There are aspects of many political parties I agree with, but to me, being against Nuclear Power is the largest short sighted items this and a couple of other parties are/were against.
If many countries took the same road as France, the world would be in a much better place. Imagine the energy advances that could have happened if nuclear was supported for the past 50 years.
Or renewables. I remind you that nuclear power is completely economically unviable today because it is the single most expensive way to generate power. Even with Trump rolling back safety regulations, it's still too expensive when solar panels are 10 cents per watt, nuclear is 50, and the amount of backup storage to offset the unreliability does not bridge that gap.
Gas is dispatchable, nuclear is not. It’s enormously expensive, and that expense is locked in whether you need the power or not.
We’re already in a situation where we have more power than we need during certain hours of the day in some states/countries, and that’s not even counting the massive, accelerating buildout that will happen between now and the years before new nuclear is built… even it was started today.
I'm happy they're doing this, and it's good and admirable to see people be able to change their minds on something they once believed so strongly, but this should have happened 30 years ago.
Or more probably, it's imputable to biology and the natural replacement of the "old guard" by adults who didn't grow up during nukes schizophrenia. Or in other words, I doubt that those folks reasoned themselves out of the irrational fear for nuclear energy that they did not reason themselves into.
As other people have mentioned, it's very likely not the same people; but rather more anti-nuclear people leaving the organization or dying, and more pro-nuclear people joining.
I find it fairly amusing that "green" parties were ever opposed to nuclear power. It was clearly lobbying by fossil fuel energy interests. If we're gonna generate electricity at night without burning coal, oil or gas, we need nuclear. Storing solar and wind overnight is an even more absurd proposition than nuclear power plants. Burning more fossil fuels is even more absurd than nuclear power plants.
Once upon a time, there was also the Soviet propaganda effort in the West. Many of the Cold War reactors could be used to produce not just electricity, but fission material for nuclear warheads. Meaning that if you could persuade big countries to give up nuclear energy for good, you'd also reduce your adversary's capability to build and maintain their nuclear arsenal, or preempt its future acquisition in the first place.
Soviet Union (and later Russia) enacted the propaganda effort against nuclear mainly to prevent the west from ditching their fossil energy. Less western nuclear warheads was secondary goal at best.
This is a bit too cynical. It's impossible to understand the history green parties' opposition to nuclear energy without the context of their opposition to nuclear weapons. The argument went that "civilian" nuclear infrastructure was deeply interconnected with nuclear weapons. They share infrastructure. The existence of a civilian nuclear fuel cycle brings into existence a latent nuclear capability (you may recognize this theme from such films as the United States vs the Islamic Republic). Creating fissile material while avoiding diversion and proliferation requires the secrecy, security, and centralized technocratic control of what activists sometimes called the Atomic State, which they argued was incompatible with liberal democracy. I think these were quite serious arguments, though of course they'd persuade only if you're already bought in on unilateral nuclear disarmament.
I think both this and their past opposition are actually principled positions; I welcome the change.
Nuclear power was not without accidents and risk, and things are improved, plus there are options for greener nuclear power.
Alas this is a party which cannot in its current form be allowed near power (whatever your position on the Gaza conflict, the "Zionism is racism" motion is grim, callous political insanity), with (for now at least) a leader who is so mindblowingly mediocre, overconfident and overpromoted that really nothing they do will be taken seriously until he is removed.
A Jewish drama student LARPing as the leader of an Islamist, pro-Palestinian party standing on a ticket of Israel not existing wasn’t on my 2026 political bingo card.
Why is "Zionism is racism" insanity? Based on the definitions of those words it's a simple true statement, no? And our political system is insane if simple true statements send it over the edge.
The problem with this is that you're looking at actually existing Zionism and the history of Zionist leaders' actual statements and deeds. When approaching a nuanced topic like this, it's important to imagine a hypothetical ideal Zionism that hasn't spent the last 78 years engaging in ethnic cleansing.
Self-determination isn’t considered racism when it’s any other group.
Ukrainians wanting an independent homeland for Ukrainians isn’t racism. Or Greenlanders wanting Greenland to be for Greenlanders. Or when it’s the Irish, Scottish, or Canadians wanting their own country.
Netanyahu is actively sliming all of the Arab Israeli as "cheaters" and "stealer".
The opposition could ally with those parties and end Netanyahu corruption and start the Oct 7 investigation that Netanyahu blocks but they don't.
Explain to us, in light of these very evident and present facts, how Zionism isn't racism. Give us an idea what is going to happen if the Arab citizens part of the Israeli population grows more than the current 20% in regards to "self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland".
Explain to me why a British political party needs to take an extreme, polarising position on Israeli politics it has absolutely no influence over, at a cost only of its domestic support.
The entire concept is tinged with antisemitism, it lacks a nuanced understanding in the religious belief in the restoration of Israel, and it encourages very simple, very straightforward reactions like "these people are all children who have no grasp of politics and shouldn't be near power". Which is my position.
Netanyahu is a horror (and a crook). The current Israeli government is engaged in a cycle of violence that is enabling illegal settlements etc.
It doesn't mean that a British political party should inject itself into a nearly 150 year old cultural/faith position that has its roots in the experience of antisemitism in Europe and the USA.
It's not that different to having a political platform position that Catholicism isn't true Christianity, or that only Sunni Islam is true Islam. Sensible multi-faith parties seeking electability and a broad power base don't do fucking stupid things like this.
You argument fails at the first sentence. The list of deep collaboration between Israel and the UK is too long for this post, and I won't list them, as you know it but are not arguing in good faith.
>The entire concept is tinged with antisemitism
But we can't say Zionism is tinged with racism? A blindingly obvious double standards.
The Zionists parties of Israel want to do ethnic cleansing in the Palestinians territories, and will purge the Arab Israeli the second they grow too big. Is there a gentle Zionism somewhere, that only wants Jews to emigrate to Israel to live their faith without all the war crimes? Maybe, but it is as relevant as the religious anti-Zionism that objects to it on religious grounds. Which is too say: not at all relevant.
> You argument fails at the first sentence. The list of deep collaboration between Israel and the UK is too long for this post, and I won't list them, as you know it but are not arguing in good faith.
I am fully arguing in good faith because we're talking about The Green Party here. It is a political party with zero influence. They have zero influence on UK foreign policy in particular.
Please properly read what you're responding to before responding like this.
That... Doesn't make any sense. Parties should not have any opinions before they get any influence? They have to be a blank slate before they get elected to a majority or a sizable minority?
The UK police are literally today arresting peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters, so I'd say it has a lot to do with domestic policy. That's just a tiny tip of the iceberg, like you had a prince taken out by an Israeli spy!
The British government in power is already taking an extremist position on the issue, so I would expect all other parties to also make their positions clear. That's just how politics is supposed to work. You should know what parties stand for.
> We need the Middle East out of our political system full stop. All of it.
And I'd like a pony.
Even if we never put a drop of oil in a fuel tank again, 40% of the world's plastics manufacture is dependent on Middle Eastern oil. It will never not be part of our system.
You think.. I heard some antinuclear guys opposing fusion because the vessel for fusion reactor would get radioactive, and that is "nuclear waste" (of course, it's not the dangerous, long-term kind).
The neutron radiation around a fusion reactor is far more intense than in any fission reactor, because in fusion reactors most of the produced energy is carried by neutrons.
Any material exposed to neutron radiation will become radioactive. Of course the designers of fusion reactors will attempt to choose only materials that are converted into radioactive isotopes with a short halflife, but until someone demonstrates a working fusion reactor we will not know whether this is possible or the production of some amount of long-life radioactive waste must be accepted.
In my opinion, during the next few decades there are far less chances for fusion reactors to be used as a significant energy source on Earth than for some improved kinds of fission reactors.
