We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything.

Second, I'm on the fence over whether I support more reactors and not because nuclear==bad. I trust the technology, but my concern is whether we can maintain a stable political environment for the decades/hundred years required to responsibly take care of nuclear.

Buying into a fission reactor means you pay billions up front, but you also promise to pay billions in upkeep, and then pay billions for decomissioning. If you aren't willing to do that upkeep or clean up after yourself then you can cause a radiological disaster.

What happens if we have a majority government that refuses to believe in the long term effects of radiation damage even as scientists explain to them over and over again what will happen? They just don't see why we should be spending that amount of money on reactor decomissioning or on upkeep and don't want to be seen as the one spending taxpayer money on something so costly. What if they decide to cut nuclear safety programs in a political stunt? I wish I could say that I know that won't happen, but on the hundred years in the future scale I'm just not sure.

Nuclear is amazing and could solve all of our short term energy needs, but it's ultimately people and our political structures that I don't trust, not the science.

From the article: "No nuclear energy program has ever launched without heavy state intervention — the capital costs are just too high for private entities to take on."

I think this misses the real reason. High capital costs are no barrier to private financing as long as the eventual profits will accrue to the investors. But in this highly-regulated industry, investors can't put money into nuclear plants thinking that in 20 years there will be a high demand, and they'll be able to charge a high price for power. Once the time comes, the regulators will likely decide that they can charge only a "fair" price. And that's assuming that they actually get to build and operate the plant - there's a substantial chance that political winds will change, and the plant ends up being banned or regulated to the extent that it's effectively banned. Government financing is the only solution to this problem, which is created by the existence of government.

We see the same thing in Canada now with pipeline construction - only government can finance them due to the government being capable of destroying any private company that tries to build them.

Why Renewables Aren't the Reason for California Blackouts: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/08/why-renew...

LCOE of various energy sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...

https://neon.energy/Hirth-Ueckerdt-Edenhofer-2015-Integratio... suggests that wind energy has up to 50% higher "real" cost than typical LCOE measurements because of variability, however, this still puts the costs for nuclear (118-192) a lot higher than wind (28-54) and solar (32-42).

> Reactors from civilian plants don’t blow up like atomic bombs...

No they don't, but they do blow up like industrial hydrogen gas explosions. Loss of coolant accidents are unforgiving in boiling water reactors and quickly fail catastrophically (in the engineering sense).

> the 1950s design CANDU reactor is small enough to be considered “modular”

Ummm, no. I stood in front of reactor #4 at Darlington just before it went into production. I think this was the last CANDU reactor to go into service in Canada. The scale of the reactor, the turbine hall, and the containment building are incomparable to anything else man-made that I've experienced.

The large size compared to equivalent boiling water reactors accounts for the CANDU's primary failing: it costs too much. Especially in the age of fracking, nuclear is uncompetitive cost wise compared to natural gas.

The supporters of nuclear energy and The Green New Deal both rely on a working assumption that the cost of CO2 emissions is the only important factor moving forward. Geographic and geopolitical considerations may play a significant role in continental Europe, Japan, and China but I have yet to hear a reasonable non-ideological argument against a natural gas centric strategy in North America.

I agree, but why set up a false dichotomy? Nuclear energy should be part of a "Green New Deal", which shouldn't just be about energy, but pragmatic environmentalism in all fields.

It seems very unlikely to me that there will ever be sufficient desire for fission based power in most countries, no matter how safe scientists say it is. I still think nuclear power will be important.

It seems plausible that governments will continue to fund research into fusion power but I am doubtful that much more money could be raised than was raised for ITER, especially as the results from ITER will not be particularly exciting. Therefore I don’t think fusion would be cost effective with ITER level technology (the way to make fusion generate power more efficiently without changing the underlying technology is to make it bigger which makes it much more expensive (I think cost scales roughly as the fourth power of the diameter)). Therefore improvements in technology would be required. A fundamental technology in this case is the quality of the superconductors (one aspect in particular is that some superconductors become less effective in high magnetic fields but the whole reason they are used is to generate very strong magnetic fields).

