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There's no good reason to be against nuclear power. It's green, it's safe, it's incredibly efficient, the fuel is virtually infinite, and the waste can be processed in a million different ways to make it not dangerous.
Even Japan is restarting their reactors
Solar and wind are great, but major industrialized nations will need some nuclear capacity.
It's going to happen sooner or later.
The question is just about how long we delay it, with extra emissions and economic depression in the mean time.
Japan doesn't have a huge amount of choice in energy generation. Off shore wind doesn't work as the water is too deep. On shore wind doesn't have the space or geography either. Solar works, but their weather isn't ideal. Geothermal...possibly being near fault lines but their not like Iceland with a small population to supply. I believe locations for hydro are limited too.
Nuclear gives them energy independence and fits.
This exactly. You need a reliable source of fuel for the baseline, which is where nuclear energy can supplant fossil fuels instead of or in addition to relying on batteries.
No, nuclear is awful as a baseline since you can't turn it off and back on quickly
You're absolutely correct, and few people realise this. They think "baseline = stable power", but that's not what you need. You need a quick and cheap way to scale up production when renewables don't produce enough. On a sunny, windy day, renewables already produce more than 100% of needs in some countries. At that point, the 'baseline' needs to shut down so that this cheap energy can be used instead. The baseline really is a stable base demand, but the supply has to be very flexible instead (due to the relative instability of solar and wind, the cheapest sources available).
Nuclear reactors can shut down quite quickly these days, but starting them back up is slow. But worse, nuclear is quite expensive, and maintaining a plant in standby mode not producing anything is just not economically feasible. Ergo, nuclear is terrible for a baseline power source (bar any future technological breakthroughs).
It's more expensive than the alternatives, and comes with additional downsides. There is no good reason to be pro nuclear, unless you need a lot of power for a long time in a tight space. So a ship or a space station for example.
I'm not the kind to hate on nuclear power itself, but let's not assume it's perfect either. There are good reasons against nuclear power, its just not the usual reasons raised by people.
The cost and time effort needed for building one plant is one drawback.
The fact that you can't say "let's turn off the nuclear reactor now that we have enough renewables and later today we start it again when the sunlight is over". It's a terrible energy source to supply for extra demand needed without perfect planning.
Nowadays, nuclear is not so worth it in general, not because of fearmongering about the dangers (an old plant badly upkept is a danger, independent of what energy source you use, but specially for nuclear plants). Ideally a combination of different renewables would be best, with some energy storage to be used as backup, plus proper sharing of the resources between different places. There's always sun somewhere, there's always wind somewhere, ...
It's not perfect, but to forego nuclear energy while still burning fossil fuels is retarded.
Nobody is arguing for fossil fuels here.
So if our energy needs are not being met even while burning fossil fuels, why would you argue against nuclear energy which further reduces the supply of available energy?
Ahh, you gotta keep in mind: useful idiots.
Well yes there is a very good argument against nuclear and that is that it replaces solar energy.
solar energy might have been expensive in the past but now it's the cheapest form of energy in history. we needed an absence of nuclear in the past to have a motivation to develop green, safe, efficient energy. and solar is the best way to do that.
i also ask you to consider the future. solar energy gets cheaper the more is deployed of it, so it will get even cheaper in the future. we have seen enormous price drops for transistors (computers) in the past, and solar panels are semiconductors, just like transistors are semiconductors. who says that we wouldn't also see similar price drops for solar energy in the future? maybe solar panels will be cheap as paper in the future.
It's incredibly expensive when all costs over the entire construction period, operating period, dismantling period and storage period for nuclear waste are taken into account.
As for coal, it's even more expensive when it kills off the planet.
How does the cost compare to the starting and operating a coal mine?
What about oil wells and refineries?
We've got other alternatives. I was not proposing to build coal mines.
There’s nothing green, cheap, or safe about nuclear power. We’ve had three meltdowns already and two of them have ruined their surrounding environments:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Mining for fuel ruins the water table:
A Uranium-Mining Boom Is Sweeping Through Texas (contaminating the water table) https://www.wired.com/story/a-uranium-mining-boom-is-sweeping-through-texas-nuclear-energy/
Waste disposal, storage, and reprocessing are prohibitively expensive:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rethinking-nuclear-fuel-recycling/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rethinking-nuclear-fuel-recycling/
Now list all the fossil fuels related incidents.
Nuclear + renewables is the way to go to stop the climate crisis in the foreseeable future.
People really don't understand that climate change is worse for life on this planet than a million Fukushima accidents.
And ironically enough, Fukushima and Chernobyl have not been that bad for plant and animal life. The area around Chernobyl is thriving because most humans are gone.
Sources: https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/how-chernobyl-has-become-unexpected-haven-wildlife
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/060418-chernobyl-wildlife-thirty-year-anniversary-science
It also caused a bunch of Russian soldiers to get sick because they dug holes in the ground. It isn't a nuclear paradise, and I'm not interested in Chernobyl-grown food, but it isn't a complete wasteland, either.
I was talking specifically about plant and animal life.
It's obviously not a paradise, but what I mean is, ionising radiation is literally less harmful to them than human presence. That's pretty bonkers to think about.
Leave that zone alone, let nature take over again and make it a monument to human hubris.
I don't think I talked about growing food in irradiated ground though? But, we currently are growing food in polluted ground thanks to fossil fuels (microplastics, coal dust, oil leaks, fracking in some backwards ass countries, etc.).
So how are burrowing animals doing? I've seen pretty pictures of deer and trees, how are the rabbits and foxes? What are their lifespans compared to those in other regions?
Just because the animals don't look like cutscenes from The 100 doesn't mean their life is idyllic, or even better than elsewhere. And all those animals are eating food grown in irradiated ground. Now, whether that's better or worse than microplastics and fossil fuel waste and leakage is another interesting question.
Let's see here... nuclear meltdowns have damaged the environments around the few plants that have experienced them.
Burning fossil fuels has damaged our entire planet...
Three Mile Island was a partial meltdown, which may sound close to an actual meltdown, it's not even close in terms of danger.
Fukushima failed because the plants were old and not properly upkept. Had they followed the guidelines for keeping the plant maintained, it would not have happened.
That's not really the fault of nuclear power.
Chernobyl was also partially caused by lack of adherence to safety measures, but also faulty plant design.
I'd say, being generous, only one of those three events says anything about the safety of nuclear power, and even then, we have come a very long way.
So one event... Ever.
Chernobyl shouldn't have happened due to safety measures, yet it did. Fukushima shouldn't have happened, yet it did. The common denominator is human error, but guess who'll be running any other nuclear power plants? Not beavers.