Ask Lemmygrad

I'm not that strongly against it but I'd rather see renewables do the job. But I'm not living in fantasyland so when we do our climate transition thing I'm not going to protest against a few reactors being build.

It's based.

Safe and a medium term solution for energy.

The people leading the charge against nuclear aren't unknowingly helping the fossil fuel industry, they are funded by the fossil fuel industry. Have been since the late sixties / early seventies when oil and gas companies realized that they could very easily commandeer the anti-nuclear-weapon and environmentalist bandwagon. Since then they've leveraged fear, of nuclear weapons, radiation and unreliable Soviet reactors, to keep fossil fuels pumping in money.

Currently I think fission energy is the best we have. It's relatively low pollution, relatively low whole cycle footprint, energy dense, efficient, reliable, and so on. Renewables complement and enhance but cannot replace some form of always on baseload power.

You can also look at the history of civilization based on how energy dense their primary fuel was. Coal and oil unlocked industrial potential for having many times more energy than wood. The nuclear age brought on intriguing thoughts like electricity "too cheap to meter." Throwing away that very well earned technical expertise in favour of filthy coal and inefficient renewables is completely silly. Until we find/unlock the next fuel source with a higher energy density, it's the best we've got. We should be leveraging it to improve people's quality of life as we have with every energy related breakthrough in human history.

Nuclear energy is an absolutely necessary and there is no dichotomy between nuclear and renewables. These are complementary technologies that each have their respective strengths. The only way we can realistically phase out fossil fuels is by using nuclear as the backbone of the energy infrastructure. There is a a good reason why China is currently investing in building 150 nuclear reactors while also being world leader in renewables.

Haven't seen this mentioned yet, so I will chime in.

I used to be very pro nuclear, and still see it as a positive addition to a healthily diverse energy system that is able to provide baseline levels of power when wind and solar are low producing like at night. It's unrealistic to think the vast quantities of batteries required for strictly renewables will be easily accessible or not lead to significant waste. This doesn't discount the harvesting and processing of uranium and other fissile materials, but a diversity of resource inputs makes a system more resilient.

My shift has been witnessing the decade it took to construct the Vogel reactor in Georgia when considered with the amount of pollution, waste, and possible risks of nuclear. If reprocessing became more commonplace and environmental regulations were not toothless, I'd still point out the arguments made by Christian Parenti a decade ago. As the Vogel reactor was just approved, he claimed it would take twice as long as the 5 stated years and be double its budget. He was exactly right.

Nuclear would be great in an already socialist society because all the downsides are more easily addressed, but the vast costs and amount of time to build reactors is in direct conflict with the urgency of the climate catastrophe. Every dollar spent focusing on nuclear projects is a dollar that won't be spent on solar or wind which have much faster ROI periods in terms of carbon offsets.

Once we stabilize with other renewables, more focus on nuclear certainly makes sense, but given the urgency of the situation, we need to do what will have the most impact as soon as possible so we have the opportunity to develop nuclear further.

Necessary, specially in our context of global warming, sadly is has been demonized due to Chernobyl accident.

Before someone point out that there were worse nuclear disasters, i make my point that because it happened on soviet union, the nuclear fear took a ride on the red scare.

Another good post on this, with some good back and forth articles linked.

Related since its also nuclear: China's fusion power program is advancing rapidly, and we'll likely see the first fusion power plant by the 2050s.

I'm a nukehead. I want nuclear cargo ships, I want coal factories to be retrofitted with SMRs, I want nuclear airplanes, I want nuclear rocket engines and nuclear bomb propelled rockets, I want nuclear synfuel and nuclear hydrogen and nuclear desalination. The only thing I'm not sold on yet is doing excavation with nuclear explosions.

But to be realistic, I'm mostly just against the environmentalist demonization of nuclear energy. We need more nuclear energy than we have right now, but it's ahistorical to advocate for a fully nuclear economy in the era of renewable energy. Something like China's clean energy mix seems pretty reasonable.

