I love Kraftwerk, but contributing to anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany hasn't been a major success. If only more European countries had followed the French example and developed substantial nuclear fleets.
Modern grids do not require high-risk investments in ultra-inert baseload power that ultimately fails to find a market; instead, they require low-risk investments in highly flexible power sources, such as batteries or pumped-storage facilities and transmission upgrades, that can capture surplus electricity at low cost (sometimes negativ) and sell it hours later at favorable prices.
The 2036 electricity futures price for Germany is €70/MWh. The break-even point for France’s EDF for old nuclear power plants that had long since been written off financially was at roughly the same level in 2020. Due to rising labor costs, their break-even point is now significantly higher. There were solid economic reasons why EDF was recently nationalized 100%. New nuclear power plant construction in France is a foreseeable economic disaster. Private investors would have fled long ago.
It was political lunacy, in Sweden and Germany and many other countries.
The safety issues .. I think the combination of low probability (unknown) and potentially huge cost (Chernobyl affected almost the entirety of Europe!) make it exceptionally prone to toxic discourse. You just can't assign reliable numbers to it. There's a risk of ending up with a Space Shuttle situation, where because a disaster would be so bad everyone in the chain downplays the risk until an O-ring explodes.
Maybe we can try SMRs once they're actually in production, but somewhere else can try them first on their own expense.
Miljöpartiet in particular is anti-science and has among the worst environment policies of all major Swedish parties. For example they're working hard to ban spreading sludge from wastewater treatment plants on fields. Apparently phosphors are single-use.
And of course there this gem: https://omni.se/mp-politikern-slosar-resurser-pa-rent-hittep...
Because they require an upfront investment that many households cannot make.
Also, whether such investments make economical sense for companies hugely depends on interest rate, and that fluctuates.
Because of that, a country with a long term goal to decrease dependency on non-renewables may want to subsidize such investments.
Meanwhile Chinas 2060 plan for a carbon zero grid with 25% nuclear and 100% over provisioning is right on track.
From https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/World-Nuclear-Industry-St...
> According to the China Nuclear Energy Association, despite higher output, nuclear’s share of China’s total electricity production slightly slipped from 4.9 percent in 2023 to 4.7 percent in 2024, (Energy Institute data indicate a 3.7-percent increase in net production and a drop from 4.7 percent to 4.5 percent of the nuclear share).40 The remarkable share decline occurred because China’s electricity consumption grew by 6.8 percent or 627 TWh—significantly larger than Germany’s total annual demand—to a total of over 9,850 TWh, and the country added a combined 357 GW of solar and wind capacity (278 GW and 79 GW, respectively) in the same year compared to just 3.5 GW of new nuclear.41
And from https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/World-Nuclear-Industry-St...
> Targets vs. Reality
> China has dominated global nuclear power development over the past quarter-century, though its ambitious latest Five-Year Plan targets have proven challenging to meet. The 10th Five-Year Plan (2001–2005) put forward a policy of “moderate development of nuclear power,” targeting around 8.6 GW gross operating capacity by 2005,61 with 7.1 GW gross achieved in reality. (All Five-Year Plan capacity numbers quoted hereunder are gross gigawatts). During this period, China connected six new units to the grid—including two French 900-MW reactors at Ling Ao and two Canadian 668-MW CANDU 6 reactors at Qinshan—and completed the development of the CPR-1000, China’s indigenized version of the French M310 900-MW design that would become the workhorse of its early nuclear fleet. The 11th Five-Year Plan (2006–2010) called on China to pursue “an active development of nuclear power” with a target of 10 GW gross operating by 2010.62 With 10.9 GW gross operating at the end of 2010, that target was slightly over-achieved. This period saw the construction starts for Westinghouse’s two AP-1000s at Sanmen in 2009 and AREVA’s EPRs at Taishan in 2009–2010, China’s first Gen III projects. Construction commenced on 29 units, most of which were CPR-1000 reactors. Fukushima’s March 2011 disaster fundamentally reshaped China’s nuclear trajectory during the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011–2015). The government imposed a moratorium on