My problem with nuclear energy is that we should have been using it for the last 60+ years but we didn’t and now we don’t have enough time to build the reactors. Renewables and batteries are the cheapest and fastest way to replace fossil fuels at this point.
Yep, I agree entirely.
I legitimately hate that the top sentiment in this thread seems to be nuclear bad. What bullshit propaganda.
The current top comment is that renewables have taken over as our best option, so yay for that
If you want a more nuanced take: I think nuclear is cool tech, but it’s a bad idea for economic reasons and due to the waste issues.
Coal ashn is more dangerous and harder to dispose of.
This sounds so ridiculuous, that I googled this claim. If one can even call it a claim, because you didn’t finish that sentence to form a coherent argument.
The thing I found is this: http://large.stanford.edu/publications/coal/references/hvistendahl/
Don’t bother reading this piece, because it doesn’t even form its general idea very well. Hence the need for a later clarification, the very last paragraph," saying:
“*As a general clarification, ounce for ounce, coal ash released from a power plant delivers more radiation than nuclear waste shielded via water or dry cask storage.”
Like, yeah, I don’t know if even that claim is true, but I don’t have a hard time believing it. But even if we accept that, what kind of apples to oranges comparison is that supposed to be?
If you still want to support that claim, feel free to do so. But you better pick a better source, than the one I found…
Unless you do, I have to assume, that you’re just regurgitating some propaganda.
By chance have you ever looked into a CANDU reactor?
It is great in times of peace, there are issues when it gets bombed.
How many times in human history has that occurred (aside from the hole in Chernobyl’s sarcophagus, which is not an active plant), please give examples.
How many times have nuclear countries been at war?
It’s something that should be planned for when you build them. Saying war is impossible because it hasn’t come home isn’t a good excuse.
Once again, I am asking for you to provide examples of the WAR CRIME that you are imagining.
Wow, I straight up didn’t notice that, reading through it. I’m glad to see it’s nowhere near as bad as it could have been.
I don’t have an example of it but I can point to examples of energy infrastructure being targeted:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_strikes_against_Ukrainian_infrastructure
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/23/world/europe/russia-oil-refinery-black-rain.html
Why do you think nuclear is immune to it?
Ok, cool. You listed Chernobyl: Is not an active nuclear plant, and as the whole point of the overarching post is that it was caused by gross incompetents, not war. And secondly/third you listed oil refineries being hit, I say good to that, we need to leave fossil fuels behind.
By mid-2024 the country only had a third of pre-war electricity generating capacity, and some gas distribution and district heating had been hit.
Is this where you got Chernobyl from?
So you understand how replacing oil and gas with nuclear would change the target to nuclear. Correct?
Not everything that disagrees with you is propaganda, you know?
I don’t believe your propaganda ;-)
Wow. Your comment was at the top in my sort and I thought “what kind of smooth brained moron thinks nuclear is bad?” The comment directly below says something like “nuclear bad, we don’t need it” what an incredibly stupid take. Nuclear is far safer and less radioactive than many of the energy sources we’re using. Full renewables would be awesome but let’s not just dismiss nuclear, it’s pretty awesome.
While nuclear may have an agreeable amount of safety, the construction of new reactors takes a lot of money and time, and their operation is dependant on the sourcing and disposing of nuclear fuel. One advantage of it might be that it produces a constant amount of electricity, but not a day goes by where solar doesn’t make power as well. So why not just go with solar then?
Oh yeah? What if the sub goes out? ;-)
Because we can’t make an instant transition to solar and it’s far better than fossil fuels and coal. It also alleviates a lot of the storage issues with solar. All solar should be the eventual goal, but nuclear as a stop gap in the decades before we can go full green energy makes sense to me.
Of course we can. Also, building new nuclear plants actually takes the decades you claim solar would take. Not a very good stop gap if it won’t be done before the gap you want to stop has stopped by itself now, is it?
Six to eight years isn’t decades, gross to just spout misinformation like that to try to prove a point. It will almost certainly take 30-40 years to get most of the planet on solar. That’s roughly 24-34 years of providing a stop gap and it doesn’t touch on needing to store and transfer solar since it can’t be collected at night after solar is the primary power source.
What reactor is operational in 6 to 8 years? Can you point to a recent project that went online in that timeframe? Would be interesting how much nuclear capacity cost in comparison to reweables like solar wind or hydro and long range distribution nets or batteries.
Terrapower just broke ground on a new reactor in the US, it’s expected to be completed in approx 6 years. Even with significant delays it would be under 8 years and almost certainly under a decade.
While not touching on cost, this link shows how much more power generation you can get with nuclear compared to other sources of low carbon energy over a decade of deployment. If you need to generate a lot of energy relatively quickly and don’t have amazing hydro options, nuclear appears the most scalable.
https://scienceforsustainability.org/wiki/How_quickly_can_we_build_clean_energy%3F
This might serve as source for those 6-8 years. It seems more like a global/historical number as the author also notes that there isn’t much recent data for the US or Europe.