Perhaps if more funding had gone into fusion over time, it would have gone into the more fundamental research into things like new superconductors specific for fusion (ie focusing on things like achieving high field strength more than cost). Fortunately other funding has gone into superconductor research and cheaper superconductors mean fusion research may also become cheaper (and better superconductors mean smaller reactors which are much cheaper).

It still feels like more funding would be better: projects could complete faster and iterate more, but it doesn’t feel absolutely hopeless to me. If all our hopes rested on ITER, I think it would be time for despair.

Despite the slow progress on fusion it still feels more likely to me than the green new deal.

At this point, I will take any and every mix of non-polluting energy we can get.

I do worry about the stability-of-nations risk, but I think if we could plan as a global community for such contingencies we could come up with plans for securing or perhaps even permanent shutdown of nuclear facilities in the event of the collapse of a nation.

Ultimately, I think we are at the point where we need to take more drastic action, and nuclear can certainly fit into that for avoiding the worst outcomes of climate change.

I also hope that we come to a point as a society where we are willing to make and enforce laws that will help us prevent a similar event as the ones that brought us climate change. We were systematically and intentionally lied to, over and over, by oil and related industries. Technology that would aid us was scrapped for the sake of short term profits. Scientific analysis was hidden. Lobbying allowed the practices to continue. Lies were allowed to be propagated to the public to the extent that, even today, many people doubt climate change is even happening despite overwhelming evidence. These need to be crimes, as they have real victims: and unlike many person-to-person crimes, these corporate crimes can affect our entire society.

> "Solar panels produce ~300x more waste than nuclear reactors when providing the same amount of energy."

Didn't know it was so much better. That's awesome. I'm happy to read recent developments in the approval for small nuclear reactors. Hope to see this stuff become more popular.

There was an article posted on HN a while back, “Why nuclear power will never supply the world's energy needs”. Not sure if the information is now dated, but I always think about it when I see articles like these.

https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.htm...

Author has good intentions, but absolutist and dangerous thoughts here. For example: "In order for this to work in the United States, the federal government could consolidate the nuclear arms of General Atomics, General Electric, Westinghouse, and others into a single public corporation. This federal entity would be mandated to decarbonize the American electricity grid."

They suggest making a monopoly for nuclear? Are you kidding me? That is a recipe for bad technology choices and taking advantage of customers. Let the market figure it out, with dozens of designs and vendors and demonstrations. It's already an oligopoly with maybe 2 or 3 incumbents in the US. And it's been that way since the 60s when the government created that market power for military and international nuclear export reasons. Essentially they picked water cooled technologies because they made sense for the Navy, and picked just two companies to export them internationally, subsidized, etc for civilian use. We need more companies not less. And we need the government to stay out of it. The only thing federal government should do is help lower licensing costs and timelines and establish locations for rapid and responsible demonstration of advanced nuclear projects. The only way to do this is smaller reactors that take less money and time to demonstrate and verify. Think small not big. The DOE might be doing this with the Advanced Reactor Demonstration, but it seems they may be in the business of monopoly creation with just two companies out of 20 or more selected to demonstrate billion dollar mega projects.

Whatever we do, we should not deploy more water cooled technologies just to decarbonize. Yes, they work; yes they have not caused damage human life the US. But the GE designed Fukushima reactors and the RMBK water reactors are astonishingly close to catastrophe. People don't understand how much effort goes into avoiding meltdowns. We need new meltdown proof designs that don't need active cooling to keep the reactor at safe temperatures.

TO THE FEDS: prevent monopolies - make demonstrating new nuclear technologies easier

It depends on who "we" is.

If "we" want to spend several times as much money for our power, and only start getting it 10+ years from now, "we" can go all in on nukes. But that "we" looks an awful lot like "them" to me.

My expectation is that if CO2 production has not taken a nosedive by 2030, we are looking at a worldwide collapse after mass migration pushes fascist governments into the driver seat, leading directly to global thermonuclear war. (I would welcome being shown wrong.)

