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To be fair, the maths behind rentability is tainted with so much agenda from all parts.

E.G: when you give prices for a nuclear plant in France, you include only assembly price and running costs. While for wind turbines you include assembly, disassembly, running costs and wiring (which must be underground by law). This makes it hard to make fair comparisons.



The turnover of EDF in France in the 90" was above $40 billion. 60% of its production was from nuclear, hence the nuclear costed more than $24 billion each year just to be operated. For a country like France this is huge, several percent of the GDP of that time. But nobody was discussing about that issue mainly because the CGT union had a tight grip on EDF governance.


Yeah but not just that. We badly needed to develop the nuclear arsenal to stay relevant and having nuclear plants helped a lot with that, technically and politically. We can't really compete with numbers or gun power, so the bomb let us still have a word to say in big conflicts.

Now we can put the existing bombs in maintenance mode, or disassemble them into more modern ones, as we don't need that many. It's the right time to shift the energy source, because now it's all about energy again.

This is the only subject where terrorism actually helped. You can't nuke a bunch of suicide bombers or extremists hidden in a mountain. Hence you can't justify making Armageddon devices as easily as before.


Who pays the cost when the wind turbine melts down?


And who pays the cost when you need to decommission a nuclear power plant?

I'm not against nuclear in general, but accounting should be apples-to-apples.


I'm afraid you didn't read the sarcasm in "wind turbine melts down". The way I see it, the op was taking a dig at nukes


Ouch. You're probably right :)


the same process for when a coal fired power station breaks down. the price of regular maintenance and in the event of catastrophic failure, insurance.


It was a joke.


Known in the industry as Denmark Syndrome.




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