new approvals to conduct comprehensive safety reviews. Existing plants and Gen II reactors under construction had to undergo major upgrades including enhanced flood barriers, backup power system overhauls, and seismic reinforcements.63 When approvals resumed, China adopted a strict “Gen III-only” policy requiring passive safety features and core-catchers. Operational capacity reached just 28.7 GW by 2015 versus a target of 40 GW.64 Nevertheless, the period closed with construction beginning on Fuqing-5 and -6 as well as Fangchenggang-3, China’s first Hualong One reactors, representing its indigenous Gen III technology. The 13th Five-Year Plan (2016–2020) aimed for 58 GW operational capacity plus 30 GW under construction while establishing the Hualong One as an exportable technology and advancing systems like the high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTR-PM) and fast reactors.65 However, domestic capacity reached only 51 GW by 2020 and 17.5 GW under construction constrained by the ongoing inland reactor ban— a controversy unheard of in other nuclear countries limiting nuclear power plant development to the seashore—and extended construction timelines for Generation III units. In August 2019, the U.S. added CGN to its Entity List,66 citing national security concerns regarding alleged attempts to acquire U.S. technology for military purposes.67 This restricted CGN’s access to certain technologies and affected its international partnerships, including involvement in nuclear projects in the United Kingdom. Later, CNNC was also added to the Entity List.68 The sanctions reinforced China’s focus on self-reliance, accelerating the transition from foreign technologies to the domestically developed Hualong One design. With an operating capacity of around 61 GW as of mid-2025, the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021–2025)69 target of 70 GW operational capacity is out of reach. According to plans, 4.5 GW are scheduled to come online in 2025, but no new reactor started up in the first half of the year. COVID-19 pandemic disruptions to global supply chains, combined with delays caused by mandatory safety upgrades, have created persistent bottlenecks. First-of-a-kind Hualong One projects saw numerous delays (see Figure 23). Meanwhile, plans for innovative projects like offshore floating nuclear power platforms appear to have stalled, with 2023 reports suggesting the program may have been suspended over safety and feasibility concerns.70
It turns out the same has been happening with nuclear, only in reverse: the agencies doing the projections have consistently, year after year, overestimated nuclear growth.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462962...
(in particular figure 3.)
I think that's a pretty good support for the notion that nuclear is past its prime.
This is the resilience something civilisation depends upon should have. Not the duct tape and chewing gum that the Us and EU networks are made of.
Certainly a lot of the young wealthy people I know in Europe have AC, even outside of the really hot places.
Most European homes don't have the kind of window that you could stick an AC in, the windows hinge rather than sliding up and down. You can get one of those floor units with a hose for probably ~€300 though.
https://56paris.com/en/cooling-paris-from-below-the-city-s-u...
The cooler parts of the US (e.g. the PNW) are also gradually increasing AC adoption as things heat up, but 20 years ago it was pretty much unheard of.
It's not because of hippies or Chernobyl that nuclear reactors never got built. A gas turbine is cheap and simple.
The materials science of turbine blades is awesome. Most materials can't be used above about 1/2 their absolute melting temperature as they become subject to creep. But turbine blades are made with nickel and aluminum (and a carefully optimized mix of alloying elements) that just happen to form phases that become less subject to creep as they are heated (until much closer to the melting point).
The reason (as I understand it) for this is that the intermetallic phase of NiAl prevents migration of single linear dislocations; pairs of linear dislocations are needed to migrate together. But at elevated temperature these pairs dissociate from each other and migration is inhibited.
Both have a reducing share of nuclear in their electricity mix as they're not building enough to keep up with their demand growth.
Luckily both are deploying wind and solar at a rate that outpaces their demand growth.
They are both building rapidly and share was not in the OP's claim.
China has signed up to the international tripling pledge and now has the capacity to build 50 plants a year.
India is building rapidly and is planning on tripling nuclear capacity by 2032.
https://ddnews.gov.in/en/india-to-triple-nuclear-power-capac...
