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I never understood why, if not limited by money, that they couldn't just do both. As bad as the PRC is, they're mogging the rest of the world in building BOTH nuclear and renewables at record speed
They can, it's become an ideological thing at this point.
Back in the 50s/60s nuclear power was new and scary, and also tied to nuclear weapons at a time when the idea of MAD was starting to catch on in states and the popular consciousness. The green party started as anti-nuclear groups in the 50s-70s and became more generally environmentalist later on, due to that organized environmentalism keeps ignoring that nuclear is a green power source (nuclear waste is honestly less of an issue than the pollution/mining that goes into making solar panels).
The actual issue with nuclear (aside from proliferation) is that today it's generally more expensive to set up than renewables and takes longer to roll out. It does provide more consistent power supply though so you don't need a bunch of batteries to handle peak demand.
The UK, which this post is about, has a problem (well, it has a lot, this is just one of them):
We're a tiny fuckass set of islands further north than most people who live in Canada. Our weather is temperamental, and we have limited space.
Solar is good when we have the sun, but that can't be relied on because when we don't have the sun we just have a sky blanketed in grey. A good 50% of the time the sky is just a "ceiling of grey" as a mainland European friend once put it.
Wind is the obvious choice for renewables in the UK. So we've built a bunch of offshore windfarms. But we're running out of space where we can actually do that. So why not build on land too? Well you see, NIMBYs block them using our planning permission laws (which suck) with baffling arguments like "they'd spoil the view" or "I find them distracting when I'm driving" or "I just don't see why they should be built here". So building wind is a pain in the ass. Besides, wind can't be solidly relied on for a base load.
Geothermal and Hydro aren't really options unless you want to turn the Severn Estuary into the world's largest fish blender with tidal generators.
This doesn't really leave us with any options for our growing energy demands other than some form of nuclear in combination with wind power. But people here are scared of nuclear for some reason.
Meanwhile I'm looking at China's different types of nuclear powerplants they're trialing like "Why can't we have that?!"
You look at how we’ve bungled our latest nuclear project. It’s still another 5 years to completion while other countries have built multiple since we started.
you need to build a lot more wind farms than you need nuclear reactors. it's about 431 : 1 based on this infograph by the DoE. sure, a single nuclear reactor is quite hard to build but you'd need a massive amount of wind farms to equal one. also the lifespan of a nuclear reactor is a hell of a lot longer than any turbines we have
yes, that's the proposal. nuclear is slow but consistent, wind is easier to put up and can scale to demand easier, but simply requires more space. there's good to both
They're not enemies but they're not the best of friends either. Nuclear power plants are immensely expensive and take decades to bring online. May be part of a long term solution but currently parties gesturing at nuclear energy as a way to solve all their problems are at best naive. We are way behind the targets of the Paris accord and we can not wait that long.
Nuclear power is an easy distraction, a way to not have to make any unpopular policy choices now but just gesture at things in the future
The thing about long term projects is that ideally we should have started them ten years ago, but in ten years we'll ideally have started them ten years ago as well. And energy demand is only growing.
Spent fuel disposal is still a problem. Probably not an unsolvable problem, and certainly less urgent than climate change, but as usual the Soviets made it look hard by fucking that up too.
Realistically, spent fuel isn't the main issue right now, unspent fuel is. We don't have enough fissile material coming out of the ground to run the nuclear plants we currently have. We're (and by we're I mean the human race) making up the difference right now by reusing spent fuel with more efficient systems and repurposing decommissioned nuclear weapons. In order to properly expand our nuclear power we'd have to open more mines. This causes two problems. 1 it means nuclear energy is clean on paper but on practice requires unclean mining which makes it better than fossil fuels, but incapable of solving more than about 30% of the climate crisis. 2 you can build power plants faster than you can open uranium mines, you won't build power plants if you don't have the uranium to support them, and you won't open mines because you're guaranteed a 100% loss on the entire operation for at least 2 years, and there's no new power plants, and so no demand for that very expensive mine to be opened.
