Pro unless you want to build one in a 15 mile proximity of my house then I get cold feet
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2026
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All reactors are subject to overheat leading to meltdown when suddenly shutdown. They become massive energy vampires, requiring huge cooling power (and manpower) for up to 2 years after to avoid that.
What are the odds that a "social collapse" (war, plague, disaster, etc) leaves some with no workers and no external juice? Not if, when! Meltdowns will occur, some will breach containment. Only fools light an unextinguishable fire that kills them if they ever stop feeding it.
While reactor designs are "safe": this requires that they follow protocols, which often means unplanned downtime. Given the social pressures for energy, it seems that reactor operators will sometimes disobey shutdown requirements. Corruption is real in all societies. With reactors it absolutely includes a non-zero catastrophe chance. Again not if, when!
Reactors are safe, for a pre-designed lifespan. Often 50 years. To decommission properly is massively expensive and takes years of labour, and requires a replacement plant. Are operators actually squirreling away the funds to have this all saved up 50 years later (by "overcharging" now)? Or are the future governments just gonna keep patching a pig... not if, when!
What kind of containment system will work for 10s of thousands of years? What does that cost, or even look like?
https://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of-honor/
I'm nuclear neutral.
Nuclear is a great resource and we should try to keep all plants that are online today online.
However, expansion of nuclear in the corrupt, finance-capital USA should be deprioritized in favor of renewables and storage. The latter has insanely fast construction times and can be deployed much faster than new nuclear. We're racing against the clock to transition our society away from carbon polluting activities, and renewables present the greatest opportunity to cut down the largest emitting section: fossil fuel power.
Long term I think humanity needs to invest in more fission and definitely fusion, but we're in a climate crisis and need solutions now.
I'm a fan of nuclear technology. Any plants working today should be maintained indefinitely, and in places that don't have any options due to geography building new ones today makes sense. And hopefully those investments can help make nuclear tech cheaper in the future with SMRs, etc.
That said, anywhere that is still burning fossil fuels on a nice sunny day should be investing all their energy money into building renewables. It's such an amazingly cheap and quick way to replace fossil fuels. Each panel hooked up is instantly displacing fossil fuels being burnt. And once you have enough solar to cover the daylight hours, you're going to be overproducing during the brightest hours and that will induce people to hook up batteries to profit from the "free" energy and now you've solved the duck curve hours.
I also have some reservations about humans being responsible enough. I live in Japan and do not trust that the energy companies have learned anything from Fukushima, they're just doing as little as possible to cover their asses. The end of Pax Americana and the rise of Climate Change unrest will also increase terrorism risks. It's not bad enough that I'm saying don't build nuclear, but I feel it's still enough of a risk that renewables should be preferred when possible (of course new tech mitigates this to some extent with safer spent fuels and smaller reactors). Just decentralizing the grid so that homes can generate their own power after storms is a huge win with renewables.
Pro, I think a lot of the anti-nuclear sentiments are leftovers from when nuclear power was not as heavily regulated as it is now.
Now it's basically impossible for a meltdown except for if a literal natural disaster happens, and sometimes even then
And it's a very clean energy source, with the one problem of what to do with the radioactive waste, but there is far less waste than fossil fuels, and it's easier to get rid of.
I'm nominally pro, or maybe passively anti while cheaper, more scalable, and cleaner sources are at hand. If you're already going full wind, solar, and geo and there's still a rationale for a nuclear plant, I'm open to it. But that's a big fat if.
The thing with nuclear power is that it's FAR easier to convert a fossil fuel generator to nuclear than it is to convert it to green or to build a new one.
And yes, I agree, we need more green, but we first need to kill off all the fossil fuel options.
Although you are right in the sense that nuclear produces steam, I am not aware of any instance of this having been done. The steam turbine is such a small part of a nuclear plant.
In my view nuclear is best as a baseline production and heat production method. The baseline part may reduce as grid batteries smooth out the volatile production of the renewables.
As a society, it's easier to do everything at once rather than one thing at a time. Edit: The difference with nuclear is that it's so much more expensive than other green options that spending on it now takes significant potential kwh out of the grid if it is given equal funding priority.
Pro, but renewables do deploy way faster so we do want those renewables to be running while we wait for the nuclear plants to be constructed.
Turning off fossil fuel burning plants is the priority
Pro. If you consider how absolutely minuscule the risks are (keep your regulatory bodies free of corruption, guys), all political criticism looks uninformed and performative, answers in this thread included.
Imagine an anti-vaxx hippie: presents as progressive, gushes of pointless contrarianism, easily exploitable by the estabilishment*. That's how I see the nuclear power-"critics", both here and elsewhere.