In any case neither fission reactors nor fusion reactors are strictly necessary on Earth, but nuclear reactors are the only way to achieve interplanetary travel through the Solar System in decent times, so I believe that the future of nuclear reactors is for spaceships, not for terrestrial use.
I've commented before on this, but I don't think it ever becomes financially viable.
Assuming all the physics are completely solved tomorrow;
Private capital can easily get better returns, not to mention sooner returns, doing pretty much anything else.
Public capital requires a very long-term govt spend spanning multiple governments. China could do it, but hard to see a western govt doing it. Plus it would add a decade to the schedule and costs would spiral upwards.
All of which is a huge bet against improvements in grid-level storage.
Wow when nuclear power was the answer why we’re against it, but now nuclear power is too expensive compared with renewables plus solar they are for it.
How about some useful policies like removing planning constraints for grid expansion and solar farms and compulsory wind farms on golf courses owned by foreign billionaires
One of the useful policies mention in the article is:
> Last year, Adrian Ramsay, then a Green co-leader, criticised government support for Sizewell C. “The money being spent on this nuclear gamble would be far better spent on insulating and retrofitting millions of homes, bringing down energy bills and keeping people warmer and more comfortable,” he said.
Classic negawatt approach, to use Amory Lovins' term.
Well actually given the free fall in prices of renewables and batteries, not really.
Nuclear costs $16B/GW. Solar $1B/GW nominal. Batteries $1B for 1GW/4GWh.
Figure out how much solar overcapacity and batteries you can get, within a year or two, for the price of a nuclear reactor deployable 10-20 years from now.
They were never were in control of the government, so it seems a conspiracy theory that the greens somehow did "a lot of damage". I think a conspiracy needed by people who can not deal with the fact that nuclear is simply not economical, and therefor fails on the market.
Fair, but nevertheless, England has nuclear power plants and is even building one, Hinkley Point C. In 2010 there were plans to substantially expand nuclear, but industry largely walked away. The reality is that not greens killed nuclear, but terrible economics.
As Joe Kaeser (Chairman, Siemens Energy) observed "There isn't a single nuclear power plant in this world that makes economic sense.“
It was ultimately a conservative government that was responsible for exiting nuclear in Germany. But also nobody wants nuclear back, not even the industry - as it is too expensive.
We're familiar with the Green point of view, your niche parties are like NGOs in the US. I think the larger context might be the conversation about technology we've been having in the US since the atom bomb. Articles about nuclear power, GMO, AI, and other advances will trigger similar interest. The timeliness of this article isn't a factor, it's an interesting event and a chance to broach a few topics.
I think a lot of Anti Nuclear Power is based off old designs that weren't as safe and had radioactive byproduct I think newer reactor designs take a lot of bite out of that process. Additionally when you look at what is proposed to happen with Fusion reactors in Virginia in the next couple years it becomes a less popular position to be in opposition.
I was curious and did the reading. The technology still doesn't exist as far as I can tell. Even according to the Commonwealth Fusion Systems who says they will build in Virginia.
The International Atomic Energy Association says:
> there are still some technological issues to address before a commercial power plant can operate. A prototype of a fusion reactor (DEMO) is expected to be built by 2040. [1]
I wish Commonwealth Fusion Systems to sucessed in the plan for commercial fusion electricity production, but they still have many technical problems to solve. They will probably demostrate fusion containment with fusion energy gain factor greater then 1 (more like 10), the primary goal.
But fusion power plants needs to breed and separare tritium, prevent excessive tritium losses in the first wall. The plasma-facing materials in tokamak are subject to very harsh conditions, mutch harder conditions then reactor walls in a fission power plant.
They also need a way to extract power from 1,000,000C heat. Since we have absolutely no idea how to do that, fusion is still a non-starter...FOR ENERGY PRODUCTION. Fusion can be used for other things but power production won't be one of those things in any of our lifetimes if ever. That being said, we still should do the research and use fusion for what it is useful for. Its just that those uses don't include power production.
My Anti Nuclear Power is not based on the technology, which is awesome, but on the external factors.
Nuclear power plants will be run by private companies that will weasel out on maintenance to save a penny. Yes, they will weasel out, this time will not be different to other industries.
Nuclear power plant cost overruns by more than 3x.
Nuclear energy being already more expensive than solar.
No private insurer wants to insure a nuclear power plant because the potential payout is gargantuan. So it is the country the one that has to insure it.
Nuclear waste maybe will get reprocessed one of these decades if we really get very lucky, but it is expensive and gets in the way of the profits. So we create a shell company to deal with it, and if it happens something, we bankrupt the shell company and the country has to pay it, again. We get to keep the profits, of course.
What if an accident happens? Well, the country is insuring it, so they have to pay for it. We don't have to be that careful anymore, we don't have to pay for it!
But there are 32 layers of protection, nothing bad will ever happen! We are going to a world with more active wars. Your 32 layers of protection will be blown apart by a well placed hypersonic missile. I hope this never ever happens, but my gut feeling tells me otherwise.
Nuclear would be great if it, and the world, would be run by responsible adults, not by profit-maximizing locusts and warmongering oligarchs.
I could see this maybe working using a standardized sensor reporting system that goes into some third party/government/public analysis. Full sensor array stream, and whatever is used internally to make decisions, up for scrutiny.
Yeah, I used to have a lot more faith in companies being responsible, but no longer. Instead what we've been seeing is that companies cannot be trusted with vital infrastructure. Every single time they manage to integrate, they all turn into worse versions of Mr. Burns. Our economic system is setup to reward corner cutting and a race to the bottom. If an nuclear plant ends up melting down, our publicly funded nuclear insurance steps in to clean up the mess and the LLC goes bankrupt. Meanwhile, everyone that invested walks away with all the wealth they've siphoned, which they siphoned more of by cutting corners.
And what's nuts is they can walk away with those profits, buy another nuclear company, and repeat the same process until the same inevitable outcome happens.
We need reform. At a minimum we need make it impossible to have things like LLCs in charge of companies where failure result in huge negative externalities. The owners need to be at risk at going bankrupt. Without that risk, they'll just keep destroying everything so long as it makes an extra buck.
If we look at mining companies, we kind of know that society will carry most of the risk and negative externalities, so regulations must exist to limit how and to what degree companies can operate.
If a mining company extract lead and silver from the ground, we kind of know that they won't be around to safeguard waste for all eternity, nor will they be able to restore the environment when the company eventually goes bankrupt. If society want to allow such commercial operations then it need to also strike a balance so that society don't have to bear too much of the negative externalities.
In Sweden, the goverment here owns the energy company that operate the nuclear power plants and the mining company.
> Yeah, I used to have a lot more faith in companies being responsible, but no longer. Instead what we've been seeing is that companies cannot be trusted with vital infrastructure.
I am in the same boat. Companies will optimize for profit and rent-seeking, all else be damned. A nuclear meltdown would be a negative externality, if line goes up it would have been worth.
> We need reform
Any reform needs to account for corporations being machines optimized to generate profit. Regulations should ensure "negative externality" is not really externalized.
Corporations only understand profits, and investors should be understood as entities willing to leech from society. The only way to heandle corporations is by having failures threatening the money that investors can leech through this pipeline.
> Nuclear power plants will be run by private companies that will weasel out on maintenance to save a penny. Yes, they will weasel out, this time will not be different to other industries.
Of course like in the well known capitalist regime of the USSR that precipitated the big nuclear problem. If only we had the government instead of the evil capitalists to run things then we could be safe from those profit maximizing parasites.
After reading GPs comment, I almost started thinking about systemic issues of our current economic structures. Good thing you are here to remind us that any problems under capitalism must be accepted without a critical thought, because COMMUNISM!