Not sure if India is going to triple its electricity demand by 2032. Seems rather doubtful, but if you have evidence for that tripling of electricity demand
But even if what you claim about falling share were true (it's not), a sinking share is not a contradiction to increasing absolute capacity, which was the claim.
Even the German government has admitted it was a mistake.[1]
Solar generates an abundance of electricity in the summer, but the winter production ranges from tiny to nothing.
The anti nuclear crowd loves looking at buildout graphs and saying we can replace all energy production with solar in x years, assuming energy usage remains the same.
It does not remain the same.
[1]https://www.foronuclear.org/en/updates/news/germanys-chancel...
https://www.rechargenews.com/policy/merz-says-wind-power-is-...
> By then, Germany should "bring the world's first fusion reactor online." Its electricity would be so cheap "that no other generation methods will be needed,” Merz was quoted as saying.
That turns out not to be the case. Everywhere nuclear was killed off it was killed off purely by political forces.
> there’s no turning back
That also turns out not to be the case:
1. Sweden enacted a nuclear phase-out, turned back
2. Japan shut off all its nuclear plants, turned back
3. Belgium enacted a nuclear phase out, turned back
4. Taiwan enacted a nuclear phase out, is turning back
5. Italy enacted a nuclear phase out, is turning back
In fact, the number of countries that have turned back from a nuclear phase-out to re-embracing nuclear power is larger than the number of countries that are sticking to nuclear phase-outs. Never mind the countries that never embraced that particular madness ("World's Dumbest Energy Policy") in the first place or that are just now turning to nuclear power.
Countries representing 70% of the world's GDP have agreed to triple nuclear generating capacity, and that doesn't include India, which has its own plans to triple much sooner.
> [electricity prices in] negative territory
That's not a good thing. It means the electricity is worth less than nothing, essentially garbage, not that it doesn't cost anything to produce. In fact, it costs a lot of money to first produce this useless electricity and then more money to dispose of it. A lose-lose.
One of the reasons Germany, for example, has among the highest electricity prices in the world. And this correlation of high intermittent renewable penetration and high electricity prices holds worldwide.
> The break-even point for France’s EDF for old nuclear power plants that had long since been written off financially was at roughly the same level [€700 in 2020.
Also not true. Even the ARENH price was €40/MWh in 2020. And that still left margin. German plants were delivering electric at around €20-€30 / MWh.
> There were solid economic reasons why EDF was recently nationalized 100%
EDF was not recently nationalized. It was always a state company, with 100% state ownership for most of its existence. For a brief time, around 15% were held by private entities. These were bought out to simplify control for the upcoming nuclear investment program. At the same time, investments in intermittent renewables have been scaled back.
I'm pro-nuclear as well, but understand that for many decades the "smart" thing to do was to oppose it. I wouldn't expect a musical artist to have a more nuanced opinion than most of their contemporaries.
Having enemies the population is afraid of is good for politicians and they'll take any enemies they can find, and they'll do so indiscriminately regardless of the real nuance of the issues.
Immigrants, abortion, this religion or that, rock music, jazz music, alcohol, marijuana, global warming, windmills, books... just whatever as hard as they can regardless of if it's reasonable or not.
There was a pretty good reason to be scared of nukes when these folks were children in the 50s. The world was quite a different place back then. The US was lagging behind the Soviets, militarily speaking, and Communism was much more expansionary.
Just a small correction, but the anti-vax arguments are very conservative, not liberal.
I wish this was true. How many right wing political parties support policies that improve the natural environment? Doing that is the domain of left wing parties, but I’d love to know of any exceptions.
The US EPA was created by Richard Nixon, for example.
Hang on, are we talking about liberal or leftist now?
Because a lot of these hoax "wellness" movements are conservative. Distrusting science and things you don't understand is a conservative mindset.
Do you have examples? People like the Luddites weren't distrusting of technology, they were distrusting of the owners using it to depress wages.
They may be self described liberal, but their actions certainly aren't.
Anti-Vax people are/were seen the leftist idiots who were anti-capitalist, anti-corpo, anti-the fascist govt, who would rather have died of preventable diseases than perpetuate the medical industry and its capitalist schemes trying to keep us sick to sell drugs and also ban weed.
