We should just have doubled down on it 50 years ago.
So much geopolitical trouble would have been avoided if bad actors in the middle east and Russia wasn't flushed with cash.
Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that nuclear power suffers from a lot of issues that have never properly been solved. And despite claims to the contrary, it is certainly not completely safe. The fact that dozens of Russian soldiers in Ukraine recently suffered radiation poisoning after digging trenches in the Chernobyl exclusion zone just highlights how long-lasting the environmental impact of nuclear accidents is. Admittedly, they should have known better, but how many exclusion zones like that can we afford to have globally from future nuclear accidents that are virtually guaranteed to happen eventually?
Because the anti-nuclear lobby is more powerful? Also the oil/gas lobby has had people in pretty damn high positions affecting these things. Belgium had an ex-Gazprom consultant as their minister of energy. Who - to no-one's surprise - wanted to shut down nuclear plants and move to Russian gas while they build up renewables.
Also the incident in Chernobyl was 99% a political problem, not a technical one. No-one dared to tell their superiors "no" or "I fucked up" or "I have a problem". This compared with the lack of notification caused most of the eventual deaths. Just telling everyone to take iodine for a few weeks and not eat any of the currently growing plants would've cut down the amount of cancers in the area by at least half.
Poor communication and politics is a bigger challenge than engineering or technology. And if you actually want to build something then you have to work within the constraints of society. Sometimes you have to pick C# or Java even though you know that Lisp is the best. Getting something built is more important than technical idealism.
The Chernobyl design was dangerous enough it would have been illegal to build in any other country.
I wonder what history will say about our environmental priorities. Will we be pilloried for doing more to harm the environment in a misguided attempt to save it?
Our economy is better at financing smaller things, and iteratively optimize them.
Which is probably why wind and solar are beating nuclear by now, the cost of building one unit is much lower. We get the economies of scale from building thousands of units.
Nuclear is too expensive for capitalism to work it's wonders.
The arguments of Germany not being so dependent on Russia if they would have left their nuclear power plants running longer has been debunked several times. I believe this is largely nuclear power lobbyist taken advantage of the current situation. The EU is even more dependent on Uranium from Russia than gas. 20% of the natural Uranium and 26% of the enriched Uranium used in the EU comes from Russia and Kazastan [1]
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/ukraine-krieg-eu-...
The amount of uranium needed for power plants is fairly small, it can be transported from wherever and there's plenty available from Canada, Australia and South Africa for example. There are potential mines in continental Europe too, it is a matter of cost and politics to choose where to source it from.
To steel man your argument though in the context of funding Russia’s genocide in Ukraine when comparing Germany’s use of gas vs if it kept its nuclear plants operating we should look at the Euro per joule cost of the gas bought from Russia vs the Euro per joule cost of enriched U bought from Russia. I suspect we are talking orders of magnitude difference. But that information is conveniently not being provided in this article.
Neither is discussed the ability to easily stockpile a couple of years of fuel supply as many plants have done, which right now would enable you to continue operating while spinning up supplies from elsewhere.
Another note regarding the claim in the article: “For the operators of so-called WWER reactors, Russia is therefore even the only supplier of custom-made hexagonal fuel rods.”
Westinghouse can make these fuel assemblies, they started on this for Ukraine. Framatome I believe has also offered to do this. There’s nothing secret about Rosatom fuel assemblies.
And just 20.000 years to celebrate that the area will be as safe as it was before 1970.
180 years at least if we feel optimistic.