I mean im guessing its because it may not be as profitable, or atleast at first, boycotts or directly just capitalism fucking everything up? i legit always imagine aliens seeing us still use coal while having DISCOVERED IN 1932
Realistically, the time for nuclear (fission) has past. If we were in the 50s or 60s, and were making a concerted effort to remove fossil fuel energy production, nuclear could have helped us do it. Now, with steadily decreasing renewable energy costs and cheaper and more effective battery storage, it’s a break-even option at best, and takes a long time to implement.
Fusion has a real chance, provided we can figure it out well enough to do anything with it. It may not be economically viable, and it’s hard to be certain before we actually get it working. Fusion could also be more effective for certain space missions, especially to the gas giants and farther from the sun. Realistically, anything closer than Mars does pretty well with solar.
Its a type of energy that gets more expensive
Hard to get insurance, so all costs fall to the states while all profits go to companies
Trash is not solved
A minor error can have a huge environmental impact, especially in densly populated areas like Europe
Plants need cooling, most use rivers and that does not mix well with rising temperatures, and have to be shut down in summer
No public backing
High initial costs, high costs so run, high costs to dismantle
Nuclear plants are not flexible and can’t react to energy availability
Most fuel is produced by less reliable states. Renewable energy is produced in your home country.
No chance of decentralizing the grid, making it a target for single point of failures or attacks (State sponsored or terrorism)
Solar is cheaper, battery parks are cheaper, hydrogen is cheaper, wind is cheaper, hydro is cheaper.
All in all, there are cheaper ways to create and store more energy safely, more decentralized and with less ties to single big companies.
Money is no issue, because if we have billions to throw at one plant, we obviously have enough for a smarter grid with storage options.
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.
f nuclear energy allowed a country to decarbonate, it could “afford” a Chernobyl per year
Or, you know, invest in renewables, better international grids and sodium-based storage instead of bring fine with turning part of your country into a wasteland…
It took 40 years to have solar energy and batteries up to the task, and we are not there yet. Yes, it could have been a choice to more massively invest in R&D in these fields, but you still need electricity while you shut down nuclear plants. Don’t do it unless you are ready to replace them with something else than coal. We are not there yet. Germany relies on France’s nuclear capabilities to import electricity at night.
That’s simply not true. Every year journalists fall for it
Direct quote from Axpo:
Eine übermäßige Erwärmung des bereits warmen Gewässers soll in heißen Sommerperioden verhindert werden, um Flora und Fauna nicht zusätzlich zu belasten
Translation: Excessive warming of the already warm water should be prevented during hot summer periods so as not to put additional strain on flora and fauna
Source: https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/europa/atomkraftwerke-hitze-kuehlung-abgeschaltet-100.html
Yes, it is not a problem for the power plants, it is a problem for the fauna and it only impacts reactors without cooling towers (which I repeat, can actually cool down rivers). And I may add, this is a problem for the fauna caused in big part by the global warming which nuclear plants help prevent.
From the (translated article)
The measures were intended to protect the ecosystem of the Aare River and comply with strict environmental regulations.
…
According to EDF, throttling or shutting down nuclear power plants during heat waves has led to an average reduction in annual electricity production of 0.3 percent since 2000.
To summarize: it’s being suppressed to keep the fossil industry alive.
It’s the opposite, convincing governments to invest in totally uneconomic nuclear reactors that will take 15-20 years to build, ensures that these countries will continue to depend on fossile fuels for the next 15-20 years.
They do not take that long to build. At all. Besifes, most of the build time is because of red tape, like requiring a plant to be FULLY DESIGNED, reviewed, and approved by multiple bodies before they can even break ground on one in the US.
It is red tape and fear mongering, not an actual feature of nuclear power itself.
It’s the current reality in both the US and Europe. And looking at the various serious construction defects that are surfacing in French plants that were build at a time when the government waived much of the red tape, these extra precautions save a lot of costs over the lifetime of the plants.
Nuclear plants are very complex machines and government contractors are well known to cut corners and do shoddy work when not supervised well. This has nothing to do with fear mongering 🤷
Renewables are best for sure. I guess if the required logistics are not in place to get them online faster, I guess waiting for fusion is better.
I would have thought it could be done faster. Thanks for the info!
hmmmmmmmmmm u do have a point, but i mean lithium is running out and we need a constant influx of power (power grid, no batteries) like with nuclear, we could never afford to use batteries for all the energy in the planet. also i THINK that hydro disturbs the ecosystem (fish n stuff cant get through) but im not sure how true that is considering that they can always just open a gate for fish to pass, like with that online dorbell.
im not sure how true that is considering that they can always just open a gate for fish to pass
That’s not how that actually works. Damming has huge impacts on downstream, now much drier, ecosystems. Even if there were a way to “open a gate for fish”, that wouldn’t solve the problem that their habitat is now gone. This is among reasons people have fought for dam removal. This also ignores the flooding of the environment that becomes the reservoir.
