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this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
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I disagree. Next to hydropower (which is limited by geography) it has been the champion of non-fossil electricity generation so far. Still, the fossil fuel lobby is a powerful foe.
Simply put, we should invest in all non-fossil options, and where solar is geographically viable, it is great. In other places however, where peak electricity demand coincides with the coldest, darkest parts of the year dispatchable production is strictly necessary, which is where nuclear shines.
There is also wind, which works really well in a lot of those darker / colder countries
For sure, wind is an especially good complement for hydropower, since the latter can store the surplus when it's windy and release it when it's not. Still, wind generation can, like other variable renewables, slip to nigh 0 production from time to time, at which point there must be enough dispatchable capacity to cover the supply/demand gap. Otherwise you get rolling blackouts in the middle of a -20°C winter. Not great.
Here's a showcase of one such day in my country this winter. Average temps below -20°C (which means demand is very rigid due to heating needs) and the wind died down completely in the morning across all of Scandinavia & northern Germany, which meant there wasn't room to import either. Winter prices on electricity ranged between 10-60€/MWh back when our nuclear plants were in full operation. Half have been shut down in the past decade due to political pressure from the green party.
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Hydropower has terrible environmental consequences. Emissions aren't all that matters in terms of the environment.
Perfect is the worst enemy of progress. Right now the highest priority must be to get rid of the fossil fuel plants, and logistically speaking hydropower is simply the best. Mostly because of the built in function of energy storage and ability to load follow, something that the other variable renewable options entirely lack.
Another benefit of hydropower is its longevity, simplicity, and relatively low maintenance needs. There are installations still in operation which (including the generating machinery) are older than a century.
I would love to say that local consecuences are better than global ones but the "local" part may actually hide a quasi continental impact.
I live in Buenos Aires, more than 1500 km away from the big hydro power plants that lay on the parana river. Sometimes Brazil has to open or close their water gates because of droughts and the consecuences are felt here pretty hard. Waves of dead fish, invasions of sub tropical species, -3 m of water almost for a complete season, camalotes (~~hyacinths~~? We apparently locally call camalotes to some sort of aglomeration of plants that floats down the river. They usually carry snakesunder it, or so i have been told).
Nevertheless, i personally prefer hydro than oil
Well but what to do with the waste?
I think in general it is a good source for energy, but unless we find a solution other than storing it somewhere in the earth, we should not use it.
You build breeder reactors or use any of the non-uranium designs that were ignored by countries because they didn't have weapons grade byproducts.
There are ways to deal with the waste, the problem is always politics/greed as it cuts into the profits. Same is true for other energy sources btw, with coal we happily shoot the waste into the atmosphere and pretend nothing's wrong with that.
Yeah 100% agree with you.
Unfortunately it is always the issue with greed and maximise the profits.
But that's why I don't really believe in the usefulness of Nuclear as a energy source. The idea behind it is brilliant, but the way we use it is not. I am no expert in this field, just my personal opinion.
Isn't it basically a non-issue?
Afaik so little of it is generated that we can comfortably store it for thousands of years.
It can also be used in manufacturing later, like in making depleted uranium APFSDS penetrators (for your mom - sorry)
Also, I believe it's literally harmless, isn't it? If properly sealed of course. Afaik it just produces heat for a very, very long time...
Depleted Uranium is not waste from nuclear reactors, it's waste from nuclear fuel production through uranium enrichment. It's very pure U~238~, the uranium isotope you end up with after you extract all the easily fissionable U~235~ from natural uranium, which is a mixture of different isotopes, with U~238~ being the most abundant.
A good part of the waste from reactors can't be used for manufacturing anything useful, if it could, it would be. Nuclear fuel reprocessing does extract the materials useful for further use from spent fuel, but that's small amounts, and creates a fair bit of extra waste itself, because the processes involve a whole lot of complicated and interesting physics and chemistry. The majority of the spent fuel assemblies (materials turned radioactive from Neutron flux, Fission products) are good for nothing (unless you want to make spicy paper weights which remotely* taste like metal) and will be anything from mildly to highly radioactive, some of them will be for tens of thousands of years.
* remotely as in "from a distance"
Might be, but I personally don't feel comfortable it being stored. What if it leaks. Not my problem, as I will be dead by then, but still we will leave it for future generations.
I have seen the chaos building the Hinkley reactor and the costs, so my personal opinion there are cheaper ways of producing energy.
The long term storage of the long lived highly radioactive components of spent reactor fuel is not solvable IMO, because the time needed to store until safe (tens of thousands of years) exceeds the life span of all known human civilisations and will take much longer than the age of the oldest known writing systems, so there is no known way of preserving the knowledge of a storage site and its associated dangers.
At the required time scale, even picking the medium to preserve the record on is a challenge, the only half way safe bet is carving it into granite or any similarly hard rock, but even that can erode significantly if exposed to the wrong conditions during that time frame.
Writing itself, as we know it, is only roughly 5500 years old.
One famous example of an early writing system that left extensive records are ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs. After the knowledge of this writing system had been lost in the aftermath of the christianisation of the Roman empire and the resulting closure of the remaining ancient Egyptian temples, it took humanity hundreds of years to decipher them again, despite great interest and effort, and was finally only possible thanks to sheer luck: The discovery of the proverbial Rosetta Stone, which carries inscriptions of the same text in Hieroglyphs, another ancient Egyptian writing system, and ancient Greek, of which only the ancient Greek could be understood at the time.
There are many other old writing systems we have records of, but are unable to read, because nobody knows how. This is how any record of a nuclear waste dump site and its dangers will most likely eventually end up. Millennia before the waste has become harmless.
I see what you did there.