It's so funny to watch the political sides swap and the doublethink take all of a few days to propogate.
Since antivax is now popular on the right, it has grown into a much larger proportion of the populace. It doesn't help that they now have positions in government.
As a kid I was an anarcho-communist punk rocker but I had a friend who was a christian and his parents were scammy, MLM, right-wing conservative types(think Rush Limbaugh but loonier) who distrusted the government and lied on their taxes. It was obvious how the wings of the political spectrum almost touch at times.
Paranoia and distrust of institutions, mystical thinking, adherence to alternative truth structures.. these are apolitical just as mental illness is also apolitical.
Yes, but I think if you asked which country was more likely to "push the button" in the 50s-70s it would have been the US, and the extent to which the US continued invasions after the collapse of the USSR kind of vindicates that.
> The US was lagging behind the Soviets, militarily speaking
I don't think this was ever true except in the least useful measure, raw headcount of conscripts.
In 2026 this is decidedly a more conservative stance. They installed RFK Jr., who in addition to Wakefield, is the antivax guy. MAHA specifically (can’t believe they actually stuck with that acronym) is overwhelmingly Republican dominated/supported.
The big problem is having one country be able to do it without deterrents and with impunity. MAD is a good thing, if anyone will have those things at all.
The main natural predator of Americans is other Americans.
It'd be nice to put jingoism aside for a change.
Anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany was entirely manufactured; it was the product of Gerhard Schröder and similar robots who enriched themselves on Russian oil and gas.
Ironically, it is also where the so-called Green Party began.
The debate has always been about what to do with the waste. Our government misrepresented the "Asse" as a solved solution for a final repository, even though it was always only a test repository for low and intermediate-level radioactive waste. But hubris or corruption led to one scandal after another, forever tainting the discussion about nuclear waste in Germany.
Everything that follows is just a reaction.
My counterclaim to your unsubstantiated take: Pro-nuclear sentiment is what has been manufactured. Anti-nuclear is grassroots.
I'm still against nuclear in Germany. I'm fine with Finland doing it.
It's not a 'bad' thing and doesn't say alot about the core movements - it just is what it is.
Nuclear IS a green energy solution.
Just like that Red Army Faction group whose name in hindsight was much closer to the truth than anyone really assumed at the time. At least at some point it clearly was a KGB operation (visits to a certain Dresden office are documented, and yes, guess who was also stationed in Dresden at the time), likely not from the start but quickly co-opted. KGB, as in the service that was built on the experience of how Germany solved their eastern front in WWI through organizing passage from Zurich for a certain dissident.
Yes, those movements were genuine. But they were also directed to some extent. The fictional Tischbier character in Deutschland 83 comes somewhat close to illustrating that ambiguity.
Where is the peace movement and so-called environmentalism rooted?
Pro-nuclear is pro-environment.
The alternatives are fossil fuels and renewables, which are both extremely anti-environment: water power require large artificial reservoirs and create flood risks, wind power kills/drives away wildlife and is almost useless without efficient large—scale energy storage and other methods of power generation, while solar also requires storage and other power generation but also requires mining of rare earth metals.
Of course we could just stop all of our industries to save power. No more production, no more consumption, no more pollution.
Show us some evidence based and peer reviewed studies for your claims. Repeating the same old and scientifically unproved claims doesn’t help.
That's not even true, it was Merkel's administration. Under Schröder, the plan for the phase-out was formulated and set in motion, only to be stopped and then restarted by Merkel.
The modern anti-nuclear movement in Germany got started in the 1970's by the TMI accident and a book named "Der Atom-Staat". Chornobyl of course put the nails into the coffin.
Nope, that is actually not true.
> Under Schröder, the plan for the phase-out was formulated and set in motion,
It wasn't just "formulated" it was passed into law in 2002 by the red-green coalition led by Schröder.
It was never stopped/rescinded.
https://www.bundestag.de/webarchiv/textarchiv/2012/38640342_...