The only real (ie large) nuclear accident happened under communism. And the reason why we don't have even safer nuclear designs is because of regulation. This entire discussion is entirely backwards and isn't looking at the data. Look where and why incidents happened. When you do, you will find various causes, none of which are fixed by political ideology. They are fixed by engineering and insurance costs.
Chernobyl happened because the son of a central committee member needed data from a dangerous experiment that was conducted at the powerplant. They literally disabled safety systems with wrenches. Both the design itself would have never allowed in the west nor would the experiment that caused the accident. Also, the HBO movie was very inaccurate so please don't bring up something you saw there, many of the things in the movie aren't even scientifically possible.
The point of the hypersonic missile catastrophe was something I had not considered and is an excellent point. I think that is true with all critical infrastructure to some extent but a nuclear reactor would certainly have more fallout. I wonder if any designs have thought about that situation.
Nuclear conrainment buildings are the strongest non-military structures build, you need a specialized bunker buster munition to penetrate them.
Under the current aircraft protection rules, the containment building has to survive impact of a fully loaded large civilian airplane moving at speed of sound.
For example testing of samples of containment building was done using acceleration of F-4 Phantom mounted on rocket sledge towards the wall. The wall survived the impact without problems.
> you need a specialized bunker buster munition to penetrate them
Which already exists. For example, India (so that you cannot say "this is something only available to USA) has the Agni-V (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agni-V) that supports a 7.5 ton bunker buster with Mach 24 terminal velocity. It costs $5 million each (like a battle tank).
Your squishy 747 moving at Mach 1 is nothing in comparison.
What other countries do already have something similar, or will have something similar, let's say, in the next 5 years?
Such anti-nuclear has some validity, but only if we can agree that burning fuel for energy and heat should not continue. Constructing new power plants and central heating systems that rely on burning fuel should be imminently stopped, and all existing plants should have their remaining life time determined and then sunset when they reach it. Any argument of external factors for nuclear are dwarfed by the external factors from burning fuel for energy and heat, double so for profit-maximizing locusts and warmongering oligarchs.
The biggest reason the world is seeing more active was is that we are dependent on a few unstable countries for our energy needs. Solar and wind power can produce very cheap energy when the weather is optimal, but suboptimal weather can equally produce extremely expensive prices to the point where social and economical stability start to break down. We are giving money to warmongering oligarchs because of the fear of what happens if prices goes up to high, which would not happen if energy and heating infrastructure was secure and geopolitical independent.
> only if we can agree that burning fuel for energy and heat should not continue.
Unless you accidentally left out "fossil", as in "burning fossil fuel", then we at least are unlikely to agree.
I certainly intend to continue to gather tree waste and burn it - and I cannot see a problem if forest weight is maintained through replenishment and replacement.
It is good to recycle tree waste and it's already done on industrial scale. But there are not enough forests in the word to replace our consumption of fossil fuels.
For example Denmark is importing lot of wood from Baltics, UK lot of wood from Canada.
Wood, biofuel, green hydrogen and synthetic fuels are all unable to sustainable manage energy variability in central and northern Europe. Cutting down massive amount of forests just for the purpose of burning it up is harmful to the environment, harmful to bio diversity, dangerous to humans, and even if we were to cut it all down it wouldn't last long.
True tree waste is very minimal today, unless we are talking garden waste (feel free to try to sustain a nation on that). Wood "waste" is used for a lot of products like paper and ply wood, and what is left to burn when everything is used are not enough to power a nation for any duration. In term of pollution it would also be better to put it into the ground than burning it, but in term of sustainability we would need multiple earths if we wanted wood to be the main fuel for energy variability.
> Cutting down massive amount of forests just for the purpose of burning it up is harmful to the environment
Err, lets perhaps stick with
* Cutting down massive amount of old growth forest is harmful to the environment ( whether it's for burning or bauxite )
and
* Cutting down forest faster than regrowth rate is harmful to the environment (as that's net loss wrt surface sequestration)
and perhaps examine "harmful to bio diversity" (is it? checker-boarded plantation forest has about the same biodiversity as it ever has - it's not old-growth but it's not devoid of life or diversity), "dangerous to humans" (really? with modern logging machines on plantation forest? - the deaths in logging largely come from non plantation clearing on steep slopes and happen to humans aware of the risks)
> True tree waste is very minimal today
Is it? Many people hereabout heat their homes from limb lopping, dead fall, and tree deaths.
> not enough to power a nation for any duration
I don't recall suggesting powering a nation - just pointing out that there's an acceptable attrition rate for forests.
The harm from deforestation comes from multiple sources. It increase the harmful effect of storms, flooding, and perhaps counter intuitively also forest fires.
Modern plantation forest involve draining of water, and that causes green house gases to be released. After logging, the area also release more green house gases during the first 20 years then they pick up. Logging also changes the level of ground water, and how much of the ground water get filtered, which in turn reduces quality of the water downstream. Logging also increase erosion, which has it own set of risk to humans.
> I don't recall suggesting powering a nation - just pointing out that there's an acceptable attrition rate for forests.
The article is about nuclear power plants, in the context of the UK green party. In order for wood to be an alternative it would need to be able to provide energy in a green, sustainable, and national independent way. Power plants that burn wood pellets do exist, but how green and how sustainable they are is debatable. It also questionable if they will just use wood, or if they mix it in with other even less green and less sustainable fuels, but sells the energy as green energy produced on waste products.
> I cannot see a problem if forest weight is maintained through replenishment and replacement
It does not scale. That’s how they are cutting down ancient pristine forest in Central Europe. It’s useful as a supplement to use wood waste; it cannot be a major source of energy.
There was no claim that it scaled, merely that it should not continue.
My point is that AGW is sensitive to the source of burnt fuel and not to the act of burning fuel alone (although it is a balancing act between carbon released and carbon captured - thrown out of balance during the anthropocene by the act of dragging up "old" carbon from the depths).
> Nuclear power plants will be run by private companies that will weasel out on maintenance to save a penny. Yes, they will weasel out, this time will not be different to other industries.
Just like commercial aviation companies then, right?
> Nuclear power plant cost overruns by more than 3x.
On average or what?
> Nuclear energy being already more expensive than solar.
What's "solar"? A solar panel? Sure. Solar+8h worth of batteries? Maybe. Solar+enough batteries to guarantee a stable grid? Hmm. Solar+batteries+the externalities of burning fossil fuels to compensate?
> Nuclear waste ...
Let me stop you right there. Head on over to https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/fifteen_minutes and look at how much coal&gas waste (no, not just CO2) we are dumping into the atmosphere at this very moment.
Now go ahead and tell me again that we need to badly find a solution to the huge problem of inert, solid, compact nuclear waste that's just sitting there.
> What if an accident happens?
Idk, what if an accident happens with anything else that's already 99.999% safe, like aviation? Odd question to ask about the objectively safest power source we have.
> Your 32 layers of protection will be blown apart by a well placed hypersonic missile. I hope this never ever happens, but my gut feeling tells me otherwise.
Right. You're getting attacked by hypersonic missiles and your priority is your nuclear power plant safety.
Empirically, somehow Ukraine is not a nuclear wasteland despite their nuclear power plants being very much under threat of attack by not so sane people.
> What's "solar"? A solar panel? Sure. Solar+8h worth of batteries? Maybe. Solar+enough batteries to guarantee a stable grid? Hmm. Solar+batteries+the externalities of burning fossil fuels to compensate?
Do you think the concrete to build an NPP doesn't require a crazy amount of fossil fuel? Do you think the storage will continue to be as expensive? Do you think the storage will continue to be as expensive by the time the NPP is actually completed?