The only problem cited for renewables is energy storage, for which we have numerous alternatives that look like they will all work.

Besides gravity storage, with weights that may be lowered into disused mine shafts, underground compressed air, batteries, and molten salt baths, a surprising synthesis is solar panels floating on dam reservoirs.

They operate more efficiently by staying cool, and are easily cleaned without consuming water. They relieve daytime load, and the existing turbines run at night. There is already a grid tap in place.

Strongly behind this for the merits of the technology which are just unquestionably better results for the costs and risks. I’d also really favor making nuclear energy an era-defining technology, like IT was for the 80s-20s. I think it’s wise to have big technological ideas drive progress, and as much as I care about “green,” it’s an uninspiring concept compared to nuclear.

If you want this then write your representatives at the local and national levels. They do listen. The reason it’s not happened is the opposite side doing exactly this for years.

There are a bunch of startups developing new reactor designs that should be cheaper and safer than existing plants. Some are ready or close to building demonstration plants.

I'd rather we fund the most promising dozen or so of those funding to build demos over the next decade than start building conventional plants now and locking ourselves in to those for decades.

There was an interesting Nova episode a few years ago that looked at a bunch of these new designs.

I remember one that used a liquid fuel in a spherical vessel, with an opening in the bottom to drain into a wider, long, shallow rectangular vessel. The fuel would react in the spherical vessel, but if you drained it into the rectangular vessel it would not react.

This is because in the spherical vessel if a given atom reacts and produces a neutron there are many directions it can go which have to pass through enough fuel that it has a good chance of causing another reaction. It's enough to achieve a self-sustaining reaction.

In the rectangular vessel, there are much fewer directions for a neutron that pass through enough fuel to react. You can't get a self-sustaining reaction.

The best part was how they plugged the drain when the reactor was operating. They plugged it by having some frozen fuel in the pipe. The heat from the reaction in the spherical vessel would quickly melt the plug unless it was heavily and continuously cooled.

Note that unlike other plants where if something goes wrong with cooling you have to take explicit action to stop the reactor before meltdown, in this one if something goes wrong with the cooling the reactor stops itself.

Another good one is the traveling wave reactor. There was a joint venture between TerraPower (a company founded by Bill Gates) and China National Nuclear Corporation to build a 600 MWe demo reactor from 2018-2025 followed by commercial 1150 MWe plants later that decade, but TerraPower was made to stop in early 2019 by the US government.

Besides having a much lower chance of doing something that can harm people in the surrounding area than current designs, many of these new designs allow for much smaller reactors so that even if something does happen the area affected will be small.

Green new deal is something we can have now, and something we needed ten years ago. Nuclear (on the scale needed for the climate disaster) takes decades to implement. We simply don’t have the time to omit a real and solution we can start now, for a more expensive dream solution.

We might want new nucelar power plants for industrial centers. But what we certainly shouldn't be doing is using them as an excuse to propagate the idea of a centralized grid of power authorities distributing power nationally or globally.

Centralized grids are incredibly expensive, difficult to manage, and introduce single points of failure in the physical and information domains. We should be doing everything we can to decentralize our grids, promote distributed power generation and storage in urban and commercial installments, and focus on letting the municipal levels of government coordinate bulk storage appropriate to their needs.

Folks get so worked up about highly efficient new nuclear power plants that they forget about transit and storage, or argue that these aspects shouldn't be considered. Both ideas are deleterious to making a modern, resilient power infrastructure that's able to adapt to climate change, changes in the economic environment, and the increasing pace of modern technology in the space of power storage and delivery.

Until these goals can coexist with the call for a "nuclear new deal", we should view them for what they are: short-sighted and misguided attempts to make profit off a need without considering the actual long term goals that society has.

FFS. As Saint Jobs taught us "Real artists ship."

We needed nuclear. And everything else. Two decades ago.

Now must do anything and everything to get to zero carbon as fast as possible. Not tomorrow. Not a decade from now. Today. Now.

