Context: I'm currently doing a PhD in nuclear engineering

Hard-line advocates of nuclear power usually point to its role as a 'baseload' generation, but this term is often misused. A lot of people use it as if it means "reliable power on demand" as opposed to wind and solar which is not (without batteries). But baseload generation generally refers to plants with unvarying output that provide the minimum energy consumption of the grid, so that other (varying output) energy sources can be turned up or down to make up the deficit.

The "unvarying" part is very important for nuclear power. Conventional nuclear plants (PWRs and LWRs) really hate when you vary their power output. This is because varying heat and radiation flux through the fuel rod cladding causes a "racheting" effect which accelerates the swelling of fuel pellets against them leading to formation of cracks in the surface oxide, which can propagate into the bulk metal if power goes up and down too often, leading to rupture of the fuel rod cladding (which is bad). Anything below 85% power output for longer than 2 weeks is classed as extended reduced power operation (ERPO) and should be minimised - typically it is done for maintenance purposes.

This is important because it influences how much of your energy production can actually come from nuclear. France for example generates something like 75% of its electrical power from nuclear, but this is only possible because they are surrounded by countries which import a lot of energy (i.e. Germany and the UK), so they can offload excess power there and avoid putting their plants into ERPO. If Germany and the UK had similarly high amounts of nuclear, the system would not work and a lot of plants would experience reliability issues.

All this is to say, nuclear is an excellent energy source for making up a large, unvarying chunk of energy production (say, ~30%) but anything much more than that can cause more problems than it solves. One power source which can provide reliable on-demand time-varying energy is... batteries! Which is one of the reasons that recent advances in battery + solar are so exciting to me. A power grid made up of solely nuclear and renewables working together to meet time-varying demand is now completely plausible. So we dont have to choose between nuclear or renewables per se, we just have to deploy each in a way that suits its own merits.

yes. its stable and powerful, you cant rely entitely on renewable energy because sun does not always shine, wind does not always blow and hydro-electric outputs too little power compared to the damage caused. you also cant rely on coal because youre going to fucking die

Pro. If you consider how absolutely minuscule the risks are (keep your regulatory bodies free of corruption, guys), all political criticism looks uninformed and performative, answers in this thread included.

Imagine an anti-vaxx hippie: presents as progressive, gushes of pointless contrarianism, easily exploitable by the estabilishment*. That's how I see the nuclear power-"critics", both here and elsewhere.

• • E.g.: I consider the Green Party of Switzerland the epitome of counter-productive performative idiocy ever since they've been campaigning for replacing our NPPs with gas turbine plants. Fuckin' 🤡s the lot of them.*

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

Pro, I think a lot of the anti-nuclear sentiments are leftovers from when nuclear power was not as heavily regulated as it is now.

Now it's basically impossible for a meltdown except for if a literal natural disaster happens, and sometimes even then

And it's a very clean energy source, with the one problem of what to do with the radioactive waste, but there is far less waste than fossil fuels, and it's easier to get rid of.

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

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

I used to be anti-nuclear in the past but I realized a lot of the talking points were either wrong or directly favoring the fossil fuel companies. 100% for Nuclear and renewable energy.

Pro, but renewables do deploy way faster so we do want those renewables to be running while we wait for the nuclear plants to be constructed.

Turning off fossil fuel burning plants is the priority

I am pro nuclear energy.

All reactors are subject to overheat leading to meltdown when suddenly shutdown. They become massive energy vampires, requiring huge cooling power (and manpower) for up to 2 years after to avoid that.

What are the odds that a "social collapse" (war, plague, disaster, etc) leaves some with no workers and no external juice? Not if, when! Meltdowns will occur, some will breach containment. Only fools light an unextinguishable fire that kills them if they ever stop feeding it.

While reactor designs are "safe": this requires that they follow protocols, which often means unplanned downtime. Given the social pressures for energy, it seems that reactor operators will sometimes disobey shutdown requirements. Corruption is real in all societies. With reactors it absolutely includes a non-zero catastrophe chance. Again not if, when!

Reactors are safe, for a pre-designed lifespan. Often 50 years. To decommission properly is massively expensive and takes years of labour, and requires a replacement plant. Are operators actually squirreling away the funds to have this all saved up 50 years later (by "overcharging" now)? Or are the future governments just gonna keep patching a pig... not if, when!