I can have solar now, with batteries next year, and great batteries in 3 years. Or badass nuclear in 7 to 10 years with an average cost overrun of 102% (https://www.bu.edu/igs/2025/05/19/investment-risk-for-energy...), just in time for solar and batteries to be so good that nuclear will be irrelevant.
BTW, Ukraine is not a nuclear wasteland because Putin doesn't think it is worth making it a wasteland, because Russia actually attacked the Chernobyl sarcophagus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_...), thus showing everyone that Putin is not scared by the nuclear fallout taboo. That genie is out of the bottle now, the madmen have shown that they are not mad enough right now.
The carbon payoff for the average NPP is 6 weeks. The idealized payoff for a solar panel is 5 years, in practice its 10 in the tropics trending to 20 on a line about where SF or Barcelona is. And a solar panel on average only lasts 20 years.
My sources say:
nuclear power 20-33 months, coal power 33 months, peat power 26-27 months, gas power 21-27 months, wind power 7 months and photovoltaic power 60-95 months.
Which means, among other things, that solar is already net negative before nuclear is built and starts to produce.
And also, solar panels are rated to 25 years 80%, which means they retain 80% of initial production after 25 years, not "explode after 20 years and you have to replace them".
But even better: let's go wind and beat nuclear and solar by a crazy margin.
This is complete non-sense. Nothing about what you are saying is factually accurate in any way, scientifically or otherwise. What is happening is that enough people have finally learned that the environmental movement's policies weren't based upon actual science or data. This lost them support. They have finally lost enough support to verge on complete irrelevancy. Now that that has happened, they are trying to reverse that trend.
Why is war never a factor in the nuclear power debate? Like nuclear is great, until you have missiles dropping on your territory. You can ask Ukraine about that. Zaporizhia has been held hostage since the early days of the war. Should the Russians have a manic moment they can make a Chernobyl volume 2 with conventional explosives.
Nuclear is a great peacetime technology, Europe is no longer in peacetime.
Nuclear ICBMs generally make this a moot point. An advanced enemy can explode a "nuclear reactor" anywhere in your country at any time.
Regarding drones, most reactors are built relatively hardened. For example, they're protected against a 747 flying into it at full speed. So even a drone attack would take an advanced enemy, and they might as well drop a bomb on you.
The destruction of the Kakhovka Dam flooded over 500 square kilometres and carried a significant death toll, caused major damage to the surrounding area and impacted over a million people.
Besides maybe solar, there is always the potential for harm during war times. Heck, even with solar, cutting off electricity supply to a major urban area can tragically carry a death toll that goes beyond even the few severe power plant disasters we as a species have ever encountered.
Fission is not an outlier here and designing any power plant for resilience is a necessary step, whether in war or peacetimes, whether in a tectonically stable or seismically active area.
A nuclear strike on a larger fission reactor could create an awful result unlike any other power plant. There were some studies during the cold war (something about the effects in West Germanyin the early 1980s, IIRC).
As opposed to a nuclear strike directly on a populated civilian area with no nuclear power plant nearby which also creates an awful result?
The main difference in nuking a fission plant over any other area would be creating longer-term fallout.
If the attacker is at all rational, unlikely to be desired because it makes the area hard to inaccessible for troops on either side.
If the attacker is horrificaly irrational and just wants to cause pure, long term, irreparable harm, unfortunately salted nukes would be a feasible option, independent of having a fission plant anywhere near the drop zone...
Nuclear disarmament, international cooperation and reliable defence alliances can (hopefully) be used to protect against this, along with resilient fission designs within reason. Not having a fission plant by itself unfortunately and targically wouldn't prevent an utterly irrational attacker willing to cause as much long term damage as possible.
Very aware of that harsh fact, living in a country that has a section in our constitution making nuclear power illegal (yes, very stupid) and is not part of any defensive alliance (while expecting the countries around us to defend us anyways), if someone wanted to "salt the earth" around Salzburg, Vienna or Graz, they could do it, even if we have no plants.
Not the battery backup system. And batteries are incredibly explosive and will explode sympathetically. Its much like hitting a refinery in that regard. NPPs have been hit during this war with bombs, they survived just fine because they are built in much the same way as a hardened military structure. They can withstand a fully loaded 747 hitting them directly at the speed of sound. That's more boom than all but the largest ordinance.
Between shameless scientific fraud from last century still affecting and harming nuclear policy to this day [0], and masses of idiots being easily influenced and swindled by foreign powers [1] (example specifically about the UK's case), I don't know why any such parties haven't been forcefully disbanded or put in the same category as terrorists, along with other organizations such as "Green"-"peace". They have at large done immeasurable damage to their countries and the world at large, and most of them started out explicitly as being anti-nuclear, that being their only mission for the longest time, only becoming relevant through the most disgusting fearmongering. Most importantly, they've achieved nothing but ensure the continued, worldwide permanent reliance on oil states and the terrorism that derived from it.
Yeah, this might well not be any individual human being changing their mind, but rather new human beings less inclined to be anti-nuclear-power now forming a critical mass within the UK Green Party.
I oppose nuclear for a very simple reason: there is no way to deal with the long term waste. Not just the small amount of waste from the fuel, but the reactor components.
The waste will burden hundreds of generations for millenia and the reason? Our current consumption
Such greed and disregard for following generations
Coal waste will be a larger problem to deal with for future generations than nuclear waste will be. The burning coal of course has shortened the lives of millions and been a major contributor to green house gases. If you oppose both coal and nuclear, how should the world have generated electrical power from say 1950 to 2000?
>Climate change is a minor problem in comparison
No one knows what the best and worst case scenarios for deaths during to climate change as they effects might include AMOC shutdown, sea level rise, forced mass migrations of people, wars, shortages of food, etc. In all credible scenarios the deaths and suffering in even the best case scenarios will be much, much, higher than any deaths due to radiation exposure from nuclear waste.
Its also the source of the majority of human caused exposure to ionizing radiation. Coal dust has a small amount of radioactivity (from literally the least radioactive element) and there is an amazingly large amount of coal dust.
>there is no way to deal with the long term waste.
Yes there is, bury it. Its what we do with lots of other waste. Of course, you have to be a bit more careful than you would be with a standard landfill. But the engineering is well understood. It is usually just the fact that nobody wants it buried near them that causes political issues.
>The waste will burden hundreds of generations for millenia
Pumping more carbon into the atmosphere is also a huge burden for future generations.
That's not true, we know enough about geology to deal with long term waste.
Nuclear waste is great for several reasons:
- the first one is quantity: very small in comparison with how much energy it produced (a nuclear reaction generates one million times more energy than a chemical reaction so less resource usage across the whole lifecycle);
- the second one is that most of it (over 90%) can be recycled and used with gen 4 reactors;
- the third one is that it stays local, i.e. unlike CO2 it doesn't go into the atmosphere (and then the ocean), and since CO2 is inert, from a human time scale how long CO2 can stay in the atmosphere is, I would argue, comparable to nuclear waste decay.
Well, if we extract the energy from the spicy rocks today through fission then on a time scale of over hundreds of millennia you actually end-up with less radioactivity on earth! (After 300 000 years to be accurate, and the figure I have is based on low enriched uranium based fuel as typically used in a light water reactor).
You maybe mixing up danger and risk, those are two different concepts. Nuclear waste is dangerous, but it doesn’t have to be risky. Consider this: where do we have the most unknown (risk): long-term geological storage of nuclear waste, or the consequences of climate change and our ability to adapt?