If we went all in for nukes, ignoring all the financial and technical and policy downsides, what's the soonest it'd go live? A decade?

Too late.

So while we build out wind, solar, storage... And while we rebuild our grid... We should also triple down on nukes. Dump money into every feasible and semifeasible and farfetched variation. And hope that in a decade some of those bets pay off. (I especially wish traveling wave reactors can work.)

Meanwhile, per disagree and then commit, get with the program. All this narcissism of small differences makes the concern trolls part of the problem. If nukes are your thing, knock yourself out. And praise all the complimentary efforts. Because we need all of it, as soon as possible.

Source: Saul Griffith

Problem with nuclear deals is that the technology solutions are so centralized they put control in the hands of big government and big corporations.

And take control out of the hands of individuals.

Which means people are no longer free to decide for themselves where their energy dollars will be spent.

Who can afford to put solar panels on their home, when they are footing the bill through taxes for huge projects typically ridden by massive cost overruns, failure to properly account for decommissioning costs, and ample opportunities for corruption?

Decentralized solutions like solar, which can be paired with fast-improving battery technology, are much more appealing, even if they perhaps necessarily need to be augmented with fraught solutions like nuclear.

Matt Yglesias makes a great point about differing views of environmentalism in his new book: https://www.aei.org/economics/the-case-for-one-billion-ameri....

> The reason I say “eco-pessimist” rather than “environmentalist” is that to me if you’re an environmentalist, it means you’re somebody who takes environmental problems seriously. You are aware of the literature on the problems of air pollution. You’re not saying the Chinese made up climate change. I’m 100 percent on board with that. I think we need to take that seriously. I think we need to invest money in green electricity and in the electrification of our vehicle fleet. But I think if you are smart about environmental problems, you recognize that to resolve climate change, you either need a cataclysmic fall in living standards — and that’s not going to happen — or you need new technologies and a new technological paradigm.

> Still, it is a fundamental difference in worldview. Some people are very driven by a pastoralist notion that we can conserve our way to solving the problem. A billion Americans is not about that. It is about a bigger, richer, more dynamic society.

I think nuclear is part of this difference in world view. Even if windmills and solar are part of the solution in the short term, that’s not going to be enough in the long term. You need keep increasing the amount of available energy. You’re not going to create a Star Trek society without investing in nuclear.

I have two main points against solar and wind @ large scale. Please destroy them.

First point. Solar relies on rare earth materials and are mostly being bought from China since they are cheaper. The estimate is that these solar panels last less than other panels. So imagine the land area needed to power the USA and China top polluters in the world and then imagine replacing all of that every n years. Plus we will run out way faster in rare earth material for solar than fission material for nuclear. For wind turbines maintenance costs increases as the structure ages. Imagine this at large scale.

Second point. Dams are way better than solar and wind. But they are dependent on the region, so is solar and panel. So picture the winter where the sun sets @ around 3pm-5pm and wakes up around 7am. Or cloudy days. And @ night! We're talking storage that can last weeks, months. I don't know if in 30 years grid level storage will reach a level that can satisfy these requirements.

so nuclear energy per density kills solar and wind, can produce 24/7 energy on the order of MW to GW and produces minimal waste with current technologies.

If the argument is that solar/wind energy will improve, then so will nuclear energy.

If we're going to do nuclear there are better arguments needed. This is not an honest evaluation

> nuclear waste isn’t a glowing toxic ooze

That's irrelevant, whether true or false waste has to be handled. So far it's not been done well, and language like that is appeal to emotion, not facts.

The comment of 300 times waste from solar panels than nuclear doesn't reflect the different waste types.

I'm not actually against nuclear intrinsically but pieces like this are not honest nor therefore, useless.

As long as Nuclear Power costs don't include the long term waste storage it's dishonest about the real costs (just like the oil industry).

Also - current nuclear power plants need cold water for cooling - france had to turn of plants due to heat [1].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwa...

Tax carbon at $200 per ton and magically the financing for nuclear will appear.

