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I mean im guessing its because it may not be as profitable, or atleast at first, boycotts or directly just capitalism fucking everything up? i legit always imagine aliens seeing us still use coal while having DISCOVERED IN 1932
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this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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Well you can look at the rollout of renewables vs Nuclear in the UK
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycNqII5HYMI
tldr: Nuclear power plants are expensive to build (complicated to build), expensive to run (need well trained staff to handle the complexities), the stuff that they run on (Uranium) isn't easy to acquire, and on top of all this the waste product is difficult to dispose of, I believe in Germany for example when the power company shut down its Nuclear power plants it told the Germany government they can deal with the nuclear waste... so basically even though the german people get 0% of their power from nuclear power plants they pay every day to store the nuclear waste from previous ones that are no longer operational...
... and when things go wrong they REALLY go wrong
Coal on the other hand is relatively cheap, the technology is fairly simple, running them is fairly cheap, there's no radioactive waste the coal power plant has to deal with etc
Well, the waste gets thrown into the atmosphere. And that coal ash contains radioactive waste. Radioactive particulates up to 10x more concentrated than the raw coal fuel are injected directly into the atmosphere and spread by the winds. You know, the actual dangerous part of those nuclear accidents everyone is always thinking about.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
If a nuclear plant leaked even a fraction of that amount of radiation it would be shut down immediately. But all of that gets to be ignored, because it's not a nuclear power plant.