In Germany we already often have more energy than we can use and wind turbines have to be shut down so the power grid doesn’t get overwhelmed. What we need most right now (here in Germany) is more grid expansion and not necessarily more energy production. Also, not every store of energy has to be lithium batteries.
In fact, sodium batteries seem to be taking off and the only downside they have compared to lithium batteries is energy density, which isn’t a problem for grid storage.
I’ll tell you why we stopped in America. The Three Mile Island incident was 12 days after The China Syndrome hit theaters, a movie about a reactor meltdown. That’s it. That simple. People freaked out and we shut down plans for new plants.
Both the association with nuclear weapons and several high profile nuclear accidents worked to shape public perception negatively towards nuclear power.
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.
Nuclear safety standards in most western countries are legally defined as whatever was high enough to make the reactors unprofitable (with language such as “the highest reasonably attainable level of safety”). This results in ridiculous scenarios like nuclear reactors being expected to store their waste perfectly for 100,000 years even if nobody attends to it while fossil fuel plants kill millions with polluted air and agriculture just pisses pollution into the environment. We build monuments to nuclear waste so that future civilizations may know to fear it properly even if all contact is lost because oh no what if like ten of these hypothetical post-post-apocalyptic people die, while hundreds of millions are set to die right now because of the climate change that waste could have mitigated.
Nuclear reactors are safe enough that grad students can operate them. If the entire world electrical supply ran on electricity you could put the nuclear waste in a couple hundred oil drums and drop those in an olympic swimming pool and people nearby would be under less risk than from a steel mill.
And yes, without the nuclear arms industry it would have made more sense to develop cheaper and safer fuels like thorium. But nuclear disasters are like train crashes - terrible, of course, but vastly overblown by the media in a way that somehow coincides perfectly with fossil fuel/car industry interests.
The only reason “civilian” nuclear power exists is as a fig leaf for nuclear armament.
I don’t think post war Germany had the delusion of their own nukes. Here the nuclear industry just exists to shuffle public money into private pockets.
Franz-Josef very much wanted Germany to have the bomb. While the German nuclear program was ostensibly always civilian, they absolutely wanted to keep the option open.
Isn’t that the dream for every business ever?
Also propaganda and lobbying by fossil fuel industries.
Of course.
As if the public decides anything
If that was the case propaganda wouldn’t be necessary.
Propaganda is for fomenting consent.
You think of propaganda as if its goal is to convince the general public
Humans cant be trusted with nuclear because inevitably someone will try to cost cut it and we get shit like Chernobyl again.
That’s literally impossible with modern designs.
well we already have many nuclear plants and no real danger has occured since chernobyl/mile island (that i know of), you just need heavy goverment regulations
There were several incidents (ref. 1), but in particular Fukushima in 2011 changed a lot, as it was a modern type of power plant.
It reignited discussions regarding safety and (under the impression of 9/11) fears that nuclear power facilities could be targeted by terror attacks.
With current regulations new reactors can cost some 20 to 40 billion, making it one of the most expensive sources of electrical energy. Costs for decomissioning are significant as well. Both building and decomissioning costs are typically passed on to tax payers.
Also, permanent storage of used burning rods is hard, nobody wants nuclear waste buried in their neighborhood. Given its half life of ~240 000 years, it may also be difficult to communicate its dangers to future generations (ref. 2).
The currently most common sources of burning material (Uranium) stem from - large parts - politically controverse regions and may in sum last some estimated 80-100 years, quite short given some 10-20 years of construction time per plant.
This is not talking about thorium and salt reactors, but technical challenges and costs seem to be limiting for these technologies, in particular as long as the default infrastructure exists.
edit: the ‘new’ types are more complex and not suited for weapons in general.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accidents?wprov=sfla1
So I kind of want to split it halfway between you two: The reason all the regulation exists is because of how dangerous it is, the reason Nuclear is so expensive and time consuming is because of regulation. I reckon you could basically make a super dangerous Nuclear plant for not much more than a coal plant and in the same time frame. So, you could say it like “nuclear is too time consuming and expensive to be relevant”, or “nuclear is too dangerous to be relevant” and they’re both basically saying the same thing.