I really wish I could share the educational resources that I have with you, unfortunately it’s all in French…
Again, simple ignorance. The reason it lasts so long is that we aren't allowed to reprocess it for rather illogical reasons. Also, most of the "waste" from the reactor are either rare earths or silver (which is stable from the moment it is created) or valuable and useful gases. It can also be reprocessed and the nuclear fuel can be put into another reactor. We don't do this because of the absurdly small chance someone could get some Pu-239 (which would still require very advanced and noticeable processing). Basically things that only happen in James Bond movies and because some politician without any scientific knowledge can imagine it, it gets banned.
It was part emotional response to Chernobyl, part is was full on Russian propaganda infiltrating parliaments in Europe.
The leader of Germany that phased out nuclear and made Germany fully reliant on Russia then took a job... at Gazprom. The VP from the Greens responsible took a very high paying job lobbying for foreign Gas firms, too.
It has to be one of the most successful foreign influencing campaigns in history.
German TV had local experts who could tell the audience in real time that the authorities in Fukishsima were lying about the unfolding disaster.
A slightly racist belief in the Japanese as superior at following the rules meant a big shock when the Germans realised that even the Japanese could not be trusted with nuclear power.
You do realize that those "experts" were widely criticized by scientists and engineers for their lack of knowledge of the plant, many, many scientific inaccuracies and for basic fear mongering right? Most of the things they said weren't accurate. What was accurate is that the Tsunami took out the power lines around the plant and its cooling pond had a hydrogen explosion. Their backup power was down (which was the design flaw in the plant) because it was flooded. This required the pumping of seawater into the reactor to keep it cool. It never melted down in any way and the death toll was either 0 or 1 depending on how you count. Just in case you actually wanted to deal in facts on this one.
It's perfectly understandable, if you allow that most peoples' understanding of nuclear safety is not perfect. Chernobyl and 3 mile island, but also Hiroshima and Nagasaki- atomic power's dangers get a lot more press than when it works quietly and reliably.
Sure, you and I can talk about newer plant designs that fail safely, or about how coal plants emit more radiation by far. But if we had the ability to rapidly convince large swathes of the populace of provable scientific facts, then clean power is only one of the many many problems we would be able to solve.
> I've never understood the opposition to nuclear power.
Part of it was a Soviet psyop to get Western citizens to oppose West's nuclear weapons. Encourage people to oppose nuclear in general, both nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
And who cares about the 150 000 displaced people and the still existing exclusion zone?
Oh, yeah, because the Fukushima nuclear accident is still ongoing. The plant is still too dangerous to access and dismantle. Cooling water is still pumped into the reactors to keep them from melting down. That water is still contaminated by a mixture of radioelements and being released to the ocean after partial treatment. And this will go on for several decades still.
There was no real need to actually evacuate anyone because of Fukushima, it was a overreaction caused by irrational fear of nuclear power. The evacuation itself caused much harm. It is pretty silly to hype an incident that caused ZERO deaths as some kind of horrible nuclear disaster.
Even if Fukushima killed tens of thousands of people, nuclear would still kill order of magnitute less people per kWh of energy produced than fossil fuels.
Oposition to nuclear is much older, it started is oposition to nuclear weapons, nuclear weapon tests and in generation was part of the global peace movements and anti-cold war and anti-Vietnam war movements.
For example Greenpeace had it roots in the oposition to nuclear weapon testing at the end of 1960s.
Much earlier. The early nuclear industry, which was shared military and civilian, was incredibly nasty. While also covering up issues. Leaving us with enormous clean up bills to this date.
Sellafield's current expected bill is £127B over the next 100 years. Hanford is looking at a cost between $364B and $589.4B.
The imagined economics sold to the public never delivered followed by real accidents like Windscale, TMI and Chernobyl.
With climate change the nuclear industry saw the possibility of finally having actual product market fit. So another round of subsidies were created in the 2000s and 2010s. At the same time renewables were seen as the upstart, and storage barely crossed any minds.
The outcome being ruinously expensive plants as seen in Vogtle, Virgil C. Summer, Olkiluoto, Flamanville 3, Hinkley Point c and so on.
What we're seeing now is a token investment to subsidize the necessary industry for military research and reactors. But no one expects it to deliver electricity at a relevant price, or point in time, compared to renewables and storage.
Hanford could be handled for far less (no idea about the UK's sites but probably the same situation). Its the result of making the atomic bombs during WWII. The acids could be neutralized and the uranium separated out. However, a contract that just keeps putting the material in new containers every few years is much more profitable. The idea it should take hundreds of billions to do is pretty much about an nearly infinite time horizon of maintenance instead of just cleaning up the site.
Also, Hanford has nothing to do with civilian NPPs and the processes used there would never be done as part of power generation.
Finally, the cost of NPPs is almost always about the lawsuits. Look at how much Korea and China payed for their NPPs. It was less than 20% of what we pay, they were online in less than 5 years and they are producing 2.8GW for each country for the last decade.
PS The UK has never deployed a standardized design for a NPP. All of their NPPs are different types of experimental designs. Just buy a AP1400 and be done with it for far cheaper.
This revisionist history about military and civilian nuclear being two completely different spheres is getting tiresome.
They were deeply entwined, and still are. The AEC established in 1946 was responsible for both nuclear weaposn and peaceful nuclear technology.
There's been a bunch of civilian dual purpose reactors ran at hanford.
Yes. Much of the waste is from the weapons program. But saying that the site has nothing to do with civilian nuclear plants is just you making stuff up.
It is sad when the premier example touted is South Korea. The country where 68 people received prison sentences totaling 253 years and 9 months from the corruption scandal involving falsified safety certificates, fraudulent components and bribery.
China is also especially funny. Despite the nuke bros perfect environment of stable regulations, cheap workforce, state financing, authoritarian rule and so on nuclear remains insignificant. Sitting at 4% of the grid mix and shrinking. While renewables and storage are absolutely exploding in scale.
Why is it that almost every top comment or top reply on HB loves to pretend they know what they're talking about while making almost no fucking sense.
You got one guy on here claiming a fusion reactor will be built in Virginia (lol). Yet another claiming that the reason that everyone hates nuclear power is because of the byproduct of nuclear waste and that it's worse than climate change (rofl). Like what kind of drugs are you people on?
It loses on accounting if you assign zero cost to the million+ lives that carbon emitting power generation takes every year, and the long term, possibly irreversible damage it does to the planet. If you factor in those two things even 1%, nuclear wins hands down
Cost of recent nuclear power in the UK comes in at $130/mwh at best. Where wind and solar are coming in at $50-80/MWh.
So for the same rate of investment you can decarbonize 2-3 times faster. And that doesn't figure the long lead times for nuclear vs solar, wind and batteries.
It wouldn't be any better, because if plants had been built decades ago, they wouldn't be able to be competitive anymore, would keep running a deficit, and would depress the economy and public finances like the white elephants they are, and take away means to transition to renewables.
You are comparing capacity costs (what it costs to deploy). What you pay are utilization costs (total cost). By total cost, NPPs are the cheapest form of power we have even with all the lawsuits. About $0.04/kwh vs $0.14/kwh for renewables. And that's before the unreliability of renewables are accounted for. That's why the countries with lots of nuclear have cheap power and the ones with lots of renewables have expensive power. If what you say were true, it would be reversed. Also, the countries with lots of NPPs have cleaner grids than countries with lots of renewables. What you are saying is just factually false.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 86.0 ms ] threadThere are aspects of many political parties I agree with, but to me, being against Nuclear Power is the largest short sighted items this and a couple of other parties are/were against.
If many countries took the same road as France, the world would be in a much better place. Imagine the energy advances that could have happened if nuclear was supported for the past 50 years.
We’re already in a situation where we have more power than we need during certain hours of the day in some states/countries, and that’s not even counting the massive, accelerating buildout that will happen between now and the years before new nuclear is built… even it was started today.
Nuclear power was not without accidents and risk, and things are improved, plus there are options for greener nuclear power.
