[Sporktacular]

Nuclear had decades to become affordable, safer and sustainable. Instead plants have remained hugely expensive and slow to commission, intrinsically safe reactors are still a pipe dream, the environmental impact of building plants and mining and refining uranium is still large when only 1% of it is used, thorium reactors are a rarity and there is only one dependable, permanent waste depot in operation.

Economics is nuclear's enemy, not environmentalists. Solving the energy storage issue is a hell of a lot easier than solving all the above. The greenies got it right, the future is in renewable sources.

[kleene_op]

I'm sorry but let me just drop this reality check here real quick:

Nuclear provided 50 years of low cost energy to France despite an uphill battle in the public opinion. Renewable energy is failing to save Germany this winter despite being hailed as the holy grail for the past few decades.

Everytime you listen to environmentalists talk you'd think we're already there, that countries are already covered with batteries for long term energy conservation, that a continental-wide energy grid has already been deployed (or will in the incoming week) so Finland can get electricity from solar pannels in Spain, that solar panels or wind turbines are great for our sovereignity when they're being produced in China, that they are infallible ecologically when they require rare materials and aren't systematically recycled.

No, green energy is not there yet, and it definitely won't before quite a bit of time. People failing to realize that and fighting teeth and nails against nuclear are gonna cause our demise if they keep at it.

[tstrimple]

> Nuclear provided 50 years of low cost energy to France

This is outright false. Look at any current data on the cost of running nuclear power. These plants are being shut down en-mass because they are too expensive to operate. I live in Iowa. The nuclear plant here was shut down early because buying out the rest of the contract and switching to other sources was cheaper than leaving the plant up and running. Nuclear proponents completely ignore the economic realities of these systems.

https://www.pveurope.eu/markets/energy-policy-fairy-tale-che...

[Sporktacular]

"Nuclear provided 50 years of low cost energy to France despite an uphill battle in the public opinion. Renewable energy is failing to save Germany this winter despite being hailed as the holy grail for the past few decades."

Its ability to supply France in the past is irrelevant to its ability to power global demand in future. The fuel is too limited and the technology too immature to turn this around. Nuclear is uneconomical as it is, fancy future designs even more so, if they ever arrive on scale. Nuclear has a limited future.

The Germany talking point is deliberately misleading. It was in transition and couldn't reasonably have been expected to predict gas would be switched off overnight. But it could reasonably be expected to predict the serious consequences of runaway global warming. The risk of the former was lower than the risk of the latter and while it was unlucky, it was a reasonable bet as a good global citizen that's done more than almost any country in trying to address a problem that affects literally everyone. So you don't get to knock it for doing what most countries weren't brave enough to even try.

No one credible called renewables the holy grail. No serious environmentalist said green energy is already there. They have been arguing for decades for more R&D, expansion of sustainable power infrastructure, local jobs for installers etc. We should have listened. And you might have heard them if lazy, right wing, straw man talking points weren't drowning them out.

I'm sorry but that's just a quick reality check for you.

[kleene_op]

> Nuclear has a limited future.

Nuclear power is such a dead end China plans to build a hundred of them https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli.... Russia, over 20 https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil.... Japan, probably concerned about what's brewing over the Japanese sea, is going back at it as well https://www.ft.com/content/b380cb74-7b2e-493f-be99-281bd0dd4..., despite Fukushima's disaster.

> It was in transition and couldn't reasonably have been expected to predict gas would be switched off overnight

Except maybe for the war in Dombas plaging us since 2014?

> No one credible called renewables the holy grail.

You are correct.

[Sporktacular]

They're building new coal plants as well, does that mean coal is also the way of the future, or maybe just a stopgap?

Germany has been working on the demand side so that growth is decoupled from carbon. This is the hard problem and will take decades to achieve. So even if it didn't predict a Russian invasion, the international response and Russia's counter, it made a reasonable bet and deserves credit, even if the dice came up short.

It will be an uncomfortable winter, and tragically some old people might even die. But not more than coal power kills with respiratory problems in the short term. And heatwaves, floods, hurricanes and resource wars kill in the long term.

No one credible called renewables the holy grail, not in their current form. But they're on the right path.