Nuclear

Damn, I was unaware of the artist. Indeed, fuck Stonetoss!

Johnny Harris and Big If True have a great video discussing fear and actual nuclear impacts. The only factor it lacks mentioning is how much land fossil fuels takes up. Each year, fossil fuels infrastructure distroys more land than Chernobyl and fukushima combined.

I doubt nuclear alone would suffice to power our civilization. Of course, you didn't say that.

Oil has been quite easy energy source enabling complex supply chains and I don't think we can change them to electric or nuclear powered ones.

We've had a horrible track record on waste disposal. Climate change is the result of our failure to dispose of CO2 from burning fossil fuels and that's also why I'm wary of us dealing with nuclear waste.

and instead of building plants with learnings from those events we continue to do nothing with nuclear, relying on ever aging tech and facilities. id love to see small nuclear reactors or some of the other designs being put into use. we also need to spread renewables around as well. if every house was its own powersource and onl relied on the grid for backup things would be cleaner.

Chernobyl

Basing on the US since that is where my MS studies in environment policy were focused. Conservative republicanans poll highest in believing climate change is fake or not caused by human activity

From the same article, you can see that support for expanding nuclear energy is stronger among liberal republicans and strongest with conservative republicans.

*Pew research is not a scholarly source on its own, but scores center for media bias making it optimal for readers without academic library access

Two things that keep me from supporting additional nuclear: 1) Cost. Show me the actual cost per unit energy for nuclear, and show me the cost trajectory. Now do the same for SWB (solar-wind-battery). I know for a fact the latter is decreasing rapidly year over year. 2) Until all nuke plants can recycle their fuel, and with ZERO global long-term geologic repositories in operation, nuclear has a waste problem that can last 20,000 years.

The problem is that the nuclear evangelists refuse to engage in real debate about the downsides of the technology. Every valid criticism or suggestion that other alternatives are a better investment is brushed aside, often with a side of name calling.

The reality is that renewables are much more scalable and cost effective in the long term than these massive infrastructure projects. Nuclear is fine. We should have been building it for the past 50 years. The reasons we didn't build it are dumb. But it's simply an outdated paradigm now. Investing a billion dollars and ten years in building a power station now just doesn't make sense when you could invest that money in better future proof tech like microgrid solar.

On your third point, it can be argued that solar panels still allow capitalists to centralize everything. Solar panels use a similar production process to microchips which is something they can just make as expensive as they can, it's not like people can rebel and make homebrew solar panels. Remember when there was a "chip shortage" for no reason so they made all the chips and graphics cards really expensive?

Doubt tbh, r/nuclear is a pro nuclear sub. You were probably banned from that shit hole that is r/energy.

I’m glad this space is pro nuclear

I don't think that's necessarily true. I just think people won't jump down your throat for daring to have a different opinion.