Explanation: While it’s sometimes considered that the Chornobyl disaster is proof of the danger of nuclear power - and it is certainly proof of the dangers possible when things do go wrong - it’s often understated that the core cause of the disaster was… immense incompetence. It was all incredibly avoidable from start to finish.
True true, but before all the atomheads spawn here. Why not use technology, that provides energy without the possibility of nuking a city/country/world.
The possibility of nuking shit is the only reason why governments keep subsidising nuclear power generation, because the nuclear industry it supports serves as a manpower and knowledge pool for the potential military use of nuclear power.
If you want to do it half way safely, nuclear power is anything but cheap. You can’t justify the enormous costs by anything but it being a stepping stone to nuking shit. I am fine with that, it unfortunately is a necessary evil. Just stop lying about the cheap reliable power source, and state the true reasons behind running that kind of haphazard expensive shit.
Don’t build a reactor that’s designed to produce bomb worthy fissile material then.
Don’t build a reactor in the first place maybe. We have better ways to produce power.
Citation needed
You cannot cool nuclear (and by extension most other nonrenewable power plants) in the summer. With heat rising, it will only get harder.
Plus nuclear is expensive as fuck, as you can see in the other comment
The fact that they shut down because of the water outlet temp is due to policy and procedure, not because of the engineering of the plants. We have many reactors in the US that sit on the great lakes and the ocean, both of which don’t suffer this problem.
Nuclear is expensive for the same reason, politics, not engineering or the science behind it.
We have many reactors in the US that sit on the great lakes and the ocean, both of which don’t suffer this problem.
No, you just don’t have environmental regulations in the US.
The reason those plants have been shut down wasn’t because they can’t technically operate in the summer heat (as any thermal power plant, they do operate on a temperature difference, so warmer cooling water will lower their efficiency, though), but because the temperature of the cooling water released would be high enough to endanger the ecosystem in the body of water they draw their cooling water from.
Procedure sounds an awful lot like a technical requirement ;)
Don’t worry the reactors on the shore of greater bodies of water will surely come up to temps sooner or later.
The “politics” making this stuff expensive is mainly safety precautions, which I for one would like to have in place when we’re talking about a nuclear fission reaction strapped to a water boiler.
This is why we should focus on less "aggressive’ forms of powe generation. Especially if they are more independent.
Renewables have the best LCOE
https://www.lazard.com/media/5tlbhyla/lazards-lcoeplus-june-2025-_vf.pdf
Renewables have the best SLCOE
Thanks!
And is also way cheaper and more reliable and doesn’t produce trash that will be radioactive for thousands of years and doesn’t make a country reliant on very unstable and/or autocratic countries to get access to the resources required for it’s use
Seems like there are only positives to renewables :D
There are some downsides. They just pale in comparison to fossil fuels and nuclear.
For example, tidal barrages and tidal power disrupting local ecosystems, wildlife deaths from windmills, geothermal agitating local land stability and releasing emissions, etc.
No perfect solutions - but there are better solutions, and renewables are definitely better than the existing alternatives. Full speed ahead.
Some people use the argument that nuclear power is OK because Chernobyl only happened because of incompetence. That’s the whole point! In my view, that is an argument AGAINST nuclear power.
Incompetence and human error will always happen. It will happen again, eventually. That’s why we can’t have a power source, with the potential to leave a continent poisoned for thousands of years, relying on the competence or lack of sabotage of human beings.
Go ahead nukies, downvote away, you dogmatic idiots.
Which is why I will forever be against nuclear, we cannot make something incompetence proof. Everything can be controlled for except for the human at the helm.
I mean, that would sanction being against a… great many ordinary things.
That being said, it doesn’t matter much at this point. Renewables are advancing so fast, and are so far along, that they’ll supplant nuclear for all but a handful of functions anyway. Renewable future let’s goooo
Luckily a great many things don’t render land inhabitable for centuries.
Fair enough. I assumed you meant more casualties than the environmental effects, which is my bad.
(though it is inhabitable even now in most places, with radiation levels having dropped dramatically in most of the exclusion zone, just… not recommended. Long-term cancer risks and all that - living there would be like working as a coal miner, which is obviously undesirable to deal with)
There are regions throughout Europe, all the way into Germany, where you can’t safely eat wild mushrooms, and certain wild animals to this day due to contamination from Chernobyl.
Was it cheaply built too?
I was under the impression there were only a few suboptimal structural/design decisions (which would be consistent with the time it was built & serve as a lesson to other designers, like all normal industries should work).
Cheaply built? No. But it did have a known design flaw that wouldn’t be fixed in RBMK reactors until after the disaster. The control rods contained graphite tips to moderate reaction rates when the rods were fully removed. Because they’re the first thing to enter the reactor during a scram (emergency shutdown), they temporarily increase the rate of reaction. This was discovered in 1983 but never fixed because “apparently there was a widespread view that the conditions under which the positive scream effect would be important would never occur”.
Well, yeah, there are a lot of such design flaws in important systems (like commercial aviation) that are either a shortcut (profit cost-cutting or prohibitive costs) or not having enough data on the possibility of occurrence so you can’t make an informed decision (and you just can’t have it all otherwise nothing ever gets built).