Would be a shame if someone were to be ripping out regulations left and right 🥲
Initially, world was very nuclear-positive. Engineers envisioned nuclear power being the holy grail of energy technology and a foundation for our future. Extreme energy density and low price-per-watt of nuclear fuel promised an energy revolution - and for a while, it actually began.
Added to expand: add to this the boost of military. The Cold War required many countries to build up nuclear arsenal, and to make weapon-grade plutonium, you need to conduct uranium cycle - one that conveniently produces a lot of energy and can be used to generate power.
Then, Idaho, Chernobyl and much later Fukushima happened, slowly turning the world against nuclear as a dangerous energy production option. Association with nuclear weapons and Cold War didn’t help, either.
In the meanwhile, renewables like solar and wind, which were initially prohibitively expensive, got more traction and investment, and as a result of new developments and economies of scale, they eventually managed to become cheaper than nuclear in most areas of the world, rendering nuclear power financially inefficient and thus largely obsolete.
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.
Up until quite recently, nuclear has been decently economical as it is - but indeed, a lot of nuclear investments of the previous century were made with obtaining weapon-grade plutonium in mind. It’s one part of why countries went with uranium cycle to begin with.
Modern research into thorium-based reactors that could be cheaper, safer and not produce nuclear weapon material is too little too late. Renewables already took over the game.
Anyway, I added this to the original response, as I think it is a vital part I forgot to mention.
i can speak to this very directly. my uncle thought he was working on making nuclear power more renewable. but what was really happening is that depleted fuel rods are the magic sauce that makes thermonuclear devices (hydrogen bombs) work. even now, i do not truly believe the nuclear powered ai centers are about the progress of man, but rather an excuse to set up extraction economies stripping the earth of her natural resources to then be turned against the working poor who mined the wealth for their overlords in the form of weapons of instantaneous genocide. the only arguments i’m willing to hear in favor of nuclear are to decommission old petrochemical plants, but none of the nuclear plans being presented now have these provisions. the capital hoarders do not propose to sunset any coal, and accuse you of being a pro-petrochemical luddite when you stand in the way of their nuclear proposals.
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).
Yes, storage is complicated - but it can be done. Pumped hydro and other technologies exist to make storage cheaper than it would be in batteries, and sodium-ion options become cheaper and cheaper to serve as buffers.
As far as I know, the power outage in Portugal and Spain did not start with renewables, those were disconnected to protect the equipment later, when the voltage already dropped, along with other power stations. Moreover, they were the first to recover, and they handled some of the load during the blackout: https://www.euronews.com/green/2025/04/29/did-renewable-energy-cause-spain-and-portugals-mass-blackout-experts-weigh-in
As far as I know, the power outage in Portugal and Spain did not start with renewables
Grids are best modelled as a system, jointly operating. Insufficient damping is the cause as per the grid operator (1).
Can be solved in multiple ways such as make it a france problem (stronger interconnects to a system with more turbines), storage, improved DC-AC transformers for small (<1MW) solar plants. (*)
Pumped storage is indeed one of the best known technologies for grid stability, as it provides both storage, and turbines with inertia. Hard to build though, finding funding and appropriate locations. Then solar suddenly isn’t as cheap if one takes into accou t the cost to make it a reliable source of energy.
(*) the report mentions an estimated 700MW of production auto-shutting down as grid frequency dropped. Most likely these are the inverters of small scale solar installations, which are frequency following (measure then adjust) rather than synchronizing, and simply shut off when out of bound. To quote:
The rapid schedule changes in photovoltaic generation driven by price fluctuations in electricity markets. From an electrical standpoint, such abrupt changes in inverter - based generation introduce significant imbalances into the system, because regulation mechanisms haven´t operated yet. These imbalances must be compensated mainly through interconnections, particularly the one with France . Severe imbalances lead to drastic shifts in power flows across the network, which in turn alter the capacitive and inductive behaviour of the grid. Consequently, system voltages can vary rapidly. This effect is further exacerbated when such generation oper ates under power factor control and doesn´t provide dynamic voltage control, as it limits the dynamic reactive power support that could otherwise help stabilise voltage
Renewables are easier to build and maintain, they’re also cheaper
i legit thought that although nuclear is more expensive, atleast at the initial investment, that solar/wind lasts much less than nuclear, i mean they are still using some soviet nuclear plants yk
I guess I have to keep asking every time this shit idea of nuclear as green energy pops up: where to put the waste? Have we figured that out yet? Or will we continue hiding that stuff somewhere and hoping it stays there? 20 years ago I joined the protests in this location, where they were going to store nuclear waste in an abandoned salt mine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorleben_salt_dome
Despite thousands of people blocking roads the train full of nuclear waste arrived anyways. Guess what, briefly after that (or who knows, they probably knew anyways) they found the salt mine wasn’t such a great idea. And now that shit sits there in some storage building waiting for an accident to happen. Maybe Russia wants to drop a drone onto it when they feel like it, or in time the whole thing just gets abandoned because nobody has money to care anymore.
