Can you both take climate change seriously and against nuclear energy?

One can hold any opinion you want, but I don't think it would be a very grounded opinion. Renewables like solar and wind should be the priority, but right now we're missing key pieces like 1) an effective power grid connecting the places that have solar and wind to the places that need power, and 2) a cost effective mechanism for smoothing over wind and solar's inconsistency.

Coal and natural gas are incredibly effective in these respects. The plants can be built near the places the power is needed and / or in places where the required grid already exists, and they inherently produce steady power on demand. Nuclear power is a drop in replacement for these attributes that can supplement renewables in a low emission way today.

Without it, or a series of technological breakthroughs in renewables, we'll just end up with an overall mix of renewables supplemented by coal and natural gas -- which isn't going to be enough. And it's not good to bet the world on the hope that we have some technological breakthrough.

Given enough time, we might instead focus purely on solar and wind, but we don't have enough time. We need to get to zero net emissions as soon as possible, and we need to use all options available to us if we want to take climate change seriously.

A brief history of green opposition to nuclear power will show the following points, which should not be handwaved away:

- nuclear weapons. This is where Greenpeace actually got their start and where the "peace" comes from in their name. Most uranium designs require enrichment to some level and can also be used to produce plutonium. This is not a dead consideration; see Iraq's controversial civilian nuclear programme, and the ongoing war between a very large nuclear-armed rogue state and the proxy forces of the nuclear-armed West. Are you comfortable with a nuclear power plant in every country?

- terrorist and other attacks. The Ukraine war has seen fighting around Chernobyl, and actual shelling of Zaporizhzhia. https://theconversation.com/russian-shelling-caused-a-fire-a...

- nuclear waste. Again a big issue for Greenpeace in the 80s; admittedly this has massively improved. Note that there is both "high level" waste which can be reused as fuel, "high level" waste which cannot be used as fuel, and a much larger amount of contaminated normal materials. Some of which are less radioactive than naturally occurring rocks.

- choose your poison: CO2 is a slowly rising problem. Nuclear power plants are a "black swan" distribution; mostly perfectly safe, but the disasters that have happened have affected huge areas.

An additional practical consideration:

- cost and time overruns. Hinkley Point C is projected to have a 50% cost overrun and to be completed 17 years from its initial announcement. Even if we were to decide to roll out nuclear power, we must keep up the rate of renewables buildout (now considerably cheaper) because it will take decades for the plants to actually be built.

I do think the SMR concept is worth giving another go. nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers are already small modular reactors with great safety records. We must not bet on it alone.

Thorium seems to be a nerd trap; nobody seems to be trying this commercially, and since it can't be used for weapons there's no government subsidy as there was for the original buildout of uranium based plants.

Molten salt has unsolvable materials science / plumbing issues: it's too corrosive.

Sure. The two aren’t mutually exclusive. And you should be skeptical of anyone pushing an agenda.

I’m pro nukes (best phrasing), but it’s understandable why people are scared of it. I hope that the costs can come down and we can start doing some small scale experiments to show the reliability and safety. Most people just don’t have experience with the recent tech.

I don't think so. It's fairly clear that nuclear is incredibly safe in comparison with coal and other fossil fuels. Nuclear is going to be part of the solution, unless we figure out a way to massively scale up renewables. Thankfully, Europe seems to be doing some of this.

Apparently so, as it's been the standpoint of the Green Party in the UK for many years: https://policy.greenparty.org.uk/safe-climate.html

Yes. This is a complicated economical and geopolitical issue. There are several points why nuclear fission energy cannot dominate the market. The most significant offender here is the fact that nuclear fission can be arbitrarily expensive if you want to make it as safe as possible which makes it a partially political one as well; there's no single consensus on what is its levelised cost since the large fraction of it comes from upfront and decommissioning cost and we don't really have enough data points there. The equation gets more interesting since renewable energies have been becoming cheaper over the decade while the mainstream of nuclear fission energy technologies still generate nuclear waste which either can be repurposed into weapons or become your headache for an order of thousand years (in fact it's both).

