Chernobyl had such a far-reaching environmental impact. Beyond even the radioactive pollution stuff, it scared everyone away from nuclear power and back to fossil fuels for energy production. I sometimes wonder where we'd be wrt CO2 levels if nuclear energy adoption had continued along the same trend as it was before Chernobyl. Would we have had substantially more time to mitigate climate change? Maybe we'd have been in the same boat (or an equally bad boat) due to other factors; maybe it would have stymied renewables even more due to already having a readily available and well-established alternative to fossile fuels in nuclear power. Idk. But if someone wrote one of those what-if alternative history novels about the subject, I'd read the heck out of it.

Nuclear is too expensive. It doesn't make sense to build new reactors.

Anyone still worried about the safety of the method is an ignoramus. "Dying slowly to lung cancer and the environment cooking me alive is so much better than the one-in-a-billion chance of having to eat some prussian blue"

Waste removal is my biggest concern. Unless the plans to expand also come with ways to recycle the waste, we're just setting ourselves up for giant exclusion zones throughout the globe, most likely in small countries where the plants are imposed on them by foreign economic powerhouses and then they're told to figure the waste out themselves.

Not to mention "just bury it" is neither futureproof nor is it good for the non-human inhabitants of our planet; sure if those concrete containment cysts in the desert ever fail it will "only" be leaking radiation into the desert, but any desert is still home to hundreds of species of living things and its own complex ecosystem. "Desert" doesn't actually mean "devoid of life"; there are no good locations to bury it and forget it.

Let's talk about the absolute devastation mining rare materials does to ecosystems and the exploitation of third world countries that it's led to. We're already implicated in so much violence against the earth itself and colonialist exploitation, and I'm supposed to support gods know how much more of that for Uranium from Kazhakstan (45% of the worlds' production in 2021)? That's basically begging for more forever wars over energy resources in the middle east.

"We'll figure out long term solutions after the infrastructure is put in place" is how we got to where we are with fossil fuels AND landfills.

I'll fully support any plans to make a push toward nuclear, but the foremost concern of that push should be waste recycling. After that's figured out, everything else is small potatoes. It would even make the long-term costs cheaper than fighting for new material and figuring out million-year half-life hazardous waste disposal. A nearly unlimited energy supply that doesn't fuel wars and is safer than the current system? Sign me the fuck up.

Honestly got know idea why China isn't doubling down on nuclear. Chinese use umbrellas when it rains - not because they don't want to get wet, but because they must if they don't want to get itchy skin from the fucking acid raining down from the sky.

Yet, China is building new coal plants.. WHY?!

It's not "da costs", it's actually really, really really expensive to build new nuclear reactors. Most of that comes from increased labor costs, which in turn have ballooned largely due to increased regulation and oversight requirements, which I would argue is not something we should do away with.

I wouldn't necessarily mind having a reactor or two acting as base generators especially during the winter, but

1. In Germany we've been searching for a secure waste site since the first reactor went online in 1957. If we haven't found it yet, we never will.
2. There's not really a reason to hope for cost reduction of reactor construction once we do it at scale, because requirements and local acceptance are too heterogeneous to implement any sort of scaling construction. Every jurisdiction will have its own risk assessment and usually the locals are none too happy about a reactor close to them. I just don't see something happening in that regard. Wind turbines and solar panels on the other hand can be churned out in factories at scale, which is why they're so cheap, comparatively.
3. Therefore, personally I'd rather invest in green H2 as an energy storage solution. We can easily generate an enormous electricity surplus during the summer months, but lack long-term storage of the electricity. So we shut off solar and wind farms when they're over producing. Wouldn't it be neat to instead let them keep generating and use that surplus energy to power power-to-gas plants E. G. with H2? It's an enormously power-hungry process, but if you do it when power is basically free...

Oh wait, we're already doing that and it's already cost-effective. Now, if we were to take that process and build it at scale... for example by not spending 12-20 Bn 💶 to build another Flamanville, Olkiluoto or Hinkley Point C... I think that might actually work.