive Uranium into a different compound which they go store somewhere else (possibly an even safer place).
Are there accidents with this? Sure, but to draw an analogy - “We should stay on Windows (coal) for privacy (energy) because Ubuntu (nuclear) has data collection (waste) too!”
The other options aren’t feasible. My roof growing up was covered in solar panels. The junk was worthless, and who knows what happened to it after we replaced the panels. We need feasible solutions today. Even if Nuclear is 5x worse than I’m selling it (it’s not), it’s still miles ahead of the competition
They create radiactive uranium, and transform it into nuclear waste. Radioactive enriched uranium is a man-made substance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium
You still need to enrich it, so yes it is man made in order to use it.