It usually goes like this:
Chernobyl! Fukushima! Radiation! Waste! Death! Death!! DEATH TO ALL HUMANITY!!!
Chernobyl! Fukushima! Radiation! Waste! Death! Death!! DEATH TO ALL HUMANITY!!!
And they're right about it not being the cheapest option, so what can you say? They win the argument.
Next time you meet the person is at a protest where they don't want a solar farm where there is now a nice forest or pasture, no 24/7 moving shadows from huge wind turbine blades and that's after they pushed for a law to require more space between the edge of town and the nearest turbine, protesting for fish rights when hydro is being proposed (if that's possible in their area in the first place)...
People also love to gloss over that electricity is 10% of the problem. Whenever you see a headline about Germany having run on 90% renewable power last month or whatever, mentally replace that with 9% because energy used in transportation, building heating, etc. don't count towards this. And then we haven't even touched upon the problem of cement/steel/plastic yet, we're going to need breakthrough materials or negative emissions with capturing plants that, you guessed it, also require electricity.
It's apparently very hard to understand that we need to work on all fronts, not pick a partial solution and wait until that's exhaustively implemented (all reasonably available space occupied) 15 years down the road, then wonder why emissions are at record highs (see 2021).
Getting consistent funding for new projects is hard when every other project in history has over run both costs and time widely.
But yeah if we argue for another five years before getting started on at least the legislation/planning stages (after which we could still declare it a sunk cost, based on how the situation looks in 2027), we might as well forget about it.
Firstly, the plant above has costed more than 3x projected time or money, so doubling is not going to solve anything.
Secondly, forget civic planning, could you or I go to our companies and say just double by budget because we don't know how to plan well ? What is the guarantee our plan is at least 50% accurate ? i.e. only 2x is enough ?
Poor planning cannot be solved by increasing budget (time or money), even in non public projects, work has tendency to get expanded to meet the budget, basically if Norway had thought 2x the $3B and actually budgeted $6B, they would likely have spent $20B in the end.
All this is only for operational life of the plant, it does not even include long term costs of waste storage because no one can even model that well enough or budget for it today.
I am not saying we shouldn't do nuclear, we really should, but truly commercial plans are meaningless unless we can handle costs better, We should invest more on that, there is encouraging work in SMRs(Small Modular Reactors) that could potentially address these concerns, until then most plants are experimental high risk projects from a public plan perspective.
Agriculture and industry are tough nuts to crack. With electricity, transport and heating, it's a problem of scaling out. With agriculture and industry - we don't even have a blueprint yet
If Russia didn't have nukes, its imperialistic ambitious would be curtailed. The ability to shield conventional assaults behind a nuclear threat is destabilizing for the rules-based world order.
In my particular country, a major chunk of the public budget goes towards paying fines to EU for use of coal, all while our government periodically passes bills allowing it to borrow more money from the central bank, increasing inflation. Negotiations with neighbouring autocratic countries can be pretty tough, when they can threaten us and rest of Europe, which is going to put pressure, with stopping energy transmission. Energy shortages in some parts of the country were a regular occurrence for decades, even before the current political problems.
Lack of nuclear plants does nothing to prevent a nuclear war, while it harms us on many very tangible levels.
I agree that dependence on geopolitically and environmentally problematic fossil fuel sources is a pressing concern.
But yet [your country] is not lost?
(People get upset at the implication that one country would take over another country, but the people of North Korea would probably not be worse off if that happened. Instead they suffer greatly because nobody can help them.)
Their first nuclear test was in 2006. Even their production of refined uranium and plutonium only began in the 80s, decades after the war came to a standstill.
If anyone is upset that the people of the German "Democratic" Republic got to join the rest of "We, the people" in a free Federal Republic, they're cordially invited to go fuck themselves.
The same would go ten times over for anyone feeling that way about the much more oppressed North Koreans.
I'd sure like it if less inherently dangerous technologies were further along. But every year they are gaining.
Takes decades to build, will be too late for climate change.
Uranium is also a finite resource