This is why many of the next generation reactors are focusing on reducing/eliminating those costs. We all know that nuclear energies are extremely competitive regarding fuel costs, operational costs and carbon emission. The issue is the large question marks I mentioned above so everyone in the industry is working on that. Remember, energy production is largely an infrastructural (thus political) issue, so public support is an essential part of decision making. Hopefully, there hasn't been much investment in nuclear fission technologies for a while, so we might have plenty of headroom to eliminate these uncertainties.

Ask Germany, they take both seriously. They are now dependent on natural gas imports. Guess where most natural gas is coming from for Germany...

Nuclear power is too expensive and takes too long to build.

Renewables + storage is about 1/3 the price of nuclear and a new plant can go from proposal to delivering power in under 2 years. Nuclear takes more than 20 years.

I'd rather have 3x as much CO2 reduction per dollar 2 years from now than 1x as much 20 years from now.

Even as little as 5 years ago nuclear was a good choice. But renewables and storage have overtaken it.

Depends on what "against" means, but nuclear is likely to be a footnote in future energy history compared with wind and solar so if you mostly talk about nuclear as an excuse to repeat lies you heard about renewables from climate change deniers then you're not helping.

If we're breaking out the time machine to restore past wrongs then starting earlier on renewables that we know now are the future would help more than nuclear. As would preventing fossil fuel interests capturing the governments around the world.

But nuclear is cool tech. Right up there with pumped storage, geothermal, good insulation, heat pumps, EVs and carbon taxes as part of the family of cool tech that will help avoid climate catastrophe.

Sadly nuclear and to an extent carbon taxes seem to be used as a stick to beat people creating real change, doing the old "perfect is the enemy of the good" trick. Sad really, and will only tarnish their reputations in the long term.

I suspect at least a few people displaced by Chernobyl or Fukushima hold the position of anti-nuclear and acknowledge climate change.

I would argue yes, you can rationally arrive at that stance.

This again? Nuclear is not competitive with solar/wind on currrent LCOE, existing nuclear is basically good for base and peak load leveling, just like gas turbine.

And solar/wind is still increasing in economies of scale. Current nuclear is not competitive and won't be, and there is no 10-year target price that any next-gen nuclear can reliably target without a ton of boondoggle incentives. Same with fusion.

In previous threads the nuclear people warn that all the nuclear engineers will age out if nuclear plants keep being decommissioned. This is a good thing.

Nuclear and next-gen are saddled with military who-cares-the-consequences-and-risks thinking combined with NIMBY regs that make it TOO difficult to approve. The hulking concrete dome designs that are what you're stuck with have fundamental design problems. The "industry" needs to be swept away.

In 10 years time, solar/wind/battery will stabilize long-term, and nuclear can consider designs that may be competitive.

Whatever the viability of LFTR engineering wise, this is the promise/advantage that any "next gen nuclear" needs to accomodate:

- breeds uses all the nuclear fuel, and can reprocess old waste (LFTR can do this)

- is meltdown proof (LFTR has the plug that will melt if reaction temp gets too hot and then the liquid disperses and neutron economy falls stalling the reaction)

- is scalable/compact (LFTR's test reactor was allegedly closet sized)

- has no shadow or cross-purpose design for nuclear weapons isotopes (LFTR is allegedly proliferation resistant). I suspect that PWR and solid fuel rod reactors "won" because the military got their isotopes.

In order to be palatable to the public, you need the LFTR capabilities, whether you do that with pebbles + reprocessing or some other scheme, but you NEED that full fuel use and closed cycle.

All these stories/posts are from "old guard nuclear" that handwave all the solid fuel rod design problems and dangers away. Honestly, good riddance to these people.

> If you believe climate change is an existential threat, how can you be against nuclear energy?

Mainstream nuclear power technology is easily repurposed to the manufacture of nuclear weapons. A corollary is that a world with no nuclear reactors is a world incapable of making nuclear bombs. If one considers nuclear war an existential threat on the same scale or greater than climate change, it may seem paradoxical to construct the tools that would proliferate that risk to fight another existential risk.

