Green Energy

Renewables get cheaper because we are building them… if we built nuclear at the same frequency as renewables their price would plummet as well.

Personally see the best option as a combination, in places like LA, Las Vegas, Phoenix solar should be the number 1 power source. Build wind power in places like Wyoming, and off shore wind where it’s possible. But when you have a place that needs huge amounts of batteries to try and compensate for inconsistent wind/solar that’s where you should build nuclear.

Nuclear is not renewable and has a lot of issues but we also shouldn’t ignore the negatives of lithium, nickel, cadmium, and cobalt mining. At the end of the day all of them are better than fossil fuels

Its a type of energy that gets more expensive

We choose to make it so. Constantly adding security features and not financing research. It could have gone down as well if we had pushed for small reactors, helped the EPR more, not shut down the research into plutonium as a fuel...

Trash is not solved

It is inert and a lot of it has the potential to be a future fuel. "Put it in a hole below the water table" is pretty close to a solution.

A minor error can have a huge environmental impact, especially in densly populated areas like Europe

It will be hard to be as impactful as coal or thermal engines, which are considered to be responsible for about 48 000 premature deaths yearly here in France. If nuclear energy allowed a country to decarbonate, it could "afford" a Chernobyl per year and still save lives.

Plants need cooling, most use rivers and that does not mix well with rising temperatures, and have to be shut down in summer

That's simply not true. Every year journalists fall for it but here is a breakdown:

• Every year some plants undergo planned maintenance in summer, not because it is too hot but because there is less consumption (winter heating is when the peak is)
• Some plants do lower their outputs, the most they had to do it so far was by 0.2% of the total output of the country because of environmental regulations that basically forbid any heating of the water above certain temperatures.
• It only touches plants that don't have the iconic cooling towers. Plants with cooling towers do not warm rivers, in some case they may even cool them down.

As long as there are liquid rivers, plants will be able to cool down. We will have much more serious problems before this becomes an issue.

Nuclear plants are not flexible and can’t react to energy availability

It can. As I am writing that, it is 1pm here, we are at 33GW of nuclear production, mostly because there is a lot of solar power and Germany is flooding us with electricity with negative price. At 4am, we were at 42GW of nuclear.

Most fuel is produced by less reliable states.

Minerals are fungible, therefore consumers go for the cheapest. It usually means countries where semi-slavery is the norm and environmental regulations are not a thing. They do tend to be shitty countries yes. Non-fossil mineral resources however are found pretty uniformly over the globe (having mountains helps). There are uranium mines in France that we shut down because of labor cost.

No public backing

That's the main problem. The above lies have been repeated ad nauseam and local opposition means that opening new nuclear plants is basically impossible. This is a policy and opinion problem mostly.

I am bitter about it. The sane plan was to go full nuclear in the 90s, double the electricity production, get rid of coal and thermal vehicles that way and slowly transition over 40 years into solar as we either get batteries costs down or develop space based solar power.

Now we are getting the transition but it was oil-fueled instead of nuclear-fueled and this choice was made by people misled into believing they defended the environment by fighting nuclear power.

Yes, wind/solar + batteries is the future (though I don't think these are cost competitive with nuclear yet. Solar alone is, batteries not) but opting out of nuclear was a very costly option for the climate.

And the tiny tiny matter of it never having been economically viable. Both the R&D and construction were massively subsidised by the state. Then the corporations were allowed to skim off the profits while the nukes were running. After that the state gets stuck with the bill for decommissioning. It's always been a racket. The only reason "civilian" nuclear power exists is as a fig leaf for nuclear armament.

Also propaganda and lobbying by fossil fuel industries.

This was always propaganda to butter over the fact that the investments into nuclear power only made sense as a basis for a nuclear weapons program. Without that (or the ambition for one) nuclear power has always been an economic black hole and with renewables becoming so cheap it is even harder to argue for it.

In terms of engineering, it takes renewables + shitload of storage in order to have equivalent power generation characteristics to nuclear.

The recent portugal/spain power outage was due to the system being insufficiently damped (insufficient storage/inertia to buffer (the loss of) a high proportion of unpredictable power generation).

If you were to take all of that nuclear waste ever produced in the US, processed and stored inside dry cases, it would fit within an American football field less than 100 ft high. That's an insanely tiny amount of space for all the waste ever created for an entire type of energy production. For some comparison the amount of coal removed from the ground each year would form a cube over a mile wide.

However, most nuclear waste is low level waste and decays within a decade or less. Some of the medium level waste lasts a few decades. The longer stuff is a small fraction of overall waste. But some of it can be reprocessed and used as fuel again. It is also perfect for the starter fuel for some Thorium-based nuclear breeder reactor designs. Some are useful for various nuclear medicines. Very little of it actually has no use whatsoever.

worst case scenario you could send rockets of it into the sun.

As others kinda said, it take isn't that much waste, especially compared to like coal ash. And it's actually much safer too in dry casks. There are also bigger problems with nuclear than the waste, but thats not your question. The way to solve waste is a combination of:

• big ol fuckin hole in the ground (e.g. salt mine or similar, where it will get sealed in)

• molten salt reactors and other modern designs, which more completely use up the fuel. Old rod designs are actually like kinda really inefficient.

Scientific education rather than emotional reactions to the unknown does that.

Coal on the other hand is relatively cheap, the technology is fairly simple, running them is fairly cheap, there's no waste to get rid of etc

Well, the waste gets thrown into the atmosphere. And that coal ash contains radioactive waste. Radioactive particulates up to 10x more concentrated than the raw coal fuel are injected directly into the atmosphere and spread by the winds. You know, the actual dangerous part of those nuclear accidents everyone is always thinking about.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/

If a nuclear plant leaked even a fraction of that amount of radiation it would be shut down immediately. But all of that gets to be ignored, because it's not a nuclear power plant.

there's no waste to get rid of etc

Yeah we breathe it in and then go in the ground so it's pretty good.