* E.g.: I consider the Green Party of Switzerland the epitome of counter-productive performative idiocy ever since they've been campaigning for replacing our NPPs with gas turbine plants. Fuckin' 🤡s the lot of them.
I used to be anti-nuclear in the past but I realized a lot of the talking points were either wrong or directly favoring the fossil fuel companies. 100% for Nuclear and renewable energy.
I'm against nuclear because it's too expensive and there is no proper place to store the depleted material.
There's plenty of places?
And do remember, it's taking what was already a dangerous material, processing it to be less dangerous, and then putting it somewhere safe
Unlike where we store all the CO2, plenty of room for that in our atmosphere.
Im pro nuclear power as long as it is cost effective.
Renewable solar and wind with backup batteries is by far the least expensive power supply at the moment.
Anything contradicting the previous sentence is a complete lie that was spread by liars with money to gain.
yes. its stable and powerful, you cant rely entitely on renewable energy because sun does not always shine, wind does not always blow and hydro-electric outputs too little power compared to the damage caused. you also cant rely on coal because youre going to fucking die
At this rate, I’m grateful for anything that isn’t burning fossil fuels.
I’d rather see solar and wind power though.
I think it works great in other places, but it is dangerous for America, where they will be built and maintained by bureaucratic Sociopathic corporations who will cut corners at every opportunity, until they fail, and kill millions.
Maybe someday America will evolve to the point where opportunities like this won't be automatically hijacked by financial psychopaths.
where they will be built and maintained by bureaucratic Sociopathic corporations who will cut corners at every opportunity, until they fail, and kill millions.
That applies everywhere though regardless of profit incentive. Even the Soviet Union cut corners on the development and running of the Chernobyl plant which led to its infamous disaster. It's not because of profiting mindset, but due to bureaucratic fear from an authoritarian leadership who want to speed up the process.
I am pro nuclear energy. It's the most efficient way to generate sustainable electricity in abundance in the smallest amount of space.
We're not running out of space. That's a strange thing to use as a decider.
Same opinion here. It's basically a gas well boiler plant without the CO2. The reason we don't have more of it is due to politics surrounding transporting nuclear waste.
As someone who has done quite a bit of work on power systems (in the New Zealand context) recently.
You have to consider any energy generation technology in the environment it is going to be deployed in.
Whilst I am generally pro-nuclear; as a technology. It doesn't really work as a deployable energy system in comparison to other forms of generation; especially here in NZ. There are three main reasons for this:
- Cost in both time and money to construct nuclear is far too high.
- Industry to support nuclear doesn't exist in NZ. Expert techs, operators, fabricators etc are not here; we would need to build an industry alongside building the first plant.
- Regulatory framework to enable nuclear generation is almost nonexistent. We have medical isotope framework; as a basic way to work with radiological material.
- Bonus challenge; we would have to import all the fuel.
Countries with existing nuclear industries and power plant have a much easier time; but when comparing the cost in time and money to get the first GWh out of a nuclear generator; it is a hard sell.
One major advantage nuclear has over other forms of generation is physical footprint; effective power density is absolutely massive. To get similar power density in renewable generation, the only thing close would be the in development supercritical geothermal power; though nuclear would still have higher power density and is not geographically constrained.
Maybe things will change in the future. Maybe small modular reactors will eventuate in an easy to deploy way; or the developments in Chinese thorium reactors will pan out to a viable generation tech. But technology is not the only stumbling block that nuclear energy faces; especially in a small country that doesn't have an existing nuclear industry.
I know there is a lot of money being thrown at fusion; and that may change the game entirely, it is an interesting time to be looking at energy systems.
NZ is earthquake and volcano prone, not ideal for nuclear.
I'm amazed at how level headed and straight forward the arguments are presented across a rather large variety of instances!
Also, against. Renewable + Battery + grid is the way to go. Connect every power source and distribute the energy. Include redundancy because energy is important.
I was pro for a long time until I read Nassim Taleb on the tail risk associated with nuclear power.
Look at Fukushima.
Look at nuclear power plants becoming targets in war.
Look at how the capitalists who will be running these things treat risk generally.
There are better options available.
yeah, I'm overall thinking renewables + storage = a much better overall solution for generation, transmission, and impact.
I don't think we should 'get rid' of nuclear - the tremendous investment in giant steam run nuclear plants should be used, but we shouldn't build new ones, and should look really hard at how we're gonna store the waste in a secure manner.
