• LordOfTheChia@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Beyond replacing fossil fuels plants, nuclear plants can also help power atmospheric decarbonization (with their excess baseband power) as well as desalination plants if close enough to a coast.

    There’s a lot of projects that depend on cheap and abundant energy that can further help undo some of the damage from a century of fossil fuels usage.

    While the design lifespan of nuclear plants might be 30-40 years, newer ones are designed for 40-60 years of operation right off the bat.

    So it’s a bit of a sticker shock at first but even getting just 40 years of benefits from each plant is huge.

    A big part of the problem is we don’t look at these longtime operation periods and we externalize (or just ignore) the CO2 emissions as costs of running cheaper gas and coal power plants.