Absolutely. Here's how the electricity mix changed in UK between 2000 and 2021:

- renewables went from 3 to 40%

- imports: 3.6 to 7.6%

- nuclear: 22 to 14%

- oil & gaz: 40.1 to 39.7%

- coal: 31.7 to 1.9%

Source: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-nuclear-output-falls... (3rd chart)

Nuclear Energy is fantastic. Humans are awful. Who guarantees the long term stability safe Nuclear installations require? We've seen that military forces can be very casual about them. We've seen that corruption in procurement is hard to control. I think that's a reasonable line to take.

Every graph and book i've read have shown the nuclear is extremely expensive nad takes years to come online. It frankly no longer competes with natural gas, solar, wind, geothermal or any other renewable energy resources. So... thats why i'm against it; It's not economical.

It makes about as much sense as both taking automotive fatalities seriously and being against seat belts.

The emphasis on nuclear is a game the fossil fuel industry is playing. They know it will take a lot of time to build nuclear power plants, which means more time for them to extract $$$ from oil.

Nucleur power has historically been problematic in that it creates waste, it takes a fuckton of money to decommission safely after the useful life of the reactor is over, and there have been incidents of massive environmental contamination.

Can all these things be overcome? I don't know. Let's hope so. But in the mean time there's every reason to proceed cautiously here. It's certainly not a stop-gap while green energy comes online - projects are many decades in length.

I don't know how much nuclear reactors have advanced. But I can understand the fear in the someone's back of their mind: What if something goes wrong?

I see this risk = Fallout x Probability. Even though the proponents argue that the tech is much more safer, the fallout is so huge and generational that its it neutralises the low probability of any accidents.

PS: I am neither for or against the nuclear tech.

Nuclear energy would have been a good idea about thirty or forty years ago. Today it is probably cheaper and faster to just build renewables.

while emissions favorable to climate change, Nuclear is not environmentally friendly and I include the massively environmentally unfriendly process needed to mine uranium. It uses TONNES of clean water, and turns it toxic as well. It might be an answer to climate change but its no "green energy"

Relevant: the intermittency of solar and wind production vs nuclear, in France over a small period of time.

https://mobile.twitter.com/tristankamin/status/1471538237739...

No we couldn't switch the whole planet to nuclear that easily. If you are a proponent of nuclear, we are living on the biggest nuclear power plant we would ever want, we just have lay some pipe and extract the heat. I'm talking about geothermal.

I'm against it because nuclear waste.

IMHO it's a false dichotomy to think that if I understand climate change to be an existential threat, then I must be in favour of nuclear. Other renewables combined with less energy usage could be my preference.

http://www.daretothink.org/numbers-not-adjectives/how-long-w...

Nuclear as it exists is a finite energy source. We could have been in a similar situation if we doubled down on nuclear decades ago.

At some point, we will need to transition to nuclear systems built with different technologies, if they are feasable, which is still questionable, or other renewable energy sources, like solar and wind. No solution is going to be a magic bullet that solves the effect of climate change because it is the outcome stemming from several technological and social limitations.

I dont think climate change is existencial threat. I'm fine with nuclear energy. Existencial threat are impotent goverments and greedy politics.

1. It's horrendously expensive.

2. Out current political systems make waste management impossible.

I’m no expert, but I want to fight climate change and I am against nuclear energy.

https://actu.epfl.ch/news/what-if-half-of-switzerland-s-roof...

It's real hard to argue against that kind of energy density.

Flagging this because it's a rhetorical question.

Nuclear would've been a great solution in the 70s and 80s to cut down on greenhouse emissions, but it is too late now to help from what I understand.

>We could have switched most of the planet to pure nuclear energy decades ago.

Fission isn't Fusion. You can't run the entire planet on nuclear power.

Its not truly renewable and the topic of waste is a real issue.

Its a short term solution but ultimately not the solution for sustainable environmentalism.