Alas this is a party which cannot in its current form be allowed near power (whatever your position on the Gaza conflict, the "Zionism is racism" motion is grim, callous political insanity), with (for now at least) a leader who is so mindblowingly mediocre, overconfident and overpromoted that really nothing they do will be taken seriously until he is removed.
Ukrainians wanting an independent homeland for Ukrainians isn’t racism. Or Greenlanders wanting Greenland to be for Greenlanders. Or when it’s the Irish, Scottish, or Canadians wanting their own country.
The opposition could ally with those parties and end Netanyahu corruption and start the Oct 7 investigation that Netanyahu blocks but they don't.
Explain to us, in light of these very evident and present facts, how Zionism isn't racism. Give us an idea what is going to happen if the Arab citizens part of the Israeli population grows more than the current 20% in regards to "self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland".
The entire concept is tinged with antisemitism, it lacks a nuanced understanding in the religious belief in the restoration of Israel, and it encourages very simple, very straightforward reactions like "these people are all children who have no grasp of politics and shouldn't be near power". Which is my position.
Netanyahu is a horror (and a crook). The current Israeli government is engaged in a cycle of violence that is enabling illegal settlements etc.
It doesn't mean that a British political party should inject itself into a nearly 150 year old cultural/faith position that has its roots in the experience of antisemitism in Europe and the USA.
It's not that different to having a political platform position that Catholicism isn't true Christianity, or that only Sunni Islam is true Islam. Sensible multi-faith parties seeking electability and a broad power base don't do fucking stupid things like this.
You argument fails at the first sentence. The list of deep collaboration between Israel and the UK is too long for this post, and I won't list them, as you know it but are not arguing in good faith.
>The entire concept is tinged with antisemitism
But we can't say Zionism is tinged with racism? A blindingly obvious double standards.
The Zionists parties of Israel want to do ethnic cleansing in the Palestinians territories, and will purge the Arab Israeli the second they grow too big. Is there a gentle Zionism somewhere, that only wants Jews to emigrate to Israel to live their faith without all the war crimes? Maybe, but it is as relevant as the religious anti-Zionism that objects to it on religious grounds. Which is too say: not at all relevant.
I am fully arguing in good faith because we're talking about The Green Party here. It is a political party with zero influence. They have zero influence on UK foreign policy in particular.
Please properly read what you're responding to before responding like this.
Complete bad faith, or lack of basic logic.
We need the Middle East out of our political system full stop. All of it.
And I'd like a pony.
Even if we never put a drop of oil in a fuel tank again, 40% of the world's plastics manufacture is dependent on Middle Eastern oil. It will never not be part of our system.
For now this is only a desire, not a fact.
The neutron radiation around a fusion reactor is far more intense than in any fission reactor, because in fusion reactors most of the produced energy is carried by neutrons.
Any material exposed to neutron radiation will become radioactive. Of course the designers of fusion reactors will attempt to choose only materials that are converted into radioactive isotopes with a short halflife, but until someone demonstrates a working fusion reactor we will not know whether this is possible or the production of some amount of long-life radioactive waste must be accepted.
In my opinion, during the next few decades there are far less chances for fusion reactors to be used as a significant energy source on Earth than for some improved kinds of fission reactors.
In any case neither fission reactors nor fusion reactors are strictly necessary on Earth, but nuclear reactors are the only way to achieve interplanetary travel through the Solar System in decent times, so I believe that the future of nuclear reactors is for spaceships, not for terrestrial use.
Assuming all the physics are completely solved tomorrow;
Private capital can easily get better returns, not to mention sooner returns, doing pretty much anything else.
Public capital requires a very long-term govt spend spanning multiple governments. China could do it, but hard to see a western govt doing it. Plus it would add a decade to the schedule and costs would spiral upwards.
All of which is a huge bet against improvements in grid-level storage.
How about some useful policies like removing planning constraints for grid expansion and solar farms and compulsory wind farms on golf courses owned by foreign billionaires
> Last year, Adrian Ramsay, then a Green co-leader, criticised government support for Sizewell C. “The money being spent on this nuclear gamble would be far better spent on insulating and retrofitting millions of homes, bringing down energy bills and keeping people warmer and more comfortable,” he said.
Classic negawatt approach, to use Amory Lovins' term.
Figure out how much solar overcapacity and batteries you can get, within a year or two, for the price of a nuclear reactor deployable 10-20 years from now.
As Joe Kaeser (Chairman, Siemens Energy) observed "There isn't a single nuclear power plant in this world that makes economic sense.“
Possibly, but I vote for them and here in Bristol, they control the council and we have a Green Member of Parliament.
They've been around for decades, but they're grabbing more attention and headlines (especially the whole "Zionism is racism" declaration).
Both Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own Green Parties. There is no single UK Green Party.
I was curious and did the reading. The technology still doesn't exist as far as I can tell. Even according to the Commonwealth Fusion Systems who says they will build in Virginia.
The International Atomic Energy Association says:
> there are still some technological issues to address before a commercial power plant can operate. A prototype of a fusion reactor (DEMO) is expected to be built by 2040. [1]
[1]: https://www.iaea.org/topics/energy/fusion/faqs
Please note the date. This is the reactor being built. CFS has come a long way since inception. DEMO is a joke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4
But fusion power plants needs to breed and separare tritium, prevent excessive tritium losses in the first wall. The plasma-facing materials in tokamak are subject to very harsh conditions, mutch harder conditions then reactor walls in a fission power plant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma-facing_material
Nuclear power plants will be run by private companies that will weasel out on maintenance to save a penny. Yes, they will weasel out, this time will not be different to other industries.
Nuclear power plant cost overruns by more than 3x.
Nuclear energy being already more expensive than solar.
No private insurer wants to insure a nuclear power plant because the potential payout is gargantuan. So it is the country the one that has to insure it.
Nuclear waste maybe will get reprocessed one of these decades if we really get very lucky, but it is expensive and gets in the way of the profits. So we create a shell company to deal with it, and if it happens something, we bankrupt the shell company and the country has to pay it, again. We get to keep the profits, of course.
What if an accident happens? Well, the country is insuring it, so they have to pay for it. We don't have to be that careful anymore, we don't have to pay for it!
But there are 32 layers of protection, nothing bad will ever happen! We are going to a world with more active wars. Your 32 layers of protection will be blown apart by a well placed hypersonic missile. I hope this never ever happens, but my gut feeling tells me otherwise.
Nuclear would be great if it, and the world, would be run by responsible adults, not by profit-maximizing locusts and warmongering oligarchs.
I am as pro nuclear (actually pro anything not fossil fuel), but this was actually the best counter argument I came across:
And what's nuts is they can walk away with those profits, buy another nuclear company, and repeat the same process until the same inevitable outcome happens.
We need reform. At a minimum we need make it impossible to have things like LLCs in charge of companies where failure result in huge negative externalities. The owners need to be at risk at going bankrupt. Without that risk, they'll just keep destroying everything so long as it makes an extra buck.
If a mining company extract lead and silver from the ground, we kind of know that they won't be around to safeguard waste for all eternity, nor will they be able to restore the environment when the company eventually goes bankrupt. If society want to allow such commercial operations then it need to also strike a balance so that society don't have to bear too much of the negative externalities.
In Sweden, the goverment here owns the energy company that operate the nuclear power plants and the mining company.
That is not correct. Vattenfall has nothing to do with Oskarshamn, and had nothing to do with Barsebäck.