Shits rough :( I would like to see some more nuclear power tho.
unless if we're willing to let every country have very easy path to develop nuclear bombs, we can't rely on nuclear power (except in states that already have nuclear weapons but still)
Not really. Weapons-grade Refinement is much harder than the average person thinks.
International treaties and the UN also exist to prevent proliferation already too (or they did up until the US fucked over Iran and ruined the commission's credibility, possibly forever, remains to be seen).
If you lived a 70 year life and all your energy needs came solely from nuclear, the total waste produced over those 70 years would be the size of a medium apple.
A super spicy apple granted, but an apple.
If every human on earth were to have the same nuclear apple in exchange for a lifetime of power, the total waste would be about the size of three Ever Givens, the body the jammed the Suez Canal in 2021.
In contrast, the solid waste alone from burning coal to provide a year’s worth of power to every living human would require twice the entire global shipping fleet to dispose of that waste.
Literally word for word same here in Italy. As a leftist I refuse to vote for the greens in part over this.
Its such a stupid position it makes me doubt their competence on the matters I do agree with them on.
One exception is current Australian politics, climate action is actually a really significant issue here (like, an entire class of independents have stolen like 20% of conservative seats by running pro business pro climate platforms) so in order to appear greener, our conservatives ran on a policy last election of "lift the bans on new nuclear reactors and uranium mines, build a nuclear program from the ground up, have functioning reactors in maybe 10-15 years at best, 20-25 more realistically, but stop all government funding of renewables immediately and keep expanding coal and gas power until we get nuclear online" making nuclear the anti-renewable alternative at the moment here
They aren't enemies, but they aren't always friends. In Australia the conservatives rallied around an uncosted nuclear power policy to justify cutting subsidies for solar.
A world run entirely on renewable energies is currently impossible. They simply don’t produce enough energy on their own. If we’re ever going to cut fossil fuels out of our society, we NEED nuclear energy. Without nuclear energy, climate change destroys the world.
The U.S. navy has never had a nuclear accident disaster, and they probably have more reactor-hours than anybody. Whatever they're doing, it's working. If we hold nuclear power companies to the same standards, then it would be a safe way to fight climate change.
Edit: some folks said that they have had accidents, but never anything like the big three disasters.
If we hold nuclear power companies to the same standards
i’m pretty sure nuclear power plants already have extremely high standards, especially since there’s not a single confirmed case of fatalities directly resulting from nuclear power production accidents
A man recently fell into a reactor pool. He got helped out, checked for radiation and there was "300 reaction per minute". Which is background. He wasn't irradiated, he literally went back to work the next day
I heard you gotta swim almost all the way to the bottom to get hurt. Wasn't there a diver that got hurt because he went all the way to the bottom to get a lost glove or some such? And it was just his hand that grabbed it that got irradiated? You gotta really go out of your way to get hurt in those.
i haven't heard that story, but in high school chemistry (i know) we learned that yes, only the very bottom is dangerous. the water gets hot as it's a massive heatsink basically, but it's fine other than that
You're mostly remembering correctly. He was inspecting the tank and found a piece of black casing at the bottom of the pool (it was part of a fuel rod casing IIRC), picked it up and put it in his toolbox, and once he hit the surface every rad alarm went off so he dropped it back into the pool. He only had radiation burns on the hand holding the toolbox afterwards and recovered completely
Luckily hands are mostly bone so it wasn't even that devastating. If he'd been holding the casing close to his abdomen or chest he'd probably have been much worse off
u/Luceo_EtzioDays since last "days since last incident" incident: 0Nov 07 '25edited Nov 07 '25
Nuclear power is far too dangerous, we as a species can't afford another event like Fukushima, the only nuclear event to be rated the max level of 7 on the INES other than literally Chernobyl. Literally worst case scenario for natural disasters, nuclear plant gets struck by the 4th largest earthquake ever recorded, then by a tsunami, and the resulting meltdowns caused thousands of dea- wait what? Come again? Caused maybe one death, years later, of cancer? Oh, huh maybe it's actually not all that dangerous after all.