What you described seems like the latter since they knew about it & deliberately decided it doesn’t need fixing/changing, but was fixed later when they presumably determined that it made the accident worse. Idk anything about it tho.
the most confusing thing to me will always be that the containment building of that plant design is basically a shed. like yeah, they can’t melt down or whatever, but surely you want to stop any radioactive material from leaving the building even when working normally?
Chernobyl was the reason Germany became anti nuclear.
wasnt that more recent, due to putins propaganda.
Chernobyl accelerated a big anti nuclear movement in Germany. It was the biggest and most well organized protest movement for decades. They managed to shut down construction of some power plants pretty quickly. Some with finished construction never started operating. Exiting nuclear was a main issue for the Green Party from early on. When they got into a government coalition with the SPD in 1998, a phaseout of nuclear power was planned and implemented. When the CDU got back into government, they reversed the exit from nuclear power, even though this was unpopular. The Fukushima nuclear disaster affected Merkel‘s popularity so much, they decided to exit nuclear power again. All of this cost a lot of money, huge amounts of CO2 emissions, and Germany lost technology.
The anti nuclear movement is the most successful political movement of the German left. It’s also an utter tragedy.
Putin Propaganda
While the German left and especially the peace movement and anti nuclear movement received some Soviet support, Putin‘s Russia didn’t play a role AFAIK. For the Soviets a militarily weak and non nuclear West Germany was in their interest.
No that was after the cdu did a 180 on merkels anto-atom course, then they did another 180, only to now ask for nuclear power again…
Hiring party yes men to run everything as cheaply as possible is literally how the USA is run.
And, well… Let’s say we may need to enclose them in a concrete mausoleum before soon.
Hiring party yes men to run everything as cheaply as possible is literally how the USA is run.
It takes decades to strip out the entire apparatus down to things like technical fields. They’re trying, though, and if not stopped, they will get us to the level of the Soviet system.
Yeah but also, nuclear is bad and we don’t need it (anymore).
Yeah but also, nuclear is
badfucking expensive and we don’t need it (anymore).Yeah but also, nuclear is fucking bad and fucking expensive and we don’t need it (anymore).
There are some specialized applications (e.g. RTGs for space probes) where nuclear power is still very useful. I agree that “regular” NPPs aren’t that great anymore.
There is an arguable case for fast breeders as part of a long-term waste management strategy. That one works by breeding high level waste into a more radioactive form that will take a mere 200 years to decay to the level of natural uranium ore as opposed to 20000 years.
The upside: Disposal is doable with technology that exists today as opposed to technology we may at one point possess in the future. We also don’t need to design facilities that last longer than all of recorded history. We don’t need much beyond fast breeders and a few guarded and well-maintained warehouses.
The downside: It still involves guarding and maintaining warehouses full of extremely dangerous high level waste for 200 years and breeders inherently pose a nuclear proliferation risk.
It’s by no means a panacea but as one of the very few feasible ideas for nuclear waste management I think they’re at least worth talking about.
That’s very reasonable, which is why it’s very unlikely to ever be executed.
This is kind of why I’m not 100% behind nuclear in general. The technology is pretty sound, and even the waste generated pales in comparison to what’s up with atmospheric pollution right now. My problem is with corner-cutting and having failure modes that create disasters in the first place. The standards for success are necessarily incredibly high and must be adhered to without fail over the lifetime of the plant. As they say, learn from history: humanity’s track record with those requirements is not good.
There are better options on the horizon though, like thorium reactors that are smaller and don’t create big problems when they break. So, the idea of another 3 Mile Island, Fukushima, or Chernobyl may eventually be a thing of the past.
The thing about Three Mile Island is that it was a nothing burger. Hell, Unit 2 was operating up until 2015, and is now being refueled to be restarted. Even when you look at Chernobyl, it’s now one of the biggest and best nature preserves in Europe. Life still lives there, just not people. It’s not some toxic contaminated wasteland covered in a miasma of chemical filth and devoid of life.
The containment structure did its job, what it was designed to do and contained the partial meltdown. No contamination was released and no meaningful amount of radiation escaped the site. The oil and gas lobby then took it upon themselves to pour resources into anti nuclear crusades, to further ingratiate the fuels they have a financial interest in maintaining the demand for.
The lesson that people learned from Chernobyl is that these things need to fail safely. Modern reactors will automatically wind down their reactions when a problem appears, without intervention. If someone is dumb enough to build a reactor that has runaway reaction problems like Chernobyl… that’s on them
It is not on them, thats the problem, someone else dies cleaning up their mess and the disastercleanup is paid by the taxpayers
Look at how much taxpayer money has been used to clean up oil and gas wells.
It’s a lot more money than it has been for nuclear incidents. The only major (and I use that term lightly. Largest?) incident in the US was Three Mile Island. Go look at the cost for that vs all the oil and gas issues.
Im hardly arguing replacing aging nuclear with more gas and oil nor adding more gas and oil to fuel even more meatproduce or datacenterspawns duh…
…that’s a good point 🤔 Corporations can never fix the systemic problems they cause