> only to be stopped and then restarted by Merkel.
That is also not the case. Merkel never actually stopped the phase-out, her administration just extended the running times. The phase-out always remained in place, and for example to prohibition against building new nuclear plants was never touched.
So no.
It had nothing to do with for example chernobyl, where children were not allowed to be outside on the playground for weeks and where you had to pay attention where your food came from and it also has nothing to do that you still have to have the meat of wild boars checked and be careful with eating mushrooms. Totally unrelated.
Seriously, the anti nuclear crowd might have not been rational from the start and still is dogmatic, but it formed exactly, because people did not trust the manufactured state's sentiment of nuclear will provide cheap and clean energy without risk.
Because it is not a clean energy, it is incredibly dirty and dangerous. And those dangers can be handled, if companies and regulators act responsible. But people simply do not trust that they are. And they do have some data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accid...
As further proof of how well that works, Fukushima arrived in 2011: https://www.scribd.com/document/819988755/Examining-Regulato...
Combine that with political decision to put waste into Asse II. Not because it was a good place, just screw with East Germany.
Big demonstration like Brokdorf where around 81. Schroeder begun being a Ministerpräsident in 1990, and 1998 Bundeskanzler.
And naturally the radio waste is fine as long as we store it into other countries.
That’s a catastrophic failure rate under 0.5 percent. Sure, the effects of a failure spread widely and can be a hazard for a long time, but personally I would want to see the same risk-averse sentiment applied to production and use of perfluorinated compounds and fossil fuels, since both of those can spread much farther and cause more of a hazard.
The cherry on top: coal power plants spread significant amounts of radionuclides into the environment.
Check out some videos by Chornobyl Family and you’ll see the state of the environment there.
If we’re talking risk aversion, we can address both the major certain risk of climate change and the lesser but still valid risks of nuclear while saving a ton of money and probably getting results quickly. The reason so much fossil fuel money goes into pushing nuclear power is that it guarantees fossil fuel usage continues unchecked for decades before possibly going down, and we don’t have decades any more.
Batteries are one solution, but the power storage requirements far surpass the world’s capacity for battery production, and come with the same caveats: rare earth metals, which need mining. Mining is a huge source of air pollution, as mining equipment is usually diesel powered, and far worse for the environment due to pollution of natural surface and ground water reservoirs.
Uranium mines have the same issues for sure, the scale is just very different.
Many forget that while there is plenty of uranium on Earth, most of it occurs in very low concentrations. The lower the concentration, the higher the CO₂ emissions for the entire uranium chain from the mine to the fuel rod.
Meanwhile, renewable energies receive free fuel from the sun. They are already recyclable today and, with intelligent local and intercontinental grids, will also require fewer batteries for storage.
Have a look at CATL’s sodium-ion batteries, they do not use anything expensive, rare, or particularly damaging to extract from the environment.
Second, power is so cheap with renewables that storage of over-production makes sense. Some of that can be things like pumped water systems but batteries are coming online by the hundreds of gigawatt-hour now and sodium isn’t exactly a rare earth mineral so that’s going to accelerate even more following market forces:
https://electrek.co/2025/09/25/us-first-grid-scale-sodium-io...
https://newmobility.news/en/2026/04/29/catl-turns-sodium-ion...
Again, this is so much cheaper that it makes nuclear even less competitive and it’s online so much faster that you’re basically weighing the gamble that storage which is already competitive won’t get substantially cheaper over multiple decades.
Heavily disagree. A ”green” power contract typically has at least double the price of a generic one.
I grew up in the 90s and didn't even fully understand what it was, but I remember the fear around it. I remember people in Ireland worrying about Sellafield nuclear power plant in the UK and talking about things like wind direction if there was an incident. And the government posting out iodine tablets to homes.
My girlfriends first older brother was one of those babies, the second one survived but is disfigured and needs serious care to live. I had three such kids in my first class at school, four different ones in my second and a sizeable number of parents whose kids didn't survive childbirth. Not being allowed to eat certain mushrooms or digging in the woods was the easier part.