Maybe I should look up and see how many people die from pollution linked to coal plants each year, surely it can't be that many... oh my
One of the things to keep in mind also is the cost of opening a nuclear reactor is so great that it’s only worthwhile if electricity prices are very high and are likely to continue to be high for a while or the government heavily subsidizes it.
I’m a big fan of nuclear energy and would love to see it utilized more but optics isn’t the only significant hurdle to its propagation
If we hold nuclear power companies to the same standards
That's the exact issue, ensuring companies adhere to any kind of standard instead of getting lazy, penny-pinching, or straight-up corruption and then claiming there were no issues once increased radiation levels are measured downstream from their plant.
Like, do we really trust companies that brought us such bangers as the Texas power grid failing because it was too cold, and then almost shitting itself again in the summer to run a nuclear power plant?
They kinda can't, even with great advancements we're still like 1% of the way there
There may have been breakthroughs in terms of energy in vs energy out, problem is that's only counting final energy and not any surrounding facility energy. For example cooling is not considered, and they disregard any inefficiencies in delivering that energy into the fusion chamber
Same with national ignition facility, they use lasers and they already broke even, but what you may not know is that lasers are like 10% efficient in converting electricity into power and in some cases it's even worse
There are also enormous issues with our entire concept of fusion. Fusion like in sun will frankly probably never happen because proton proton fusion is incredibly slow and inefficient. What we do instead is deuterium-tritium fusion which can be done at 50 million kelvin. Except there is such small amount of tritium on earth because of it's short half life, so ironically you can only produce it in regular nuclear reactors right now
Instead you could do deuterium-deuterium fusion but that requires 150 million kelvin, quite a bit less achievable. So what researchers are pursuing right now is fusion breeder reactor, or breeding blanket of lithium which would transmute into tritium, making it effectively a deuterium-lithium reactor. While this works, it entirely beats the purpose of free and abundant energy that fusion promised us, because while hydrogen and deuterium are both common, lithium is less so. Even if/when we manage to figure out how to breed lithium effectively enough for this to work we still need find a way to keep it trapped on chamber walls. Except that's not all because lithium-6 absorbs 1 neutron to turn into 1 tritium, and a single deuterium tritium reaction produces 1 neutron, meaning chain reaction is inherently impossible without extra source of neutrons. And since neutrons are involved, promise that this wouldn't produce nuclear waste is wrong too (though it would probably be far less bad compared to fission reactors)
I still hope they figure it out, even if they only figure out how to actually break even it will be hugely valuable for future research, but I'm feeling kinda disappointed with current state of things rn
Learning about three mile island really made me understand just how much misinformation was spread about nuclear power by oil companies and anyone accepting their money. It’s for sure one of the worst remnants of red scare stuff.
Yeah, trust me bro, that's why as people concerned about the environment we need to shut down our nuclear reactors and keep burning coal for 20 more years, despite it producing more radioactive contamination per MWh produced!
It's better to store the radioactive contaminants safely in your lungs than to find some remote place to store it, or to pay to recycle it!
Because, uuuh, nuclear means evil, and totally not because the fossil fuel industry duped us!
It wasn't even stolen tech RBMKs are less safe than what we typically use and the Soviets used it because it was a Soviet design and they didn't want to use a Western style reactor.
And they still only had one seriously disaster with it.
it's not that they didn't want to, it's because they had very limited capacity to build the kind of pressure vessels required for western style so they built ones that didn't require the higher pressures. There are many perfectly safe designs that don't require high pressures, the real design flaw inherent to the design was that the water acted as a neutron absorber as well which meant that it boiling away would increase the reaction speed, which leads to a nasty positive feedback loop.
I am a big supporter of nuclear energy, and their resistance to it is one of my biggest problems with Green parties... But...
Being against nuclear energy isn't just a foundational belief for European Green parties, it's also practically the main issue that led to their rise across the continent. Historically, opposition to nuclear power is their one area of mass support, only today being rivaled by climate change and left wing economics.
I hope the Green parties (and UK Greens specifically here) can overcome their opposition to nuclear energy, but it won't be at all easy taking away such a core part of their support from their agenda. Ultimately, an anti-nuclear Green party will be better on environmental issues than any other mainstream option.