Ideally waste-consuming reactors will come along to eat all those waiting storage pools of hot radionuclides and turn them into energy + inert waste, but until then we have to stop adding to the pile.
Context: I'm currently doing a PhD in nuclear engineering
Hard-line advocates of nuclear power usually point to its role as a 'baseload' generation, but this term is often misused. A lot of people use it as if it means "reliable power on demand" as opposed to wind and solar which is not (without batteries). But baseload generation generally refers to plants with unvarying output that provide the minimum energy consumption of the grid, so that other (varying output) energy sources can be turned up or down to make up the deficit.
The "unvarying" part is very important for nuclear power. Conventional nuclear plants (PWRs/LWRs) really hate when you vary their power output. This is because varying heat and radiation flux through the fuel rod cladding causes a "racheting" effect which accelerates the swelling of fuel pellets against them leading to formation of cracks in the surface oxide, which can propagate into the bulk metal if power goes up and down too often, leading to rupture of the fuel rod cladding (which is bad). Anything below 85% power output for longer than 2 weeks is classed as extended reduced power operation (ERPO) and should be minimised - typically it is done for maintenance purposes.
This is important because it influences how much of your energy production can actually come from nuclear. France for example generates something like 75% of its electrical power from nuclear, but this is only possible because they are surrounded by countries which import a lot of energy (i.e. Germany and the UK), so they can offload excess power there and avoid putting their plants into ERPO. If Germany and the UK had similarly high amounts of nuclear, the system would not work and a lot of plants would experience reliability issues.
All this is to say, nuclear is an excellent energy source for making up a large, unvarying chunk of energy production (say, ~30%) but anything much more than that can cause more problems than it solves. One power source which can provide reliable on-demand time-varying energy is... batteries! Which is one of the reasons that recent advances in battery + solar are so exciting to me. A power grid made up of solely nuclear and renewables working together to meet time-varying demand is now completely plausible. So we dont have to choose between nuclear or renewables per se, we just have to deploy each in a way that suits its own merits.
What about nuclear + storage (pumped hydro, batteries) then? That should let you up the baseload a bit right.
Absolutely! Though in practice battery storage tends to be more economical with renewables as the excess is higher (so electricity is cheaper) and storage time is shorter (as upping nuclear baseload would require you to account for differing long-term demand between seasons)
Might I just add that nuclear isn't exactly dealing with climate change and water shortages that well.
It's something I never really thought about, but plenty of nuclear plants have faced climate related issues in recent years, and been forced to shutdown or reduce output.
Also, in an age of drone warfare, decentralised power production is potentially also a huge plus.
This is true. We hear about it happening a lot in mainland europe because there are a lot of inland reactors relying on rivers/reservoirs, however coastal reactors aren't vulnerable in the same way. Climate change certainly isn't making nuclear obsolete, but it definitely changes the way we need to think about cooling systems
Of course, coastal reactors are vulnerable in other ways. Climate change can exacerbate extreme weather events. It's the annoying thing about lots of stuff, you only really find out what goes wrong, when it goes wrong.
Unknown unknowns, as some arsehole once put it.
Also, coal contains small amounts of uranium and thorium which gets concentrated in the fly ash. Fly ash which then gets spread across the area surrounding the power plants. So I'm certainly not saying nuclear is obsolete or particularly dangerous compared to alternatives like coal.
Expensive, takes forever to build, produces shit ton of waste. Also ugly as sin.
Fossil fuel companies want you to support it because it takes a really long time to set up and they can turn a profit during that time.
You're way off on the amount of waste they produce.
If you collected the waste of every nuclear plant in the United States since 1950 in one place, it would only fill a football field up to about 30ft deep. That's really not all that much considering it's 70+ years of power. That's very easily manageable if people would just get over their fear.
The entire NPP is also nuclear waste when it is taken out of operation. That is a lot of waste. Sure, it may not be highly radioactive, but you cannot just dump it on a landfill and call it a day, either. Every screw, every doorknob, every everything has to be properly disposed of.
That's not how it works. Only a tiny fraction of the debris requires specialized handling and disposal. Doorknobs outside the containment building are absolutely not radioactive and are not treated that way. The radiation levels inside a nuclear plant are actually lower than the surrounding background radiation levels outside the plant.
Nation states will choose uranium / plutonium reactors so that they can abuse nuclear power for weapons grade material generation. But we already have nuclear proliferation. Cat's out of the bag. Given that nuclear is a huge win in almost every other way, I'm pro-nuclear even in the context of nation states.
I'm pro but think it needs to be replaced over time
not shut down and replaced by non renewables like it's now sometimes the case
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