thing is, nuclear is not punk. It requires large-nation-scale financing.
A community cannot build a nuclear power station.
https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Build-Use-A-Dye-Sensiti...
Same with batteries, but just not in a way to compete with the large scale industrial processes. A wind turbine is far easier here.
Still, with improvement of tools, I can see a future, where even small communities have the capacity to practically make their own solar panels and their own batteries. But also buying it from the next industrial center makes sense to me (not at odds with the solarpunk idea to me).
I also do see small nuclear reactors a possibilitiy for those small communities, but I really don't see humanity advanced enough, to handle so much distributed radioactive material, without having dirty bombs or improvised nuclear bombs going off regulary.
If you have access to a supply chain that digs up the materials you need from the ground and manufactures fancy glass panes and circuitry and such for you, then sure. You can assemble a solar panel at home
It's much easier to be sustainable in a small well built rectangular passive house than in the average texan mcmansion atrocity (bad insulation, insanely inefficient shapes, &c.) for example
Solar with battery storage is the cheapest, quickest, and most effective source of power currently on the market, and it can reduce our emissions when time is of the essence.
That's not to say solarpunk would advocate to shut down existing nuclear plants or stop construction of ones already underway, but most in the movement have decided solar and wind as the most expedient and decentralized way of achieving energy independence and emissions reduction.
It's just France.
There is a thing called 'Atom Punk'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_derivatives#Atompunk
But it has a different emphasis.
Seems like it. The only picture there has "Atomic war!" as the caption.
"Putin has continued to invoke Nuclear Orthodoxy on various occasions, such as a 2018 claim that Russians would "go to heaven as martyrs" and foreigners would "simply drop dead.""
Thank you very much for this new utopic information.
It is extremely expensive, boasts a 30% thermal efficiency and uses more raw materials than wind and in line with solar when factoring in the uranium supply chain.
Yes, if we ignore everything but the uranium in the fuel road we can call it efficient. But that would be like measuring solar efficiency based on the weight of the photons.
Open borders seem pretty pro-liberty as well. What’s more authoritarian than a government telling you there’s a magic invisible line on the ground and if you cross it, that’s crime?
Sorry, bud, it's just monkey stuff.
What is not natural is nations.
The big difference between China and the west seems to be that in the west, we need to pay a tax to our wealthy by their ownership stake in major companies and private capital that keep enshittifying everything.
[1] https://www.aiib.org/en/news-events/media-center/blog/2024/H...
Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything" probably makes this case most clearly, arguing nuclear uses finite resources, creates waste and is damaging to mine.
I'm not arguing for this case here, but that view is very popular in environmentalist circles and probably explains why nuclear is absent from solarpunk literature.
Nuclear is low carbon, but it's far from an environmental panacea and it's about as far from decentralized production (punk) as you can get.