What kind of containment system will work for 10s of thousands of years? What does that cost, or even look like?

https://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of-honor/

As someone who has done quite a bit of work on power systems (in the New Zealand context) recently.

You have to consider any energy generation technology in the environment it is going to be deployed in.

Whilst I am generally pro-nuclear; as a technology. It doesn't really work as a deployable energy system in comparison to other forms of generation; especially here in NZ. There are three main reasons for this:

• Cost in both time and money to construct nuclear is far too high.
• Industry to support nuclear doesn't exist in NZ. Expert techs, operators, fabricators etc are not here; we would need to build an industry alongside building the first plant.
• Regulatory framework to enable nuclear generation is almost nonexistent. We have medical isotope framework; as a basic way to work with radiological material.
• Bonus challenge; we would have to import all the fuel.

Countries with existing nuclear industries and power plant have a much easier time; but when comparing the cost in time and money to get the first GWh out of a nuclear generator; it is a hard sell.

One major advantage nuclear has over other forms of generation is physical footprint; effective power density is absolutely massive. To get similar power density in renewable generation, the only thing close would be the in development supercritical geothermal power; though nuclear would still have higher power density and is not geographically constrained.

Maybe things will change in the future. Maybe small modular reactors will eventuate in an easy to deploy way; or the developments in Chinese thorium reactors will pan out to a viable generation tech. But technology is not the only stumbling block that nuclear energy faces; especially in a small country that doesn't have an existing nuclear industry.

I know there is a lot of money being thrown at fusion; and that may change the game entirely, it is an interesting time to be looking at energy systems.

Pro unless you want to build one in a 15 mile proximity of my house then I get cold feet

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

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

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

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

Against. 20 years ago I would have been for.

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

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

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

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

I'm amazed at how level headed and straight forward the arguments are presented across a rather large variety of instances!

Also, against. Renewable + Battery + grid is the way to go. Connect every power source and distribute the energy. Include redundancy because energy is important.

I'm nuclear neutral.

Nuclear is a great resource and we should try to keep all plants that are online today online.

However, expansion of nuclear in the corrupt, finance-capital USA should be deprioritized in favor of renewables and storage. The latter has insanely fast construction times and can be deployed much faster than new nuclear. We're racing against the clock to transition our society away from carbon polluting activities, and renewables present the greatest opportunity to cut down the largest emitting section: fossil fuel power.

Long term I think humanity needs to invest in more fission and definitely fusion, but we're in a climate crisis and need solutions now.

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

I’d rather see solar and wind power though.

I'm a fan of nuclear technology. Any plants working today should be maintained indefinitely, and in places that don't have any options due to geography building new ones today makes sense. And hopefully those investments can help make nuclear tech cheaper in the future with SMRs, etc.

That said, anywhere that is still burning fossil fuels on a nice sunny day should be investing all their energy money into building renewables. It's such an amazingly cheap and quick way to replace fossil fuels. Each panel hooked up is instantly displacing fossil fuels being burnt. And once you have enough solar to cover the daylight hours, you're going to be overproducing during the brightest hours and that will induce people to hook up batteries to profit from the "free" energy and now you've solved the duck curve hours.

I also have some reservations about humans being responsible enough. I live in Japan and do not trust that the energy companies have learned anything from Fukushima, they're just doing as little as possible to cover their asses. The end of Pax Americana and the rise of Climate Change unrest will also increase terrorism risks. It's not bad enough that I'm saying don't build nuclear, but I feel it's still enough of a risk that renewables should be preferred when possible (of course new tech mitigates this to some extent with safer spent fuels and smaller reactors). Just decentralizing the grid so that homes can generate their own power after storms is a huge win with renewables.

Im pro nuclear power as long as it is cost effective.

Renewable solar and wind with backup batteries is by far the least expensive power supply at the moment.

Anything contradicting the previous sentence is a complete lie that was spread by liars with money to gain.

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

Currently in reality? Under capitalism, genocide, planetary annihilation, etc? I'm opposed. It will absolutely be used as a tool of violence and exploitation like every other "technology" developed under capitalism.

In an imaginary world... It depends on the imaginary situation, etc. But that's largely irrelevant to actual reality.

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

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

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