this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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The cleanup for fossil fuels is an order of magnitude more expensive, and an order of magnitude more difficult. It also impacts so many things that its true cost is impossible to calculate.
I'm aware of the issues with nuclear, but for a lot of places it's the only low/zero emission tech we can do until we have a serious improvement in batteries.
Very few countries can have a large stable base load of renewable energy. Not every country has the geography for dams (which have their own massive ecological and environmental impacts) or geothermal energy.
Seriously, we need to cut emissions now. So what's the option that anti-nuclear people want? Continue to use fossil fuels and hope battery tech gets good enough, then expand renewables? That will take decades. Probably 30+ years at the minimum.
We’re talking 11 years for 7 “small” reactors. The first decade just to establish a business, but no real difference in the overall picture. How many years, decades after that to make a noticeable difference?
Meanwhile we’re building out more power generation in renewables every year. Renewables are already well developed, can be deployed quickly, and are already scaling up, renewables make a difference NOW.
Renewables cannot provide a reliable base load. Not unless you can have your solar panels in space where the sun always shines, we figure out tidal power, or you're lucky in terms of geography and either hydroelectric or geothermal work for you.
Solar power doesn't produce energy at night, wind doesn't always blow. You know the drill.
You completely sidestepped the entire crux of my comment.
We need a base load of energy to fill that gap, because batteries currently can't, and likely won't be for decades. Here are the options we have available:
nuclear power, which produces a waste that while trivial to store far away from people, will be radioactive for hundreds of years.
fossil fuels, which cause massive damage not only to the local environment, but to the planet, and cleanup is effectively impossible.
we put society on unpredictable energy curfews. At night the population can't use much energy. When there's a drop in wind or solar production, we cut people's energy off. Both political parties must commit wholeheartedly to this in order to make it viable. Our lives would become worse, but we'd not have either of the above problems.
Of those 3 options, I'd rather go with nuclear. What's your choice?
Don't forget to add that nuclear waste created is absurdly small in volume.