solarpunk memes

All that matters is cost in the energy transition. A certain subset of person likes fission because it's always fun to be contrarian. But there's a reason fission companies have gone bankrupt left and right, and that we've seen countless fission startups collapse over the last two decades. Nuclear proponents like to bitch about strawmen Greenpeace activists and people irrationally afraid of nuclear power. They like talking about these phantom barriers to nuclear, as if fear of nuclear power has anything to do with why fission is a dying technology.

Fission is dying because it's just too damned expensive. Bitch all you want about the intermittency of solar; it's cheaper to just spam solar panels and batteries than it is to create an equal amount of reliable power with fission.

Nuclear proponents will always state that fission can be done perfectly safe, and that's true. But when you point out the cost, they then bitch about regulation making it expensive. Never do they connect the dots that it is precisely that heavy-handed regulation that ensures corporate profits don't result in unsafe power plants.

Fission is an inherently dangerous technology. Yes, some modern plant designs are "intrinsically safe," if they're built right and maintained right and no greedy bastard corporation cuts corners somewhere to save a buck. In order to do nuclear safely, you have to regulate the ever-loving hell out of it and make sure every step of the process is checked and double checked, and that there is some neutral third party looking over everyone's shoulders. Nuclear power, if done wrong, can go absolutely catastrophically wrong. It can render entire regions uninhabitable for generations. It can be done safely, but only if extremely heavily regulated and tightly controlled. And that is one thing that just inevitably makes fission power extremely expensive. There is no "move fast and break things" when you're splitting atoms. Development is slow, expensive, and bureaucratic. And that is unfortunately just the way it has to be for this technology to be used safely in a for-profit capitalist society.