This excellent video delves into the economics of nuclear power plants and compares them with the alternatives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC_BCz0pzMw

Although nuclear energy is profitable of the LONG term, it is financially infeasible over the short-to-medium term.

I am very very pro-nuclear and I don't have any major disagreements with this article. However, any such article needs to also address accidents. I believe the most fervent anti-nukers fear accidents and while you'll never be able to fully placate them you can't allow them to accuse the pro-nuke movement of ignoring it.

Nuclear providing all of our base electrical generation needs, as well as co-generation applications like cooling & heating, is an obvious engineering slam dunk.

I think there are also some incredible synergies that can emerge with electric cars and batteries. Just a little bit of distributed storage (e.g. Tesla car in your garage back-feeding your home periodically) could potentially obviate the need for peak generation capacity altogether. What little we do need could simply be spinning reserve w/ nuclear generation providers where it's required the most.

In the areas where nuclear is not feasible, we obviously would continue to burn the most appropriate fuels. That said, one big area that could definitely use some attention would be international shipping. Perhaps as reactor costs come down, boats that are bigger than a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier could be justified in having nuclear power too.

Not too happy about a liquid-sodium fast breeder reactor as a good example.[1]

The General Atomics TRIGA is a good safe research reactor, and inherently stable, but not a power reactor.

China is plugging away with the Hualong One, which is a classic pressurized-water reactor similar to the Westinghouse AP-1000 and a French design. Nothing exotic. Output is around a gigawatt. Fuel loading on the first one started last month. Full power this year, if things go well. The second one is already under construction. More are planned.

China now gets 5% of its power from nuclear, up from half that five years ago.

[1] https://prod-ng.sandia.gov/techlib-noauth/access-control.cgi...

My Airbnb host is a full time nuclear engineer and even he doesn’t back the technology. “Too risky”

Does anybody know a company or institution that they trust to operate a reactor for decades with the right safety standard? Everywhere safety is being cut back if it reduces profits. We may have the technology for safe nuclear energy but we lack the right society.

This mistakenly assumes that the Green New Deal is about averting climate change. It’s not: https://news.yahoo.com/aoc-chief-staff-admits-green-12440835...

> The interesting thing about the Green New Deal, is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” Chakrabarti said to Inslee’s climate director, Sam Ricketts, according to a Washington Post reporter who attended the meeting for a profile published Wednesday.

> “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing,” he added.

Do Nuclear plants really create that many jobs though? Sure it's labor intensive during construction but it's highly specialized work and doesn't exactly create a lot of working class jobs. The key part of the green new deal is the "new deal" bit, not the "green" bit. The "Green" bit is just a good way of spending the money if you are doing a "new deal". If you don't get many jobs per dollar, it's a bad deal.

Urg. "We're not going to solve this problem, so let's argue about all the solutions we don't gave the time or money or interest to actually implement".

Nuclear power is the largest source of electricity in France, with a generation of 379.5 TWh, or 70.6% of the country's total electricity production of 537.7 TWh, the highest percentage in the world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France

“Two terawatts of photovoltaic would require installing 100 square meters of 15- percent- efficient solar cells every second, second after second, for the next 25 years. (That’s about 1,200 square miles of solar cells a year, times 25 equals 30,000 square miles of photovoltaic cells.) Two terawatts of solar thermal? If it’s 30 percent efficient all told, we’ll need 50 square meters of highly reflective mirrors every second. (Some 600 square miles a year, times 25.) Two terawatts of biofuels? Something like 4 Olympic swimming pools of genetically engineered algae, installed every second. (About 61,000 square miles a year, times 25.) Two terawatts of wind? That’s a 300- foot- diameter wind turbine every 5 minutes. (Install 105,000 turbines a year in good wind locations, times 25.) Two terawatts of geothermal? Build three 100- megawatt steam turbines every day— 1,095 a year, times 25. Three terawatts of new nuclear? That’s a 3- reactor, 3- gigawatt plant every week— 52 a year, times 25.” Add it up, and when you’re done, you’ve got an area about the size of America—“ Call it Renewistan,” says Griffith— covered with stuff dedicated to generating humanity’s energy.[1]

The green new deal is just political theater in order for the democratic party to get more money. You're deluding yourself if you think a political party is single handedly capable of solving climate change. As much as I want something like the green new deal to work, it probably won't even make a dent in the grand scheme of things unless they go full nuclear.