So this may be a bit more tangible for some people than for others.
Ok, maybe not that very last part.
The paranoia around nuclear power is tied to generational fear mongering of governments during the Cold War. The oddest part is why not use safer reactor designs; water reactors make sense for the US Navy and not on land.
And Chernobyl. And Fukushima. Nuclear is great but it has some very real risks
And yet people worry about it and the OP claims it led to the situation in Germany.
Maybe addressing the issue needs to occur, rather than dismissing it?
The estimated cost of making the UK's current stock of waste safe is currently £136bn, for a value of "safe" that leaves at least one of the high level waste pools being at an "intolerable" level of risk of leaking into groundwater until the late 2050s.
For comparison, the estimated cost of achieving net zero in the UK by 2050 is £110bn.
When the Senate ratified some non-proliferation treaties, that also ended reprocessing spent fuel in the US which gets blamed on Carter.
Notes:
0 - https://www.amazon.com/Curve-Binding-Energy-Alarming-Theodor...
1 - The DOE owns all of the US nuclear weapons and leases them to the DOD.
> requiring custodianship on a timescale that humans can barely conceive of let alone commit to or execute responsibly.
This is fearmongering. Casing waste in big concrete casks is enough. It's so incredibly overblown that we're willing to burn coal and kill people over it.
Will it actually get encased successfully, will it be stored onsite in environmentally sensitive areas because it’s too much trouble to move, will your children’s children uphold the commitments you foisted on them through the political and economic turbulence in their lifetimes, and if not what happens comparatively when those coal ash heaps and nuclear fuel dumps are left to rot…
The externalities of concentrated radioactive material are not something that our socio-economic institutions are capable of handling at scale. Tragedies of the commons are the rule and eventually all of that waste will be go through periods of mishandling at one time or another.
Nuclear power plants have been extremely safe for many decades! Fuck, even the worst disasters related to nuclear power plants have killed less people than coal or oil disasters, even including Chernobyl which was a fuck up beyond comparison.
> Will it actually get encased successfully
Yes, this is literally done and has been done for many decades.
> will it be stored onsite in environmentally sensitive areas because it’s too much trouble to move
What does that mean? You can live 1 feet away from a cask and receive less radiation than you do from the sun.
> will your children’s children uphold the commitments you foisted on them through the political and economic turbulence in their lifetimes, and if not what happens comparatively when those coal ash heaps and nuclear fuel dumps are left to rot…
This is a bad argument because all of society relies on our grandchildren upholding present commitments. What happens if our grandchildren stop upholding the electricity grid? They die. What happens if they stop large scale agriculture? They die. And on and on and on.
> The externalities of concentrated radioactive material are not something that our socio-economic institutions are capable of handling at scale.
It's quite literally something society has been doing very successfully for 50+ years.
Rectang explained it very well, and all their points stand imo.
1 death attributed to Fukushima.
0 deaths attributed to Three Mile Island.
Meanwhile, deaths in the fossil fuel industry total hundreds to thousands every year.
Now before you say "but wait, I've seen estimates of thousands of deaths linked to Chernobyl" - then we must also include all the deaths caused from fossil fuel carbon emissions and radiation emissions, which total in the hundreds of thousands every year.
> You argue it is safe
I do! The fact that a nuclear plant was struck by a tsunami and yet just 1 person died from the radiation fallout is pretty damn amazing. That's about as bad as it gets and yet the result was the same as an oil well accident.
When I was a student I met a Chernobyl liquidator in his 30s on a local train. He said he was dying of leukaemia and looked like it. As a thought experiment, how would you argue to him that his death is unrelated?
Western part of USSR had also an explosion of thyroid cancers and tumors among children. Fortunately it was very treatabe. Because it was screened as a known consequence of the fallout my brother in law had an intervention early.
These are consequences from single incident, for a power source that has minuscule share of generation worldwide. The second similar event had also led to exclusion of substantial territory and only avoided massive health effects due to wind pattern towards the ocean.
And if nuclear proliferated more to geography prone to low safety culture and warfare the toll could up considerably.