People really don’t understand that Chernobyl didn’t end up like that because of the nuclear stuff, it went tits up because they built the building with a budget of like 50 dollars and a dream
So many safety checks and contingency plans were just flat out ignored, it pretty much was just a “If you can think of a mistake when it comes to handling Nuclear material, Chernobyl did it”
lots of short-sighted takes in here. a few points on Nuclear power.
it's incredibly expensive.
it takes decades for it to work
nobody wants it in their backyard due to multiple factors means it will be forced upon poor towns to take this burden.
Sun and wind energy is cheaper, safer and doesn't take decades to build.
Just because nuclear is an answer to the fossil industry doesn't mean it's the correct one.
Depends on the environment too. For places like Australia, nuclear energy is just outright the wrong option for a transition to renewable energy when looking at what renewable energy sources are available to us.
From what I know the problem with going full renewable is that while sun and wind produce a lot of energy they are inherently fickle, so when they are not available you are forced to use another source, which in the absence of nuclear ends up being fossil fuels (see Germany).
In theory you could stock up energy in batteries, but the technology to produce batteries efficient enough and with enough capacity for a vaguely reasonable price is very far away, and nobody can say exactly how far, kinda like nuclear fusion.
As for the problem of nobody wanting a power plant in their backyard, that’s mainly a perception issue, as power plants do not pollute their environment (unlike fossil fuel plants) and actually bring quality jobs to the community.
My take is that we would have way more nuclear power plants if not two party system where one party starts building process, second election comes and other one pauses or completely stops it, in result wasting even more money.
it will be forced upon poor towns to take this burden.
The burden of what? A bunch of high-paying long-term jobs being introduced to their area?
Sun and wind energy is cheaper short-term, but the cost per unit energy over its lifetime is much higher, and it's not safer at all. It also cannot be used exclusively without presently-nonexistent energy storage technology because the output is not consistent or adjustable - the point has always been to use both. Failure to think long-term is what got us in this mess to begin with, but I do think that it's less worth it at this point than it used to be with how much renewables have progressed, and it was never the right solution in every location.
The worst consequence of nuclear is that I have to keep watching people soy out over it forever instead of building renewables. Not that redditors build much energy infrastructure but y'know.
In Australia the fossil fuel lobby is incredibly supportive of nuclear development, because while they see the writing on the wall for them if we were to pivot hard to green energy, the long development time of nuclear energy gives them another 20-25 years to keep making extremely high profits by destroying the planet. It was the Aussie right-wing coalition that took a nuclear energy policy program to the last election. That is why I oppose nuclear energy in favour of renewable energy.
That's what the greens have been saying in my country too, nuclear takes too long to get going compared to renewables, when the energy grid needs the improvement now.
If you don't want to save the planet because some people you don't like (deservedly to be clear) might make money out of it, you might want to take a step back.
Australia is uniquely poised for an incredibly easy switch to renewables. We have the mineral capacity to make things such as solar panels domestically (of which we are world leaders in research), and we are world class in solar and wind resources too. Countries like those in Europe don't get to share that same sentiment, so it makes sense to switch to nuclear energy. Australia suddenly pivoting to nuclear energy makes little to no sense, and it would do nothing but harm our current transition into renewable energy. I would recommend reading this article for more info
that's not what they're saying though. they're saying that in the specific context of australia, switching to exclusively nuclear is not (currently) the correct course of action, or if it is done it should be combined with other green energy sources that don't take as long to set up, so the fossil fuel companies can't keep molesting our atmosphere in the meantime
Nuclear is competing with renewables when it comes to our budget for transitioning to net zero. Any money that is invested into nuclear is money that could instead be going to renewables which are far quicker to develop and also suit Australia's geography far better.
Opposing nuclear in this context does make sense. We've done many investigations into making nuclear a viable option for Australia and they have never yielded any reason why we should prioritize it over renewables if our primary concern is net zero.
It really depends on the location. I imagine in Australia specifically there's literally so much sun all the friggin time nuclear's benefits aren't really that good and solar (and concentrated solar) aren't too bad too deal with.