[1] Stewart brand whole earth discipline

Government subsidies of an industry are an important tool where private sector investment is not sufficient to reach positive feedback loops and move up the manufacturing efficiency curve; either at all, or just not fast enough naturally.

The efficiency of public investment is often measured as the ratio of private dollars you can entice someone to invest in return for the public subsidy.

So for example, offer someone a $5,000 tax credit to install $55,000 of solar panels is a 10:1 private investment factor. This has two very important results;

1) If you have a high private investment factor it means that the thing you are subsidizing has substantial positive economic value in the real world. Those private dollars means someone has skin in the game, and actually wants the product they are buying.

2) It means the net total effect of resources being allocated to the industry is much higher per dollar of public funds being invested.

The problem I have with the Green New Deal or similar ideas is they seem to be trying to achieve a specific industrial energy base irrespective of the economic value of that basis, or the current limits of technology.

First, because it’s being driven primarily by public dollars — literally printed money whose only cost is the debasement of all savings. Second, because the goal is not fundamentally economic, it means a significant sustained drag on the economy due to more expensive energy which is a multiplicative negative effect going into the future.

Energy needs to cost less and less going into the future while also being produce cleaner and cleaner. Cheap abundant energy is a necessity for not only a growing economy but even a matter of equitable treatment and human rights.

Over the next 20 years the technological progress in renewables and storage will naturally and fundamentally change our national energy supply. Similar to the mythical man month theory, we can’t spend 10x as much and get there 10x faster.

Smart and efficient public spending with high ratios of private dollar participation has been and will continue to be successful in motivating an economical shift to clean energy. I don’t think we want to or should be spending trillions of dollars here, because frankly most of it will be wasted.

The fundamental solution to cleaner energy is in making the clean energy solutions abundantly cheaper and more reliable. Anything else is akin to trying to stay warm by lighting money on fire.

Why not both? The Green New Deal doesn’t exclude nuclear power. I know some policy makers are hesitant about nuclear power, but from what I understand the authors of the Green New Deal framework (AOC and Markey) have said they are open to nuclear power.

Does anyone here know much about how they validate correct operation of hardware / firmware / software in the nuclear industry? I'm interested in this question but don't know where to start reading about it.

I’m tempted to go in on some long term GE stock options for this reason - stock is very cheap but they are the only major US nuclear manufacturing player.

No, we need a geothermal new deal. Nuclear is way too problematic, and MIT has estimated 240+ years worth of GT energy in the US alone.

Elon Musk probably has a couple of hours a night he could devote to getting large-scale private nuclear off the ground.

Article praising nuclear power, referencing pro-nuclear think tanks and not referecing Fukushima even once. Yeah, nah.

I have one question for all the articles that write, rightly so, about how efficient nuclear is. Can you guarantee that another Dyatlov won’t be put in charge of the plant and potentially cause massive devastation?

This article fails to present a fair view and it's too shallow to be taken seriously.

I have had the opportunity to be involved with a big player in the mid-C power market and it quickly showed me that the real challenges are different than what Reddit armchair experts identify.

tl;dr: just head over to [MIT's EN-Road Climate Simulator](https://www.climateinteractive.org/tools/en-roads/), move the Nuclear dial to maximum adoption, and see what changes. You have gone from 4.1 degrees of temperature change to 3.9C. The 0.2C that is almost negligible compared to other solutions like reducing methane emissions.

The US's Green New Deal is a comprehensive document not only about climate protection but also about social injustice. The US does need something like this Deal and making a case for a "Nuclear New Deal" does not address the same issues. The internet appears to think of nuclear energy as this misunderstood miracle that the interest groups and politicians have killed.