Forsmark
- Vattenfall: 66.0 %
- Mellansvensk Kraftgrupp (essentially Fortum): 25.5 %
- Sydkraft Nuclear Power (Uniper): 8.5 %
Ringhals
- Vattenfall: 70.44 %
- Sydkraft Nuclear Power (Uniper): 29.56 %
Oskarshamn
- Uniper (through Sydkraft): 54.5 %
- Fortum: 45.5 %
Barsebäck
- Sydkraft Nuclear Power (Uniper): 100 %
I am in the same boat. Companies will optimize for profit and rent-seeking, all else be damned. A nuclear meltdown would be a negative externality, if line goes up it would have been worth.
> We need reform
Any reform needs to account for corporations being machines optimized to generate profit. Regulations should ensure "negative externality" is not really externalized.
Corporations only understand profits, and investors should be understood as entities willing to leech from society. The only way to heandle corporations is by having failures threatening the money that investors can leech through this pipeline.
Of course like in the well known capitalist regime of the USSR that precipitated the big nuclear problem. If only we had the government instead of the evil capitalists to run things then we could be safe from those profit maximizing parasites.
Chernobyl happened because the son of a central committee member needed data from a dangerous experiment that was conducted at the powerplant. They literally disabled safety systems with wrenches. Both the design itself would have never allowed in the west nor would the experiment that caused the accident. Also, the HBO movie was very inaccurate so please don't bring up something you saw there, many of the things in the movie aren't even scientifically possible.
Under the current aircraft protection rules, the containment building has to survive impact of a fully loaded large civilian airplane moving at speed of sound.
For example testing of samples of containment building was done using acceleration of F-4 Phantom mounted on rocket sledge towards the wall. The wall survived the impact without problems.
Which already exists. For example, India (so that you cannot say "this is something only available to USA) has the Agni-V (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agni-V) that supports a 7.5 ton bunker buster with Mach 24 terminal velocity. It costs $5 million each (like a battle tank).
Your squishy 747 moving at Mach 1 is nothing in comparison.
What other countries do already have something similar, or will have something similar, let's say, in the next 5 years?
The biggest reason the world is seeing more active was is that we are dependent on a few unstable countries for our energy needs. Solar and wind power can produce very cheap energy when the weather is optimal, but suboptimal weather can equally produce extremely expensive prices to the point where social and economical stability start to break down. We are giving money to warmongering oligarchs because of the fear of what happens if prices goes up to high, which would not happen if energy and heating infrastructure was secure and geopolitical independent.
Unless you accidentally left out "fossil", as in "burning fossil fuel", then we at least are unlikely to agree.
I certainly intend to continue to gather tree waste and burn it - and I cannot see a problem if forest weight is maintained through replenishment and replacement.
For example Denmark is importing lot of wood from Baltics, UK lot of wood from Canada.
https://www.eubioenergy.com/2025/03/13/no-smoke-without-fire...
I certainly didn't claim that there was, but thank you for rebutting a point not made.
True tree waste is very minimal today, unless we are talking garden waste (feel free to try to sustain a nation on that). Wood "waste" is used for a lot of products like paper and ply wood, and what is left to burn when everything is used are not enough to power a nation for any duration. In term of pollution it would also be better to put it into the ground than burning it, but in term of sustainability we would need multiple earths if we wanted wood to be the main fuel for energy variability.
Err, lets perhaps stick with
* Cutting down massive amount of old growth forest is harmful to the environment ( whether it's for burning or bauxite )
and
* Cutting down forest faster than regrowth rate is harmful to the environment (as that's net loss wrt surface sequestration)
and perhaps examine "harmful to bio diversity" (is it? checker-boarded plantation forest has about the same biodiversity as it ever has - it's not old-growth but it's not devoid of life or diversity), "dangerous to humans" (really? with modern logging machines on plantation forest? - the deaths in logging largely come from non plantation clearing on steep slopes and happen to humans aware of the risks)
> True tree waste is very minimal today
Is it? Many people hereabout heat their homes from limb lopping, dead fall, and tree deaths.
> not enough to power a nation for any duration
I don't recall suggesting powering a nation - just pointing out that there's an acceptable attrition rate for forests.
Modern plantation forest involve draining of water, and that causes green house gases to be released. After logging, the area also release more green house gases during the first 20 years then they pick up. Logging also changes the level of ground water, and how much of the ground water get filtered, which in turn reduces quality of the water downstream. Logging also increase erosion, which has it own set of risk to humans.
> I don't recall suggesting powering a nation - just pointing out that there's an acceptable attrition rate for forests.
The article is about nuclear power plants, in the context of the UK green party. In order for wood to be an alternative it would need to be able to provide energy in a green, sustainable, and national independent way. Power plants that burn wood pellets do exist, but how green and how sustainable they are is debatable. It also questionable if they will just use wood, or if they mix it in with other even less green and less sustainable fuels, but sells the energy as green energy produced on waste products.
It does not scale. That’s how they are cutting down ancient pristine forest in Central Europe. It’s useful as a supplement to use wood waste; it cannot be a major source of energy.
My point is that AGW is sensitive to the source of burnt fuel and not to the act of burning fuel alone (although it is a balancing act between carbon released and carbon captured - thrown out of balance during the anthropocene by the act of dragging up "old" carbon from the depths).
Just like commercial aviation companies then, right?
> Nuclear power plant cost overruns by more than 3x.
On average or what?
> Nuclear energy being already more expensive than solar.
What's "solar"? A solar panel? Sure. Solar+8h worth of batteries? Maybe. Solar+enough batteries to guarantee a stable grid? Hmm. Solar+batteries+the externalities of burning fossil fuels to compensate?
> Nuclear waste ...
Let me stop you right there. Head on over to https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/fifteen_minutes and look at how much coal&gas waste (no, not just CO2) we are dumping into the atmosphere at this very moment.
Now go ahead and tell me again that we need to badly find a solution to the huge problem of inert, solid, compact nuclear waste that's just sitting there.
> What if an accident happens?
Idk, what if an accident happens with anything else that's already 99.999% safe, like aviation? Odd question to ask about the objectively safest power source we have.
> Your 32 layers of protection will be blown apart by a well placed hypersonic missile. I hope this never ever happens, but my gut feeling tells me otherwise.
Right. You're getting attacked by hypersonic missiles and your priority is your nuclear power plant safety.
Empirically, somehow Ukraine is not a nuclear wasteland despite their nuclear power plants being very much under threat of attack by not so sane people.
Do you think the concrete to build an NPP doesn't require a crazy amount of fossil fuel? Do you think the storage will continue to be as expensive? Do you think the storage will continue to be as expensive by the time the NPP is actually completed?
I can have solar now, with batteries next year, and great batteries in 3 years. Or badass nuclear in 7 to 10 years with an average cost overrun of 102% (https://www.bu.edu/igs/2025/05/19/investment-risk-for-energy...), just in time for solar and batteries to be so good that nuclear will be irrelevant.
BTW, Ukraine is not a nuclear wasteland because Putin doesn't think it is worth making it a wasteland, because Russia actually attacked the Chernobyl sarcophagus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_...), thus showing everyone that Putin is not scared by the nuclear fallout taboo. That genie is out of the bottle now, the madmen have shown that they are not mad enough right now.
My sources say: nuclear power 20-33 months, coal power 33 months, peat power 26-27 months, gas power 21-27 months, wind power 7 months and photovoltaic power 60-95 months.
https://inis.iaea.org/records/kgzhn-ark54
Which means, among other things, that solar is already net negative before nuclear is built and starts to produce.
And also, solar panels are rated to 25 years 80%, which means they retain 80% of initial production after 25 years, not "explode after 20 years and you have to replace them".
But even better: let's go wind and beat nuclear and solar by a crazy margin.
Nuclear is a great peacetime technology, Europe is no longer in peacetime.
