I was surprised that ESGV (Vanguard Index for responsible environmental friendly investing) does not include nuclear power there. I wonder what's the stigma bout nuclear?
1) Generations of nuclear engineers either told big lies or made huge errors of engineering; resulting in staggering disasters in Russia & Japan which will mark our planet for a period far longer than current human history.
2) The main use of nuclear plants was to create refined product for nuclear weapons, now we have vastly more of that stuff than you can imagine lying around. We don't need or want any more. I believe that a single facility in the north west of england has sufficient plutonium for 40,000 nuclear weapons.
3) They are wildly expensive compared to other forms of "clean" power - solar, hydro and wind are just far far cheaper in terms of both invested carbon, $ and collateral environmental damage.
Apart from that fission is just fine.
The insane project duration and nonsense cost overruns for nuclear construction are their own problem.
And you get a lot of people who don't understand and don't want to understand the safety aspect.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/comed-bribery-s...
I am sure you know the answer but because you ask for it: Radioactivity is nasty. Example Germany: When I grew up my parents couldn't pick mushrooms and I couldn't play in a sandbox because a few thousand kilometers away there was a reactor incident and the wind blew it over. Today people living near a power plant receive free jodium tablets in case there will be an accident. The government spends endless years looking for places to store the nuclear waste because nobody wants it in their backyard, obviously. The waste in the old starage, designed to last 10000 years, leaked already and noone knows how to handle it. France built most of their power plants directly at the border so that hopefully we will receive all the fallout. Uranium mining is said to be desastrous for the environment. Probably there's a lot more.
And it's no a one-time catastrophe result, but everyday operation.
Basically people live to a hundred even with pollution, but life expectancy and quality of life is much lower near a meltdown site.
That said, if you look purely at numbers, nuclear (assuming it doesn't explode) is better for humanity than coal.
That said that said, loads of countries recognize how bad coal is, and it's being phased out in favor of gas and renewables.
Im my country (Poland) over 20 000 people die yearly of lung cancer. Significant percent of them never smoked cigarettes and the main reason they got that cancer was smog. Which in Poland is almost exclusively seen in winters and caused by burning coal.
Chernobyl caused up to 4000 victims according to the worst estimates (including cancer developed later).
Every year in just one country there's more victims of coal energetics than victims of nuclear power in the whole world over all time.
That's leaving aside the problem of them inevitably breaking, which they absolutely will. Even if it only happens very few times, that's enough to ruin a very large swathe of environment. The risk is low, the impact is very very high.
Yes it has. You just store it. It takes up minuscule amount of land. The argument I hear is: "You can't store waste safely".. why? "Because you just can't".
>That's leaving aside the problem of them inevitably breaking, which they absolutely will.
Inevitably? I'm not sure about that. Right now that's not an issue and it hasn't been an issue for the the 60 years we've had nuclear power.
>You can tell this is the case by looking into how these storage facilities actually do in practice.
Sure. How many times did you hear about nuclear waste from commercial reactors leaking and causing damage to the environment?
>Even if it only happens very few times, that's enough to ruin a very large swathe of environment.
No. That's not true. That's not how radioactivity works. The longer the half-life of a radioactive substance, the less potent it is, and as you spread it over a larger area the potency goes down EXPONENTIALLY. Waste from commercial reactor is tiny - if you spread it, you dilute it to the point where it is engulfed in background radiation. There is no chance that waste from a commercial nuclear reactor will ruin a 'large swathe of environment'.