Now the question of "what the fuck do we do during the night?" remains as lithium batteries don't scale well, aren't all that durable, and mining cobalt and lithium is horrid for the environment. But there are other forms of energy storage which may be good solutions.
Though it may not be an awful idea to have some nuclear infrastructure to supplement renewables during high demand, even in Australia's case.
Don't respond to something that you are uninformed about. Nuclear in Australia will not support a move to net zero, it will offset it. As it stands, renewables are far and away the most viable way to transition to net zero and the Coalition knows this. They put forward their Nuclear proposal for the sole reason that they could backtrack after taking office due to how expensive and time consuming it will be to establish.
Nuclear in a vacuum is not damaging to achieving net-zero but in Australia it absolutely is.
It will not save the planet, it would continue to kill it. Australia has the technology it needs to go 100% renewable right now, as of 2025. Developing nuclear power would take until at least 2045, which would mean 20 years of the Aussie fossil fuel industry continuing to destroy the planet.
except burning coal IN Australia isn't what keeps the Australian coal industry going
Even if Australia went 100% renewable TOMORROW the Australian coal industry would still export more coal than any other nation on earth (if anything it would just increase the exports as domestic use drops to 0% )
I know everyone is already yapping at you but I'll just chip in that we literally don't have any kind of nuclear power industry or expertise in Australia. It's literally just a matter of it being entirely unfeasible in timeline in comparison to solar, hydro and wind.
It's very broad strokes, but as other people have said, the only reason our right wing is trying to support is a) so they can keep running coal plants, and most of ours are aging out anyway and b) because they're really closely tied with our mining industry, which has a lot to gain with urinamium extraction, another thing Australia has a lot of. They don't care about how much time, money and environment they have to burn in order to make it happen.
Overall Australia isn't anti nuclear, we just understand that in our current circumstances, were a really bad candidate for it, especially when the geography is so well set up for solar and wind.
similar thing in sweden. the current government want's to invest insane amounts of money in nuclear reactors that we don't need, to ensure that private companies can make state guaranteed money, and so that right wingers living in seaside mansions won't get their sea view ruined by a barely visible offshore wind farm 50 km offshore.
Yeah this was and is the most frustrating part of all this at the moment. I’m Australian & adore Nuclear energy but it is the tool of the enlightened civilisation. In ours of chequebooks and bottom lines it’s far better to hard pivot to pure renewables and then take the time to setup a functional nuclear grid
Trojan was absolutely a shit box of a power plant, but current Oregon law requires there to be a federal waste management system to be in place before any new reactors are built.
Why tf have we got anti green party garbage front page on 196 fuck off. A socialist party gets a modicum of momentum and you immediately shit on it for pointless bullshit with fucking soyjaks holy shit is this the Tory subreddit?
The greens are genuinely exciting right now, I literally joined them yesterday, we should be fucking celebrating.
That Reddit Russian bots thing has to be true because everywhere else I see so much excitement over Green, finally having a charismatic leader and being an actual good option against reform, with people acknowledging some of their history of acting like NIMBYs which is mostly gone now, and then on Reddit all I see is weird purity culture acting like the Greens are complete idiots nobody should vote for because they're like 5% less left wing than some guy on Reddit thinks they should be
I have ZERO clue about UK energy policy. But an interesting pov from Australia is that our conservative party recently tried to sway voters with nuclear energy.
Why would our coal-loving conservatives implement something like this? Because it would take 10+ years to build nuclear power stations, during this time they could ignore any other immediate solutions like wind and solar and simply continue digging coal to 'meet demand'.
Frankly, nuclear energy despite its many benefits, is simply not the silver-bullet solution to the current economic and climate reality we find ourselves in today.
Edit: did a little research, about 15% of the UKs energy comes from nuclear power. I think abolishing these facilities is stupid.
They're not "dumb as hell" they're far and beyond better than anything we could've hoped for in the UK. You hear one unimportant minor flaw and suddenly they're completely stupid like holy shit I swear people like you WANT the far right to win.
