Average Lifetime of Danish Wind Turbines, as of February 2018.

[NNadir]

16. I'm not sure this is true, since the infrastructure has been destroyed by ignorance and greed.

The greed consists of the attitude of this generation which punts all costs to future generations.

If you build a nuclear plant designed to last 80-100 years, you will pay more than if you build a gas plant that will require future generations to bear all the costs, along with a series disgusting massive wind farms spread over hundreds and thousands of square kilometers as an advertising divergence for what's really powering the world.

Building a nuclear plant involves caring about the future.

We know infinitely more today about materials science than we did in the 1970's and we obviously know more about chemistry and we have very fast and powerful computers. The technology is there, but the manufacturing infrastructure and more importantly the moral infrastructure as been destroyed by mindless assholes complaining about broken concrete at Hanford, for example.

We don't have ethics as our ethical infrastructure has been destroyed. That's why we have assholes who insist on making nuclear power plants "expensive." If they cost $15 billion to build - there's no reason they should - when they used to cost $1 billion (or less, in the case of Oyster Creek near me) this would involve spending maybe $14 billion as a gift to our children, our grandchildren and our grandchildren's children.

Our attitude is "What's in it for us?"

Instead we build wind turbines that become landfill or "recycling exercises" (with poor people doing the "recycling" because we don't give a shit about their health and wouldn't want to dirty our bourgeois hands) that last 20 years, so that any benefit accrued comes to us and only to us.

If you do the numbers, the 49 year lifetime for Oyster Creek works out to about $10-15 million a year, for a plant that routinely and continuously puts out 640 MW for years at a time without much interruption.

Not so long ago, before we started shafting poor people by making them pay for solar junk "feed in" tariffs, electricity cost about 11c/kwh here. Thus the retail revenue from that reactor over its lifetime was roughly $30 billion, from one small building.

There's no way in hell our little delusional "renewable energy is cheap" airheads are going to invest in the future. Their interest in the future is blithely declaring that future generations will do what they have proved incompetent to do, produce 100 exajoules from solar and wind, or worse 600 exajoules. The attempt to do that would be a toxicological nightmare that would dwarf even dangerous fossil fuels.

If their wind turbines grind the avian population to hell, trash mountain tops with roads for giant trucks, leave flow back water oozing to the surface for generations, well tough shit for the kids. They were supposed to go 100% renewable. They didn't do it, that's their fucking tough luck. It's their fault if they don't have birds, mountain trails free of trucks, clean deserts, clean free flowing water. They won't have done what we told them to do, and we don't give a shit that it can't be done.