I'll take renewables over nuclear, but I'll take nuclear over fossil fuels.

Pro, but as a temporary measure to eliminate fossil fuel usage, and it should be replaced with renewable energy later. But I doubt anything like that will ever happen.

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.

Aside from it being simply outdated and uneconomical, and given the community you are asking this in: there is an well studied argument that nuclear power is inherently authoritarian because of the necessary security requirements (and to a lesser extend centralisation of power production).

It's less efficient compared to more decentralized renewable energy; it's ok to keep the working centrals but I'm against new ones.

Pro. The waste storage required per kilowatt is tiny compared to the waste storage of coal. The all-told, long-term investment to power ratio is far better than fossil fuels in general. The death-print is safer than even solar.

Caveats

• Strong and competent regulation is required. No plants should be built under Trumpism.
• Our primary focus should be renewable sources of power and improved batteries to make them more reliable.

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.

Anti, but only because it's far too late. Nuclear energy should have been the transitional technology that helped us move off fossil fuels and into renewables.

But due to a massive smear campaign in the 60's and 70's, and some unfortunate material circumstances, everybody began equating nuclear power with nuclear weapons.

Renewables are totally viable now, as China has most prominently shown in recent years. The damage that fossil fuels have done to our climate and environment are so extreme, and the political and economic entrenchment has grown so deep, that spending money and resources trying to get nuclear energy popular again is a waste.

I am pro nuclear energy. It's the most efficient way to generate sustainable electricity in abundance in the smallest amount of space.

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

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 wouldn't say I'm pro or against it. It's quite expensive and politically controversial so I doubt building more of it will help us decarbonize. But I don't support closing any plants that are currently running either, at least until we've fully decarbonized electricity production.

I'm unsure how this relates to anarchism though. Other than, if communities have control over what gets built near them I think it will be even more difficult to build more of them than it is now.

The security problem ruins the amazing tech. In an age of terrorism and drones, the risk isn't acceptable. The same goes for hydro unfortunately, which is my fav energy form (I like watermills).

Within the current capitalist system, it no longer makes sense to build them. They are too slow to come online, and they're more expensive than renewables. It would have been an ideal solution had the rich and powerful cared for even their own children. With that said, it still makes sense to maintain them, as they're actively keeping fossil fuels at bay to some degree.

If the world suddenly and magically became an anarchist utopia, I'd say it makes sense to build them going forward. We need to transition as much as possible as quickly as possible, and that means doing parallel efforts where the resources needed are different, which is to a degree the case with nuclear vs renewables. We are in a crisis and should act like it.

In a magical, pretend, ideal future where climate change is no longer an issue, I don't think it would make sense to have them. They require a lot of centralization, and renewables don't. We should opt for less centralization.

I am against the idea "factorio" type people seem to see in nuclear in that it could solve our problems with endless energy, no politics needed.

It is an ideology that is dangerous if nuclear power can't fulfill that promise and its even more dangerous if it can.

I am not entirely against the technology itself however.

Against. 20 years ago I would have been for.

Highly centralized systems have always gone against my basically anarchist, emergent, bottom up approach I try to take to all things. At the same time, by the numbers, nuclear just makes more sense for the climate.

Solar or wind or hydro with battery, especially with the more modern batteries, fits both my general philosophy and the overall approach for the climate far better. It requires less technical skill (anyone here could install basic solar plus battery), its more modular, it allows for emergent systems; everything about it makes more sense.

If you believe we should make decisions collectively at the scale of a society, we shouldnt spend any money building nuclear at this point. And if you don't believe we should make decisions collectively at the scale of a society, you probably already didn't agree with the philosophy required to support nuclear.

PRO: For use on Pioneer 10 and 11; Voyager 1 and 2; Galileo; Ulysses; Cassini; New Horizons; as RTG power sources.

ANTI: Terrestrial use that needs 10,000 years of safe storage considerations for spent fuel and waste.

Better than burning fossil fuels, which we should have stopped fifty years ago. That’s the debate, not whether we should be using renewables as much as possible.

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

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. One of the cleanest energy sources you can get. Highly reliable. Fear about waste is vastly overblown which becomes apparent when you spend even a second researching it.

It is one of the only viable energy sources for space travel, which means it's not something we should phase out or stop researching. The only real alternative at this time is hydrogen fuel cells, which are explosive, and a lot more complicated. Solar is only viable at a certain distance to the sun. Nuclear energy is the clear winner by almost every metric.

Think about how basic of a concept nuclear is. You have a spicy rock heat up fluid. The rock stays spicy for a long time and you rarely need to change it. That's it. You're not burning anything. You aren't using overly complicated electrical equipment and membranes. You don't need specific weather conditions or specific geological features like rivers or geothermal vents. It's a rock that gets hot and can stay hot.

I'm in favor of the cheapest and quickest to build means of power generation. That's renewables and storage.

Nuclear is a massive waste of money.

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.

Anti-nuclear. Used to be pro-nuclear because the energy density would allow for very compact energy production, but I don't trust the government (or corporations) to have any meaningfully concentrated nuclear material. Maybe solid-state nuclear batteries can be made to work and we can use that to dilute the nuclear material -- not sure about that yet.

These days I favor local solar and wind.

I'm pro nuclear because it's orders of magnitude better than the shit we're already doing and it turns out you can basically just put the spent fuel back where you found it yes I know that's a little reductionist but you get my point.

That said I also think renewables are a good idea and we need a mix but there's been so much damage done to nuclear image when it's a perfectly good power source

The future is fusion.

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.

Anti, pro arguments only work in comparison to coal which is a low bar. We frankly simply have not solved the waste issue. I study chemistry and yes, the amounts are tiny, but some isotopes in waste have half lives longer than any structure we can build would last and scaling up nuclear would scale up this problem before it's solved (just like we did with greenhouse gases). Also it's objectively more expensive than any renewable source, as multiple independent studies have found.

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.

Pro. Clean and safe energy. I say that as someone that was told one of my chronic conditions is because I was downwind of Chernobyl as a child.

I'm against nuclear because it's too expensive and there is no proper place to store the depleted material.

At this rate, I’m grateful for anything that isn’t burning fossil fuels.

I’d rather see solar and wind power though.

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/

Mostly anti since renewables are cheaper. I would be OK with nuclear used for filling the dips in renewable output. The SMRs proposed by all these startups seem like a very bad idea to me, but IDK. If fusion ever brings all that they promise, I could be pro.

Pro in general as a technology, it's likely necessary for long term space flight like probes, satellites, and devices that need to run for decades or longer with little to no maintenance. For powering facilities that need consistent, high energy especially in remote areas it should be an option. Homes and most facilities should use renewables as preferred means of generating power outside of fairly limited uses for nuclear.

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

Anti. I really think we should figure out the waste first. I know there are arguments that it's better even with the waste, but you know that's how we get ourselves into bad situations down the road. Meanwhile there seem to be a lot of buildings around that could house wind and solar without even consuming more landscape.

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.