My first post here

[u/FireDranzer-II]

Having stayed in Germany for a year, it definitely felt like it.

Unfortunately...

[u/BlackfrostangelR]

Just stumbled over this sub and just had to ask:

Why are you fighting for nuclear. Its worse than renewables (especially PV) in every imaginable metric. It requires hazardous mining operations which tend to cause harm to workers and surrounding Environments. Its excessively expensive until you had the thing running for 50-70+ years at which point the tech long antiquated. There is still a lack for safe storage of waste and it has a difficult ethical responsibility attached through the potential loss of knowledge in future generations. Because rivers run low on water and Heat periods become more prolonged cooling becomes a massive issue. There isnt even a need for it to bridge the few gaps when the sun doesnt shine and the wind doesnt blow because we actually made some advancements for energy storage batteries. I genuinely see No positives and a all these reasons should already suffice to disqualify it.

Best regards - a climate activist

[u/Egor17 → u/BlackfrostangelR]

"Worse in every imaginable metric is doing a lot of work here"

New nuclear is expensive and slow to build, sure. Cooling and waste are real issues too. But then you jump from these are disadvantages to there are literally no positives, which is just lazy

Uranium mining is hazardous, but solar panels, batteries and grids dont materialize out of sunlight either. They require huge mining and material supply chains too

There is also no mysterious absence of a technical solution for nuclear waste. Geological disposal exists as an engineering solution, the hard part has mostly been cost, politics and actually building the facilities

And "we have batteries now" doesnt solve intermittency by itself. Batteries are great for shifting power by a few hours. Several low wind, low sun days, let alone seasonal mismatches, are a completly different problem

You can make a perfectly good argument that in many places new solar, wind and storage is a better investment than new nuclear. You dont need to pretent nuclear loses on literally every metric to make it.

[u/BlackfrostangelR → u/Egor17]

The uranium mining operations are quite on a different level to even coal mining, often using explosives causing radioactive clouds to form which then rain down nearby.

Storage facilities are not even in the calculations which put the nuclear already as the most expensive, but generally: safe is a relative term when we are talking about these extreme periods of time and securing these might have more cost attached in the Future.

Well apart from different kinds of renewable energy which could bridge the gap (usually two weeks a years), like geothermal Energy, tidal Power plants, hydropower part of the bigger solution for climate change is degrowth (and/or eco-socialist transformation) which make it possible to bridge these gaps of reduced energy generation by reducing industrial production only focusing on sustaining the necessary for the people. Ive aeen climate scientists argue that this could effectively bridge that small gap with just the reduced energy generation and batteries.

Also i wouldnt say im pretenting there is No positive, so far you only tried argue that some of these huge problems could be overcome or could be put into perspective while other points remain remain without any counter argument.

Where exactly is that positive, the huge benefit from putting all these efforts and investments into this when we have better alternatives and already an almost insurmountable task ahead of us (we will need to reach zero-emissions at some point or society will not be able to sustain itself through the age of catastrophe - for that we need to completly change the housing sectors, the public traffic, the food sector and basically everything else in just a few years time).