As much as I am for nuclear energy, your question is rather naive. The first mention of CO2 warming was made in the early 1900s and the research was definitive by 1981 [0].

The reality is that there was a coordinated disinformation and obfuscation campaign made by Exxon, Shell, BP, et al. They sacrificed our planets Goldilocks zone for 50 years of corporate profit.

Certainly grab your pitchfork. This is a human atrocity that will soon trump all others. But the ones you should be skewering are sitting in boardrooms right now figuring out how to squeeze the last few dollars from our planet before wet bulb temperatures reach 50C.

[0] https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha04600x.html

Yes. Because this isn't an energy crisis. It is a consumption crisis.

Atomic energy will be seen as a free pass to consume more and more, worstening climate change.

Looking at the videos of Russian soldiers shelling the Zhaporizha nuclear plant made me more aware of the downsides of nuclear power.

I am still in favor but I see there are just huge non preventable dangers, mostly dependent on political or competency failures, something that just happens in human society

Climate activists who predict doom but don’t want nuclear power are just cosplaying.

The modern world can’t run on renewables alone. It’s impossible.

For nuclear to be viable globally, which is necessary to solve climate change, it would mean trusting other, far less developed and unstable countries to build and operate nuclear power plants. That is something that even the US, the USSR and Japan have all occasionally failed to do correctly with significant consequences. The UK has a ton of hot nuclear waste that is still improperly stored due political issues. I don't think there's political appetite for expanding the set of countries with access to fission.

Solar, wind, geothermal, biofuels etc. are imperfect, but it's hard to imagine a scenario where a mistake can make a significant chunk of the earth uninhabitable for hundreds of years.

Yes, you can certainly be both.

Climate change is an immediate existential threat as you say yourself. Seeing nuclear as the solution to that threat is very shortsighted IMHO.

Many commenters mention the threat of accidents like Chernobyl or Fukushima. That is one aspect, yes. However, on the grand scale it seems as if humanity has limited the risk for these kind of accidents.

The much bigger problem with nuclear energy is that humanity has not yet figured out how to handle the waste on the short term. Let alone on a time scale that is beyond human comprehension.

I was quite impressed by the thorough analysis in this article:

https://bostonreview.net/articles/is-nuclear-power-our-best-...

Piling more nuclear waste on to the already unmanageable heap is irresponsible. That is why being against nuclear energy as the stop gap solution for climate change is not only reasonable but also responsible.

I would say this is firmly in "Modest Proposal" territory, in the sense that the solution proposed would certainly contribute to solving the problem, but has enough negative effects that it doesn't make sense. As a parallel example, it's clear that if we killed off 50% of the earth's population we would substantially reduce the environmental impact of human activity on the climate. Yet nobody would seriously consider this as a solution to the climate problem, and there is no one proposing this and nobody would support it. But how can you be against this, if climate change in an existential threat?

Frankly I find it difficult to believe that there are still nuclear supporters out there. Fukushima was thankfully somewhat small in impact, but let's not lose sight of the fact that there was a full-on containment failure -- an actual honest-to-god meltdown. I have been assured so many times by so many nuclear experts and proponents that this sort of failure mode is simply not possible anymore.

Given that the impact of a major containment failure can be extremely dramatic, with death tolls in the millions, what makes people think that we understand the engineering problem enough?

Renewables are no match and no substitution to nuclear energy. No matter how much investment you dump into renewables, their energy density will remain inferior and sooner or later you will hit a threshold where, like it not, you will switch to full nuclear, because calculator batteries can't power industries. Nature has nothing better to offer (according to our current knowledge of physics) and that is not an opinion, but pure reality.

People don't want to accept this fact in the same way flat earthers don't want to accept that Earth is spheroid. They want to live in their imaginary worlds simply because they're insane.

But, today, if we were all 100% nuclear, you still have to deal with the fact that battery tech is inadequate to replace fossil. I believe that once a miracle happens such that a superior battery magically becomes trivially available to anyone, demand for power and pure market forces will cut the throat of renewables and society will completely shift to nuclear.