Either way nobody argues for replacement of nuclear with coal in this day of age. Renewables are the fastest growing energy sector.
If nuclear became #1 power source and instead of 25 year cadence we had IAEA scale 7 events every 1.5 years, would you still argue it's a net win?
Events like Fukushima would be worthwhile tradeoffs. Events like Chernobyl would not, but that would require nigh non-existent safety regulations.
To put it in layman's terms - I'd much much much rather live right next to a US operated nuclear power plant than a US operated coal plant. In fact I do live rather close to several nuclear power plants.
Im also not against solar or wind, but energy diversity is important for national and energy security purposes
> Worrying about expanding nuclear and ending up putting the waste in a hole deep in the ground is such a nonissue to me.
Blithe minimization of the problem of storing nuclear waste over millenia feels like "Peak HN". :)
("Peak HN" jabs are a cheap shot, though — so let me engage more seriously...)
First, "coal vs nuclear" is a false dichotomy. Everybody I see advocating for nuclear power in this thread is advocating for it as a permanent solution rather than an interim solution — in which case there are other competitors.
Second, if nuclear waste is too dangerous for less-than-ideal storage conditions, that speaks negatively to the viability of nuclear power — because over the long term less-than-ideal storage is guaranteed by our inability to design incentive structures for responsible stewardship that persist over centuries.
Simply untrue. Finland‘s Onkalo is exactly that-a storage solution engineered to require zero stewardship. It is possible and now we know we can do it right. Storage is the weakest argument against nuclear.
By the way, Solar panels and wind turbines contain heavy metals with no decay path, e.g. Cadmium. Nuclear waste at least decays after apprx. 1000 years with spent fuel roughly as radioactive as the uranium ore originally mined for it.
The fearmongering against nuclear was always crazy to me. Especially since nuclear and renewables actually complement each other really well. We can use nuclear for baseload and renewables filling in on top when sun and wind are available.
> The fearmongering against nuclear was always crazy to me.
I sometimes feel similarly about pro-nuclear cheer mongering.
1. Radioactive waste gets less toxic over time unlike many toxins like mercury, lead, and cyanide. People seem to emphasize the duration of toxicity for radiation while apparently giving 'forever toxins' a total pass.
2. Short-lived radiation is what's really dangerous. When atoms are decaying fast, they're shooting out energy that can cause real damage fast. Longer-lived radioactive stuff with billion-year half-lives like natural uranium can be held in a gloved hand, no problem. In the extreme, and infinite half life means something is stable and totally safe (radiologically at least).
Yet people still want to emphasize that radioactive byproducts of nuclear power have long half lives. I don't really get it.
The question that matters for both industries is what bad things happen when their stewardship inevitably lapses and the happy path dead-ends.
I don't like either answer, so that heightens the urgency of pursuing alternatives with fewer long-lived hazardous byproducts. Neither coal nor nuclear is an acceptable long term solution.
We did this so that people can buy stock on the market without having to take any responsibility for what they are doing. It's certainly a great funding mechanism, though.
Similarly, while coal ash is nasty stuff that kills lots of people, it lacks many of the qualities that make spent nuclear fuel especially difficult to manage even in small amounts.
For example, a “dirty bomb” made by packing coal ash around conventional explosives would be far less effective than one made from spent nuclear fuel.
Selective view of the victims?
https://secure2.kentucky.gov/kytc/plates/web/LicensePlate/In...
One almost never sees any of the other 11 black license plates. I do expect that to change as the new (black) firefighter license plates replace the old red ones.
Of course pollution looks bad when you have to barrel it, instead of just shitting it out into the environment (atmosphere, etc) and saying "we'll stop doing this in a couple decades, don't worry".
I understand that brown coal isn't what people had in mind when they opposed nuclear; they would rather have wind power, solar power, maybe magical fairy dust, but they didn't consider that, practically, we will stick with brown coal.
We could start by actually having a DB that works, instead of forcing people to use cars if they want to actually reach their destination on time.
And bus connections that drive more often per villages and small towns than once per hour.