The German Green party, which has taken part in national governments and is the biggest party in several states, has basically founded to oppose nuclear power.
And the (original) certification itself isn't all that important:
You can check what needs to be fixed with them now (if anything) and do the renovations to keep them working. As long as the basic design is still considered save today, and as long as maintenance and running costs are well below the revenue you make.
The biggest expense in nuclear power is building them. And a really big part of that exploding cost is in all the dark rituals you have to engage in to placate public opinion. (Like excessively long safety reviews and whatnot.)
If you take an existing nuclear reactor, the status quo works in your favour. Even in the unlikely scenario where your renovation essentially replaces the whole thing (so from an engineering point of view, you might as well build it from scratch), renovation might still be the wise choice exactly because of status quo bias in the population.
You are right that it was a dumb decision, but in this case blame the voters, not the politicians. It's democracy at work, it's what the people wanted. (At least judging by opinion polls and protests and the like.)
Hard to understate just how expensive. Here in Montreal where ice storms kill and cause billions in damage, we still don't bury the main transmission lines. We been burying almost everything _in_ the city where having to repair millions of individual connections (again) would be impractical, but it's relatively simple to repair the limited major lines into the city.
From CBC:
> Current estimates are that it would cost five to 10 times more to distribute electricity to a big city via underground cables, and that not all of nature's problems would be alleviated even if that were done.
> Horizontal directional drilling costs $10 to $30 (USD) per linear foot with upfront fixed costs of $30K or so.
Underground power lines are expensive, but not that expensive. As far as I know, you dig a ditch, put the power line into it, and then put the material back in over the top.
To pass under roads, under rivers, avoid digging up tarmac, houses, orchards, crops, things on the surface, etc.
Trenching is straightforward, I mention horizontal directional drilling as that puts a cap on the total cost of going underground Vs pylons and above ground stringing.
Agreed that it's in their self-interest to participate in the mass hysteria, but I believe my point still stands that it's an abrogation of leadership.
There's probably plenty of people who would be happy to be elected leaders but who don't compromise their morals like this. You just never see them elected.
> With the raw single-thread performance of the M4/M5 chips, an openbsd guest is arguably the best environment for testing pf configurations or running isolated mail servers (for example).
A unikernel would probably be even better? (But then you need a mail server that's set up for running as a unikernel, without an underlying OS.)
That being said, the timeline is remarkably short for such a hardware project.
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