Everything is significantly more efficient these days. You can run 10-100 modern led lights on the electricity used by 1 conventional bulb, and heat pumps can be upwards of 400% efficient. All of those efficiencies really ad up.

Nuclear was the best solution in the 70s. If we had built all the plants then, we wouldn't be in our current mess.

Today, the economics don't make any sense. Energy from a fission plant is much more expensive than from renewables+storage, and nuclear plants that are operating often have to be curtailed in summer (when energy need is high) due to a lack of cooling water. The timeline to build a new plant is decades - far too late to make a difference if we started now.

There would also have to be global trust for literally every country to be operating multiple nuclear reactors, which does not exist today and likely never will. The odds that the US simply allows most of Sub-Saharan Africa - currently ruled by a set of characters ranging from (in the State Department's view) dictators to Jihadists - operational control over advanced nuclear technology do not look very strong.

I'm typically pro-nuclear, but there are legitimate problems with it:

1. Waste disposal - We STILL haven't made a good solution for storing nuclear waste in most places.
2. Cost overruns - Nuclear projects almost always run over their budgets by 10-30% or more.

That said, I'm of the opinion that it should be a part of our energy mix, given it's reliability in producing consistent power. I think we should prioritize wind and solar, but for our overnight and non-windy days, nuclear is a great way to fill the gap.

Really? I think its pretty simple.

It still requires mining. It requires a plan to dispose of waste (which only ONE country actually has). There are over 600 mines that are in need of remediation around the world that haven't been accomplished, with at least a hundred waste sites that are still not remediated.

Which leads to the single best reason to avoid nuclear: Nobody is responsible enough yet. In most countries that can afford to do it, it will go to the lowest bidder to operate and run and we can see that governments and wars come and go. Humans are shit at being responsible, particularly when money or power is dangled in front of them.

Solar is the cheapest and cleanest form of energy with the most recyclable materials.

• Nuclear costs too much. Much much more than anything else.

• It isn't clean. Since when is radioactive disposal considered a clean activity?

That's two reasons. The first one is the real reason.

• What exactly do you mean by the use of the word efficient?

I’ve never understood the anti-nuclear movement. Let’s give up one of the cleanest and most efficient ways to generate energy because reasons?

I don't support fission because I don't like paying comically high amounts of electricity. I support power options because they're the most practical, not because I get some weird retro-futuristic "our friend the atom" sexual kick out of it.

The two huge nuclear disasters in question: Unreasonable demands of management and a lack of safety protocol.

We've already accepted the downsides: we're all held at gunpoint by thousands of nuclear missiles on a daily basis for the past 5 decades and yet there seems to be more people worried about nuclear power than that. We could just as well take advantage of the upside as well.

Different but wrong. I am always interested to know what people's guesses are for the total number of deaths caused by Chernobyl, because it's remarkably low in my opinion. It's by far the safest form of energy generation. Yes, even safer than wind power... why? Simply because wind is a very energy un-dense source of energy so you need to do a lot of construction to obtain it, and construction is a somewhat dangerous job - there'll be some small number of people who fall off wind turbines (or off rooves while installing solar panels, or whatever) and the huge number of turbines works out as swamping the small number of nuclear plants and tiny number of deadly nuclear disasters.

If anti-nuclear people knew anything about nuclear power, they wouldn't be anti-nuclear. The Chernobyl powerplant was an RMBK reactor, completely different in structure than other nuclear powerplants. The fossil fuel industry loves misguided opposition against nuclear energy. Read about the RMBK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK

3 Mile Island was an overblown media sensation. Chernobyl was a poorly designed and poorly maintained facility doing a live stress controlled by complete morons that literally could not have happened in the next generation reactor design. Fukushima took a literal force of nature to cause an issue and even then it was originally designed to handle it but cost cutting during construction moved the backup power source too close to the water.

Meanwhile the current generation reactors, even discounting SMR, are designed to make those failure modes physically impossible. The ultra-modern SMR designs are already producing commercial power in China with North America following suit in the next 36 months or so.

What? How is it clickbait? The title explains exactly what the graph displays. How did this offend you?