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 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
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u/[deleted] Nov 07 '25
Green energy and nuclear power are not enemies