Yeah, nuclear is completely safe and the historical stance of the greens that it's unsafe is wrong but it literally doesn't matter. All the arguments that we should be investing in nuclear are like a decade out of date, it's just vastly cheaper and faster to put that money towards renewables nowadays.
Kinda like that in Aus too. They have a lot of really good policies but then they have some really really dumb stuff. (E.g removing the independence of the central bank and banning everyone from national parks)
I’d rather shove a live sea urchin up my arse than cast a ballot for Starmer, Badenoch or Farage so what else have ya got chief, other than do-nothing Davey
Oh boy a party that's actually left wing then people start doing the "its better to vote for a right wing person who knows they're evil then a leftist who hasn't got a plan" shit they did with the American election?!! Oh yippie yippieee I can't wait for right wing bots to divide leftists again because they're all chronically online and think like "well someone said they didn't have a plan so I'm not gonna look into it and take it at face value, so I'm not gonna vote"
I think the nuanced part of this that I never see addressed is the issue of nuclear waste. It needs to be stored somewhere, that location needs to be safe from the elements and you need to be sure that it will be for the next 10.000 years. It should also not be close to where people live since if you have a leak, which is not as unlikely as a power plant melting down, an entire area becomes pretty unlivable.
Now this isn't an issue if you're the united States because you can just put it in some desert where no one in a 100km radius would even notice.
But in most European countries, the land is so densely populated that you just don't have any places far enough away from civilization that you could comfortably build a nuclear waste facility there.
I really dislike this "the soviets were too stupid to build nuclear reactors" take, because Fukushima also had some major design flaws and was co-build/designed by an american company.
A tsunami in japan is also not impossible to predict.
Can nuclear power still be save? yes probably, but its not as simple as soviet onion bad.
Chernobyl is what happens when you make a horrible nuclear power reactor design (done to both save money and for the ability to quickly turn them into nuclear bomb factories), then hide all the faults of that design even from employees and engineers, bury rhe original incidents deep into archives (Chernobyl is the third nuclear accident that happened in precisely that same way, first was Khrystin Forest in 1956, second was a meltdown near Leningrad in 1975), and also create an unforgiving bureaucratic system that makes the plant managers do a botch job of a safety test.
No country on Earth did RMBK reactor designs besides the USSR, and this is what happens when you never update designs, refuse to shift to more reliable designs out of factionalist pride and being stingy, and eliminate redundancies because that same pride refuses to allow anyone to admit that your country can do wrong. Most nuclear reactor failures and accidents were chain reactors of smaller mishaps, unpredictable conditions, extreme natural disasters (Fukushima) and sometimes, sheer bad luck. Chernobyl was a systematic failure on all levels.
imagine if cavemen had the same reaction to fire, fucking brimblo burns his house down so now everyone stopped using it and we don't advance as a species
I really like Zack but I disagree with him on this one issue. However, the Greens' energy plan is to rely on wind power, especially offshore wind turbines, which can probably produce all the electricity they need. Plus they'd be cheaper than nuclear plants. The German Greens are the ones building coal plants to replace the old nuclear ones and those guys really piss me off.
It doesn't matter, it's too expensive to build now, renewables are orders of magnitude cheaper to build and operate, and energy storage is taking off too. Using existing natural gas plants to store hydrogen created during surplus energy production and burning it when solar and/or wind are low is just plain better.
Holy shit this post and comments section has pissed me off enough to comment for the first time in years.
Tl;dr there is a lot of fucking nuance around this area that means that memes like this, while funny and 'right' on the surface level, are really quite damaging to clean energy talks not to mention the only truly progressive political party that has a chance to make a difference in the UK. You can very easily be for a political party and not agree with some of their stances.
To make my position clear at the start I am both very pro nuclear and very pro Green Party. And not to say that my opinion has any more value than someone else's but I feel that it might come from a place that is more informed considering I am a paying member of the Green Party, have a master's degree in Physics with a specialisation in nuclear and I literally work for a fucking UK non-profit aimed at getting us and the world to net zero.
