I will have to strongly disagree here. The timelines are actually the main reason why I would disqualify Nuclear power as a solution to energy, even as a temporary one.

The time from inception to going online for a new Nuclear reactor is in the range of 15-25 years. Of course we could attempt to shorten that, but that would probably mean compromising on safety. So indeed, if we want to stop using fossil fuels asap, building solar, wind, and hydro, which come online in a matter of months (maybe years for hydro), is much faster.

Aggravating this are two further issues: Current Nuclear energy production is non-renewable, and supply problems are already known to occur at current energy production levels. Second, the global construction capacity is limited, probably to around current levels. Even if we do not push for faster construction times, the number of companies and indeed people who have the necessary expertise are already at full capacity, and again, expanding that would probably imply safety problems.

That is to say, currently running Nuclear power plants are save and clean, so by all means keep doing it until renewables take over. But expanding Nuclear power to solve the energy problem is a non-starter for me, due to the timeline and it being non-renewable. And that is before we start talking about the very real dangers of Nuclear power, which are not operational of course, but due to proliferation, war, and governmental or general societal instability (due to say, climate change).

What exactly do you mean by "in the meantime"? What kind of timeline do you envisage for the large scale rollout of nuclear energy? Do you seriously think it'll be possible to roll out nukes faster than building some more storage?

From a country that's preventing shutdowns on the monthly, fuck no.

Yeah a 20 year commitment when the next party will revert all progress means nothing.

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.

Tbf, long term goals are a good thing. National planning having a lifespan of 4-8 years is fucking insane, and probably contributes non-trivial to federal expenditures and waste. We'd be better off if we could follow long term goals. But you're right, though, it was performative planning by and large.

Sounds like typical politicians.

Small modular reactors are modern. And it's where the majority of the research is happening.

It's a bit of a chicken and the egg situation right now. Once the factories ramp up, they'll be pumping out some of the cheapest power producers by MW ever designed.

Unfortunately, those factories can't ramp up until the sales start coming in, and the sales aren't coming in because without the factories going full steam ahead, it's incredibly expensive to make the reactors.

Solar and wind had the exact same problem back in the day. They just didn't have two separate lobbying groups trying to kill them off.

That's not going to happen.