Regarding drones, most reactors are built relatively hardened. For example, they're protected against a 747 flying into it at full speed. So even a drone attack would take an advanced enemy, and they might as well drop a bomb on you.
Besides maybe solar, there is always the potential for harm during war times. Heck, even with solar, cutting off electricity supply to a major urban area can tragically carry a death toll that goes beyond even the few severe power plant disasters we as a species have ever encountered.
Fission is not an outlier here and designing any power plant for resilience is a necessary step, whether in war or peacetimes, whether in a tectonically stable or seismically active area.
The main difference in nuking a fission plant over any other area would be creating longer-term fallout.
If the attacker is at all rational, unlikely to be desired because it makes the area hard to inaccessible for troops on either side.
If the attacker is horrificaly irrational and just wants to cause pure, long term, irreparable harm, unfortunately salted nukes would be a feasible option, independent of having a fission plant anywhere near the drop zone...
Nuclear disarmament, international cooperation and reliable defence alliances can (hopefully) be used to protect against this, along with resilient fission designs within reason. Not having a fission plant by itself unfortunately and targically wouldn't prevent an utterly irrational attacker willing to cause as much long term damage as possible.
Very aware of that harsh fact, living in a country that has a section in our constitution making nuclear power illegal (yes, very stupid) and is not part of any defensive alliance (while expecting the countries around us to defend us anyways), if someone wanted to "salt the earth" around Salzburg, Vienna or Graz, they could do it, even if we have no plants.
If we come to that state of things, then almost anything we do isn't safe.
0. https://atomicinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/LNT-and-NAS-En...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_for_Nuclear_Disarmame...
It's hard to convince people to change a stance they made a part of their political and personal identity.
"Science progresses one funeral at a time".
The waste will burden hundreds of generations for millenia and the reason? Our current consumption
Such greed and disregard for following generations
Climate change is a minor problem in comparison
>Climate change is a minor problem in comparison
No one knows what the best and worst case scenarios for deaths during to climate change as they effects might include AMOC shutdown, sea level rise, forced mass migrations of people, wars, shortages of food, etc. In all credible scenarios the deaths and suffering in even the best case scenarios will be much, much, higher than any deaths due to radiation exposure from nuclear waste.
Yes there is, bury it. Its what we do with lots of other waste. Of course, you have to be a bit more careful than you would be with a standard landfill. But the engineering is well understood. It is usually just the fact that nobody wants it buried near them that causes political issues.
>The waste will burden hundreds of generations for millenia
Pumping more carbon into the atmosphere is also a huge burden for future generations.
>Climate change is a minor problem in comparison
What do you base that on?
We have no way to communicate the danger of the waste to people 55,000 years in the future
That greed, yours and mine, could create that dangerous pile of rubbish, that will be deadly to people who will never know of our existence
What astounding recklessness and hostility to the future
For current consumption
Unbelievable
B) We could reprocess the waste
C) There are reactors that produce 95% less waste, regulation prevents their testing and deployment
D) All the nuclear waste in the US (the country with by far the most NPPs) fits in 1 Olympic sized pool
Nuclear waste is great for several reasons:
- the first one is quantity: very small in comparison with how much energy it produced (a nuclear reaction generates one million times more energy than a chemical reaction so less resource usage across the whole lifecycle);
- the second one is that most of it (over 90%) can be recycled and used with gen 4 reactors;
- the third one is that it stays local, i.e. unlike CO2 it doesn't go into the atmosphere (and then the ocean), and since CO2 is inert, from a human time scale how long CO2 can stay in the atmosphere is, I would argue, comparable to nuclear waste decay.
You cannot predict t that any place on Earth will be stable, or stay local, over hundredsof millenia
Wishful thinking so you can make future generations pay for your consumption
You maybe mixing up danger and risk, those are two different concepts. Nuclear waste is dangerous, but it doesn’t have to be risky. Consider this: where do we have the most unknown (risk): long-term geological storage of nuclear waste, or the consequences of climate change and our ability to adapt?
I really wish I could share the educational resources that I have with you, unfortunately it’s all in French…
The leader of Germany that phased out nuclear and made Germany fully reliant on Russia then took a job... at Gazprom. The VP from the Greens responsible took a very high paying job lobbying for foreign Gas firms, too.
It has to be one of the most successful foreign influencing campaigns in history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schr%C3%B6der#Business... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joschka_Fischer#Business_activ...
A slightly racist belief in the Japanese as superior at following the rules meant a big shock when the Germans realised that even the Japanese could not be trusted with nuclear power.
Sure, you and I can talk about newer plant designs that fail safely, or about how coal plants emit more radiation by far. But if we had the ability to rapidly convince large swathes of the populace of provable scientific facts, then clean power is only one of the many many problems we would be able to solve.
Part of it was a Soviet psyop to get Western citizens to oppose West's nuclear weapons. Encourage people to oppose nuclear in general, both nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
https://www.ianfairlie.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/fukush...
https://www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/wp-content/upload/2011/...
And who cares about the 150 000 displaced people and the still existing exclusion zone?
Oh, yeah, because the Fukushima nuclear accident is still ongoing. The plant is still too dangerous to access and dismantle. Cooling water is still pumped into the reactors to keep them from melting down. That water is still contaminated by a mixture of radioelements and being released to the ocean after partial treatment. And this will go on for several decades still.
Also, you can't spell.
For example Greenpeace had it roots in the oposition to nuclear weapon testing at the end of 1960s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpeace
Sellafield's current expected bill is £127B over the next 100 years. Hanford is looking at a cost between $364B and $589.4B.
The imagined economics sold to the public never delivered followed by real accidents like Windscale, TMI and Chernobyl.
With climate change the nuclear industry saw the possibility of finally having actual product market fit. So another round of subsidies were created in the 2000s and 2010s. At the same time renewables were seen as the upstart, and storage barely crossed any minds.
The outcome being ruinously expensive plants as seen in Vogtle, Virgil C. Summer, Olkiluoto, Flamanville 3, Hinkley Point c and so on.
What we're seeing now is a token investment to subsidize the necessary industry for military research and reactors. But no one expects it to deliver electricity at a relevant price, or point in time, compared to renewables and storage.
Also, Hanford has nothing to do with civilian NPPs and the processes used there would never be done as part of power generation.
Finally, the cost of NPPs is almost always about the lawsuits. Look at how much Korea and China payed for their NPPs. It was less than 20% of what we pay, they were online in less than 5 years and they are producing 2.8GW for each country for the last decade.
PS The UK has never deployed a standardized design for a NPP. All of their NPPs are different types of experimental designs. Just buy a AP1400 and be done with it for far cheaper.
They were deeply entwined, and still are. The AEC established in 1946 was responsible for both nuclear weaposn and peaceful nuclear technology.
There's been a bunch of civilian dual purpose reactors ran at hanford.
Yes. Much of the waste is from the weapons program. But saying that the site has nothing to do with civilian nuclear plants is just you making stuff up.
It is sad when the premier example touted is South Korea. The country where 68 people received prison sentences totaling 253 years and 9 months from the corruption scandal involving falsified safety certificates, fraudulent components and bribery.
China is also especially funny. Despite the nuke bros perfect environment of stable regulations, cheap workforce, state financing, authoritarian rule and so on nuclear remains insignificant. Sitting at 4% of the grid mix and shrinking. While renewables and storage are absolutely exploding in scale.
You got one guy on here claiming a fusion reactor will be built in Virginia (lol). Yet another claiming that the reason that everyone hates nuclear power is because of the byproduct of nuclear waste and that it's worse than climate change (rofl). Like what kind of drugs are you people on?
Nuclear loses on pure accounting and time to build.
So for the same rate of investment you can decarbonize 2-3 times faster. And that doesn't figure the long lead times for nuclear vs solar, wind and batteries.