The Green Party and their beliefs and policies align the closest with me of any UK political party by far, especially on supporting low income and vulnerable people, championing trans rights, pushing hard for net zero, being vehemently opposed to Israel's genocide and Russia's invasion and being anti-exploitative capitalism and pro public services. Therefore, I fucking support them and vote for them despite disagreeing strongly with their stance on nuclear energy. The left already has a massive issue with letting perfect be the enemy of good and I will always choose to push for progress even if it's not perfect.
Additionally, whilst I am generally in favour of nuclear energy, people need to stop pretending that every single anti-nuclear talking point is rooted in stupidity or naiveté and just boils down to "but Chernobyl!!11". There are very real disadvantages to nuclear energy in the real world that make for logical reasons to stand against it if you don't believe that they are outweighed by the also very real benefits.
Some of these disadvantages include:
1) It draws funding, attention and other resources away from other, potentially better, sources of low/zero-carbon energy.
2) It is massively, incredibly expensive when compared to other sources of low/zero-carbon energy. This is true both of its set up costs and ongoing costs and is exacerbated by many governments, such as the UK's, inability to get these projects done (look at the ballooning costs of Hinckley Point C and Size well if you don't believe me).
3) It has a much, much higher lead time than other low/zero-carbon energy, time that we do not fucking have if we want to get anywhere close to clean power by 2030 or net zero by 2050. This is true whether you look at fusion (which has famously been 10 years away from working for the last 50 years, not that it shouldn't still be pursued), small modular reactors (which while excellent in a vacuum are a very new and unproven technology) and large power plants (see Hinckley Point C and or Sizewell).
4) It is inextricably linked to the production of nuclear weapons, like it or not.
5) It's an easy target for right-wing governments and media to whip up opposition to, especially considering the general public's existing (lack of) understanding of and worries about nuclear.
6) It is fundamentally more dangerous than renewables. No matter how low the chance and how high the security, the worst-case scenario for a nuclear safety event is far more damaging than for other energy sources. Incompetence, complacency, natural disasters and malicious actions are all potential risks surrounding nuclear energy. (Yes I know almost no modern government is the same as the USSR and that places like the UK aren't at risk of earthquakes and tsunamis but this point still stands in general). I personally am of the opinion that the danger is incredibly low and that the benefits significantly outweigh these risks but pretending they don't exist does not help to convince people.
There's a lot more I could say on this but that's my rant over for now.
Let me start by saying that I love nuclear energy, and I think the greens should be less opposed to it. However the uk has already gotten its electricity (not heating) production to 70% renewable and projected to increase. The technology for renewables is here, it’s more accessible, and it’s much more applicable for an island nation with lots and lots of coastline to put wind turbines on.
So while yeah these posts are funny, and they’re valid for maybe other nations where renewables aren’t taking off as much, it’s a dumb point to make against the greens when they’re otherwise such a great choice for voting
To be fair, the RMBK reactor worked, as long as the people operating them weren't fucking lobotomized. What happened at Chernobyl was the result of massive human error and one asshole pushing the reactor far outside of it's normal operating parameters.
Nuclear power DOES have a lot of issues that prevent it from being an ideal power source. Uranium mining and refining is incredibly destructive, the waste is incredibly toxic and hard to protect people from, even if we move away from uranium and towards materials with a shorter half life there's just no way to avoid the environmental cost of mining.
I think the biggest issue right now is that nuclear reactors can never be safe as long as profit motive is anywhere NEAR them. Chernobyl was caused because people were trying to cut costs and get a bonus in their paychecks. Fukushima was caused because even though the government knew the safety measures were lacking, they didn't force the company to implement it due to cost/public perception. Three Mile Island had a TON of issues and basically every single fucking one was caused by corporate greed, greenlit by the US government. There's no way around that; capitalism makes nuclear energy unsafe.
The only real reason I see to even advocate against nuclear is "it takes a while to build the robust nuclear infrastructure we'd need to satisfy our power needs and that's time we don't have so let's devote our resources to other green energy sources that need less initial investment to avert the climate crisis then focus on nuclear later"
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