Extremely useful, although we should invest in researching potentially better variants like thorium reactors and fusion.

We're lucky on Earth because we have a fairly large amount of Uranium that should last us at least 100 years. It's not nearly as destructive as most ways of generating power, and 100 years gives us lots of time to find more uranium (harvesting it from sea water comes to mind), or to finally get fusion reactors into production.

Very pro-nuclear. It defends against the following:

• imperialism;
• climate change;
• energy shortage ;

Good shit. Builds jobs. Low polluting. Way too much corruption and expense involved. Can’t be scaled down.

It’s better than fossil fuels in moderation, but we don’t have enough uranium to last too long on it. Some people use nuclear to deflect away from renewables, but the reality is we need to be mostly renewable to be sustainable. I think fast breeders and fusion are worth continuing to look into, but since it doesn’t exist now we shouldn’t act like we already have them. It’s important to consider the waste and the fact that many countries just keep nuclear around to make nukes. highly recommend everyone read Half Earth Socialism which has a good chapter debunking claims nuclear energy will save us from climate change.

It's good especially compared to fossil fuels. People are very afraid of nuclear waste so we will keep track of it and know where it is. Fossil fuel waste is also very dangerous but it's emitted as a part of everyday life straight into the atmosphere and isn't directly and immediately harmful to people. So no one gives a crap about it. To me this is a big advantage to nuclear.

Solar is WAY cheaper, quick to build and still decreasing in costs. Nuclear is expensive, slow to build and not appropriate for all terrains. Earthquake prone areas are bad as we can see from Fukushima nuclear plant. Nuclear also needs a source of water for cooling. It's good in niche cases but getting less and less economically justifiable compared to renewables.

my friend excitedly tells me about new energy source

I tell him this better be something new

”haha oh man, yeah it’s new - it’s nuclear power!”

mfw it’s steam turning a turbine for the millionth time

I'm pro nuclear power thanks to some videos made by Kyle Hill which I will link

https://yewtu.be/J3znG6_vla0

https://yewtu.be/4aUODXeAM-k?listen=false&t=1

Overrated by some Reddit/lib types.

They advocate it because they feel they'll shock environmentalists.

There's a reason hardly any nuclear plants have been built the past 40 years. Because there are more profitable ways of making energy.

It wasn't hippies shut it down, it was profit-calculation.

And we're running low on fossil fuels. "Oh we'll use uranium instead!" Well that's a non-renewable mineral too, we'll run out of that soon enough.

I'm "against" it in current reality in the sense that I see it as the techie way to greenwash energy production. It relies on a lot of mining, typically in third world countries, to supply the energy consumption of the imperial core.

That wrecks the local environment and the society getting wrecked is never gonna benefit from that energy. I'm pretty sure Europe which relies a lot on nuclear barely has any mines themselves. Building the infrastructure is also very expensive (specially since a shoddy job would be so dangerous to first worlders), to the point where it makes other large scale projects like dams sound plausible.

They just aren't made instead beause they'd be changing and possibly harming the core environment rather than the peripheral one.

Nuclear proponents always have this (possibly very real) strawman in their heads about how "nuclear is unsafe" or "nuclear weapons" with good counterarguments for both, but I've yet to see one explicitly countering the position that nuclear power is just externalising the damage to overexploited countries. The current Niger situation comes to mind.

And nuclear waste disposal as it exists is also very unsustainable.

Now, if the same countries that extract the uranium/plutonium had the right to decide if that's acceptable to them democratically, and got help from "green" countries to set up their own end-to-end nuclear infrastructure with no strings attached for the good of the human race, then I'd be very interested.

But hydro, wind and solar are all right there with way less drawbacks.

It's probably useful but all I can think about is how easy it would be to become complacent and watch another meltdown happen or a major terrorist attack. All those benefits seem secondary to the possiblity of hundreds of thousands of people dying overnight from radiation poisoning.