I do think nuclear has an important role in lowering electrification costs when the carbon pricing goes up and we do need to start looking at SMRs and nuclear fusion much more seriously; below I will try to balance some of the article's points.

Before I start, I'd like to highlight that to my understanding, the biggest sustainable energy challenges come from the demand side not the supply.

> when wildfires broke out the following month, a blanket of ash blotted out the sun in some places, cutting the state’s solar energy output by one-third.

Under the wildfire circumstances many of the energy generation plants, including nuclear, may need to adjust. Solar is 20% of california's generation, so the roughly 7% cut is significant but [was not the culprit as someone pointed out](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/08/why-renew...).

Solar has an important advantage over nuclear in a disaster: it is decentralized. Independent communities can rely on their own solar power while they connect to the bigger grid as well. This creates resilience in case one of them is cut.

> Energy in California is incredibly expensive for ratepayers

Some reasons for this are environmental restrictions that stops California from buying relatively cheaper hydro power, inefficiencies in PG&E, and just generally not enough ratepayer anger.

> Reactors from civilian plants don’t blow up like atomic bombs and nuclear waste isn’t a glowing toxic ooze.

The reactors work under extreme safety considerations. Prior to Chernobyl the scientists [did not hold the concern](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3d3rzFTrLg) that a reactor is capable of making such disaster. The problem is that like most engineering we need to see what happens to fix it, and the sensitivity around nuclear increases the cost of that. The waste does glow, just not in the visible spectrum.

> elements such as uranium and plutonium have such long half-lives, the radiation they emit is low enough to safely hold in your hand.

You probably do not want to do that for a prolonged period. Also, the big issue is not only with the direct radiation but with the particles getting into the body.

The article mentioned half-lives, it is long enough that [we can't quite comprehend what to do about it](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/). That is true even for Thorium, though relatively much better.

The idea behind our green movement is not leaving a problem for the next generations. The nuclear energy at the advancement level of today does not guarantee that.

Green New Deal isn’t an energy or environmental program. It is a greenwashed policy proposal that includes essentially the entire far left’s agenda - it uses the word “justice” affixed to many different causes and the cause of environmental protection (rebranded as “environmental justice”) and a dose of mental gymnastics to drag in many unrelated policy proposals that are part of either the social justice or socialist agenda.

If we want to expedite environmental protection, what we need is an unbundling of individual policy proposals from GND, which will speed up adoption of the pieces that matter (like supporting nuclear energy) without all the controversial social justice or socialist cruft riding on it.

Nuclear power is, by far, safer than fossil fuel power. The problem is that it has a branding deficit.

The BP logo is a green-yellow sun; it's happy, because it's capitalism-- shiny and happy on the surface, and please don't read the fine print-- whereas most nuclear projects require government involvement, and government doesn't invest money into advertising or branding, preferring quiet competence (when you hear a lot about your government, that's usually because someone screwed up). So, people have a relative over-focus on the problems with nuclear power (which are serious, and need to be addressed) compared to other sources of energy.

The Green New Deal is at worst nuclear-neutral in favor of stressing wind and solar.

Biden's climate plan, which has a bunch of the same stakeholders and says the GND is a great idea, is on top of that more explicitly and vocally in favor of reactor development and a focus on efficiency improvements and waste processing and reclamation.

Hell, even greenpeace has been pro-reactor for a while now.

I don't see a short-to-medium solution that is the combination of better, cheaper, or safer per watt than nuclear power. (I have no problems with solar and wind, either)

Liquid Salt and Thorium are the best wins we have today until we figure out fusion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-yALPEpV4w

Simple facts.

...why not both? Obviously we would still need a green new deal even with massive nuclear investment.

In light if how the U.S. is handling the pandemic, your concern is extremely valid.

The green lobby would rather have a new coal plant (with no pollution control at all) than a nuclear power plant.

In the end all of us will move to nuclear. Maybe this a necessary dance we have to do to make everyone open to nuclear. I just the hope the whole cycle is accelerated by todays connected world.