Only way to make energy green is degrowth, so spending less of it. Every single way of producing energy is damaging to the environment, and inventing new stuff or rebranding old stuff as “green” isn’t going to change it. They tear up the country I live in for lithium and the people can’t grow their gardens anymore, common lands are now filled with wind power and the people cannot send their herds onto the mountain anymore, they produce fuel out of maize and large areas of monoculture now grow fuel instead of food, huge areas of agricultural land are being filled with solar panels. It all causes damage, just stop spending so much energy. Don’t produce shit nobody needs, switch the fucking AI off, stay at home and just relax.
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.
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.
-
what are you suggesting tho, fossil is clearly and factually worse for the enviroment compared to nuclear, i mean do you know how big the earth is? sure radiactive waste may seem big and scary to you, but as halcyoncmdr mentioned earlier, it is really not that much of an issue, the earth is really big and we can just hide it really deep below, much better than putting shit in the atmosphere for us to suck into our lungs.
US nuclear propaganda is strong with you guys.
Scientific education rather than emotional reactions to the unknown does that.
where can i read more about this i dont know shit ngl
Well you can look at the rollout of renewables vs Nuclear in the UK
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycNqII5HYMI
tldr: Nuclear power plants are expensive to build (complicated to build), expensive to run (need well trained staff to handle the complexities), the stuff that they run on (Uranium) isn’t easy to acquire, and on top of all this the waste product is difficult to dispose of, I believe in Germany for example when the power company shut down its Nuclear power plants it told the Germany government they can deal with the nuclear waste… so basically even though the german people get 0% of their power from nuclear power plants they pay every day to store the nuclear waste from previous ones that are no longer operational…
… and when things go wrong they REALLY go wrong
Coal on the other hand is relatively cheap, the technology is fairly simple, running them is fairly cheap, there’s no radioactive waste the coal power plant has to deal with etc
Yeah, there’s no waste from coal plants…if you don’t count the damage from mining, the storage and spills of fly ash, or the carbon and radioactive material emitted into the atmosphere. Except for those, and the deaths they cause, coal could be the cleanest fuel source out there…instead of one of the most polluting.
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.
There’s no waste to get rid of
It just flies up into the atmosphere for free, indeed
Full disclosure: I am not from the industry
-
Yes, fear mongering is a factor. If you are a political power that opposes the nuclear, you can win a couple of points.
-
Dependency on a major player. You can’t just build a nuclear plant as a country. It’s a multinational project and even countries like Turkey rely on countries like Russia for building a plant. The choice is not that wide also: France, China, Russia, or the US.
-
Then, you need to buy fuel from these players. There are a couple of examples where the plants were partially rebuilt to work on fuel from another country, but the drive was always political AFAIK: Ukraine and Finland made themselves independent of Russia’s nuclear supply.
-
It’s a long project with sky-high investment at the start and zero to no profit. It should be politically motivated. Like even in Russia I know of 2.5 newly built nuclear plants since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Others were upgrades of existing plants which require less money. But Russia builds nuclear in Turkey, Egypt, and Bangladesh.
To point 2. South Korea can be added tot the list.
TIL.
Man, they have a broad nuclear program. Such a tiny country covered with rice fields
-
higher ups 100% look past the fearmongering of chernobyl and other accidents, nuclear is the safest compared to the many accidents that occur in solar, wind etc (if you look past the accidents which just dont happen nowadays, also considering that china has literally made a reactor that is physically impossible to meltdown)
There has to be more to the story than that, as medical tools using radiation have had terrible accidents, but are still used a lot all over the world. And for example every day there are terrible accidents with motorcycles and in some countries that’s basically the primary mode of transportation for most people.
The true story has to be a bit more complex and nuanced?
There’s no alternative for medical instruments and riding a bike is a voluntary choice. Sitting in a radiation cloud because Chernobyl had a meltdown isn’t one.
Propaganda in favour of the wildly profitable fossil fuel industry
This! Even the Simpsons is guilty of it.
This is a video about Europe (mostly Germany and France), not the world as you asked, but I think it includes some answers to your question.
thanks, i mean i dont really think we should just have nuclear yk, but i wish it was the main power source, although the only issue i really have is that if i personally would love a more decentralized power grid, how could that ever be acomplished with nuclear energy? its not like we can just have mini reactors, right?
People are scared and stupid.
