The author is a "Freelance writer" and has 0 history relating to the energy sector or nuclear power or anything relating to the topic.

The bulk of the article borders on urban myth and views that are thoroughly debunked by actual industry experts.

There are 0 cited sources. The whole thing reads like a high school essay of poor enough quality to get an F.

Why is this on HN?

Isn’t the technology improving? We could have smaller plants?

Fourth generation plants, for example, increase efficiency, safety, etc

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph241/xue2/

“ The main advantages Generation IV seeks to provide is reducing the amount of time the waste remains radioactive for (on the magnitude of ten, reducing from millenias to centuries), improving the energy yield for the nuclear fuel, increasing the variety of fuels that can be used to power the reactor, and allowing for reactors to use already present nuclear waste in its operations.”

Total FUD arguments that crumble immediately.

Nuclear Waste is fully contained and tiny and there are zero peer reviewed articles suggesting that stored commercial waste has ever hurt anyone anywhere. No other energy source can say this. Fossil waste kills 4 million/yr and renewable waste is recycled in poor areas exposing people to heavy metals.

Accidents are not good and we shouldn't put tornado proof plants in tsunami zones. But nuclear is among the safest form of energy we know.

https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy

Cost is fine when you standardize a plant and build lots. See France and Korea. We built 20 GW/yr before and we can do it again. It's extremely fast low-carbon energy.

This article is full of lie. Biggest modern plants supply 6 GW, not 0.9 Currently existing plants supply 10% of the world energy consumption. Last generation of plants lasts for 100 year. Seems to me it is paid article.

> However, the biggest problem with solar thermal technology is cloudy days and nighttime. Abbott plans to investigate a number of storage solutions for this intermittency problem, which also plagues other renewable energy solutions such as wind power, in a future study.

This is a much harder problem to solve than all of the listed problems with fission, many of which are misrepresented or exaggerated. For example:

> If a nuclear reactor is built every day, the global supply of these exotic metals needed to build nuclear containment vessels would quickly run down and create a mineral resource crisis.

When a nuclear reactor is built every day, we'll be able to get all the resources we need for anything from asteroids.

The article is from 2011. Most of the points describe issues with historic plants and wouldn't apply to Gen3 reactors.

I wonder if Thorium based reactors suffer the same issues at scale.