[slopinthebag]

One thing I don’t understand is environmentalists seemingly unbounded hatred of nuclear energy. If the goal is to reduce carbon emissions and switch to clean energy, nuclear is a way to do that, but it seems like many of them would rather use coal (see Germany). I simply don’t understand this.

[bluGill]

You are not alone. There are a lot of people who have been confused since the 1970s. Even people who don't care about the environment have long recognized that hypocrisy.

[bryanlarsen]

This hatred is irrational, but has incidentally done the world a lot of good.

In the 90's/00's when Germany and Denmark decided to start decarbonizing their grid, the sane choice would have been nuclear. At the time it was the cheapest zero carbon viable electricity source. (Geothermal may have been cheaper at the time, but wasn't viable to power their entire grid).

But instead they decided to massively overpay for wind & solar. This bootstrapped the insane cost reduction we've seen in wind & solar over the last 30 years. Today solar & wind are significantly cheaper than natural gas, and orders of magnitude cheaper than nuclear.

> coal (see Germany)

Which dropped from 55% of electricity from coal in 1990 to 23% today. From 400 million tons to 130 tons.

[throw0101d]

> Which dropped from 55% of electricity from coal in 1990 to 23% today. From 400 million tons to 130 tons.

And how much lower would have it been if they had chosen to keep their existing nuclear and reduce/retire their coal and/or gas? Certainly if they did not want to build new nuclear that's one thing, but they chose to keep the emitting stuff, which was really stupid IMHO.

Even now it'd be viable to re-start some of Germany's nuclear if they really wanted to reduce emissions:

* https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/reports/restarting-german...

* PDF: https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/_files/ugd/ae75b7_bc5db59...

[bryanlarsen]

None? In 1990 those power plants were online and yet 55% of electricity was from coal.

[throw0101d]

What was the European grid mix in 1990? What were German energy imports/exports in that time frame? I would hazard to guess that the larger context of energy has changed quite a bit in the EU in the last few decades.

Germany coal is not estimated to be eliminated for another 5-6 years:

* https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-coal-exit-quie...

How many gigawatts of coal generation could have been shutdown already if nuclear was still generating its gigawatts?

[bonesss]

Ok, but if they had instead bootstrapped industrial nuclear technology into our known design-space we’d have actionable scalable solutions to transportation fuel generation (OPECs geopolitical sway, Chinese economic stability), mass desalination, environmentally friendly electrification of industrial processes, and industrial heat applications that could save incredible amounts of greenhouse emissions on a yearly basis. Instead we are reliving the oil dynamics of the 70s because of our poor industrial accounting, doubling down on emissions heavy tech in energy intensive operations, and maintaining harmful environmental chemical pollutants in our processes farmed out to the developing world…

Renewables in isolation have an entrenching effect on other aspects of our global emissions footprint & some likely causes of WW3. Humanity has an energy and greenhouse gas crisis, not an electrical generation crisis. Transportation fuels are central. Delaying our high energy future results in, among many other things, intensely polluting data centres instead of the obvious pairing of 24/7 large scale steady energy with no emissions to our increasingly digitally dictated economies.

Wind/wave/solar is nice, cheap enough anything pays for itself, but there is a bigger picture. Tribalism and anti-nuclear sentiment are not in line with our short to medium term environmental goals and are only marginally relevant to the long term and existential ones. We have already cursed generations by our trepidation, reluctance, and submission to monied interests. We cannot get an iPhone 20 without building and iterating on 19 models first.

[bryanlarsen]

So, nuclear powered trucks are the solution?

[opo]

>This hatred is irrational, but has incidentally done the world a lot of good.

Turning off nuclear power plants while you still are burning coal does not meet the criteria for a crime against humanity, but that decision has resulted in the death of many people already. Those that supported this decision are responsible for those deaths and for that contribution to future deaths caused by climate change.

>...Today solar & wind are significantly cheaper than natural gas, and orders of magnitude cheaper than nuclear.

Solar is not "orders of magnitude" cheaper than nuclear. Utility solar cost is somewhat comparable to older nuclear power plants that are already running and much cheaper than new nuclear. Rooftop solar is much more expensive than older nuclear power plants that are already running and comparable to the price of new nuclear.

[slopinthebag]

But had they invested in nuclear perhaps coal would be down to 0% today, and the same cost reduction would have applied to nuclear instead, with nuclear being orders of magnitude cheaper?

[bryanlarsen]

If they had invested in nuclear in 2000, they'd have maybe 3 plants built by now.

[slopinthebag]

3 > 0

[bryanlarsen]

Germany has installed the equivalent of about 25 nukes worth of solar & wind.

And 3 is definitely not enough to provide any sort of cost scaling benefits.

[slopinthebag]

They did, but at a cost that vastly exceeded the expected cost of building 25 reactors.

> Germany could have kept the existing nuclear power in 2002 and possibly invest in new nuclear capacity. The analysis of these two alternatives shows that Germany could have reached its climate gas emission target by achieving a 73% cut in emissions on top of the achievements in 2022 and simultaneously cut the spending in half compared to Energiewende.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14786451.2024.2...

Honestly a pretty shocking policy decision from the German government, and I imagine was entirely ideological rather than pragmatic.

[csb6]

I think a lot of it was driven by the Chernobyl disaster, which was a massive environmental and health catastrophe. But plants today are vastly safer than Chernobyl due to better design and processes, which I think anti-nuclear people haven't realized.

[throw0101d]

> But plants today are vastly safer than Chernobyl due to better design and processes, which I think anti-nuclear people haven't realized.

Even other plants built in the same timeframe as Chernobyl are safer (not even getting to newer designs/builds), because in the West they were built with containment.

The founder of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank isn't anti-nuclear:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geraldine_Thomas

* https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/26/obesity-...

[masklinn]

The environmentalist hatred for nukes long predates Chernobyl (if anything Chernobyl was an environmental boon by driving humans out of the zone). It started as a justified disapproval of nuclear tests (especially open air) and military nuclear, but then nuclear militaries made sone pointed remarks about the health and safety of a few beatniks going against the military-industrial complex, oil companies started fl funding groups, and voila civilian nukes are an environmental problem.

[cbsmith]

...because they have other goals beyond reduce carbon emissions.

[arn3n]

I have this stance. It’s, for me, a tail-risk calculation: For a given nuclear power plant to be more environmentally friendly than equivalent coal, you have to price in the probability of a nuclear catastrophe with the fact that such catastrophes create fallout that can outlast human civilization.

I can expect that a well-built nuclear plant might not have a catastrophe in my lifetime. But when the consequences are so long-lasting it seems prudent to avoid them entirely. One misbuilt reactor or one governmental regime that rolls back safety regulations and you end up with irreversible consequences. Given the tendency of corporations to “race to the bottom” and abandon safety, and the general unwillingness of the US Government to give proper attention to potential catastrophes (like climate change), I don’t believe that we as a society can handle the responsibility of nuclear reactors. I wish we could have nuclear safely; I don’t trust us to be safe, so I’d rather we not have nuclear at all.

[wiml]

Environmental disasters that will likely outlast human civilization? Coal does that in normal operation.

[teamonkey]

It’s not an either-or.

[wiml]

Isn't it, though? A GW generated one way displaces a GW generated another way. As long as we are building and operating coal-fired power plants — which we are — it is reasonable to consider displacing those plants with fission plants. I'm not aware of any system in which coal is better than nuclear.

Of course, yes, wind and solar are great. But despite the amazing growth in those sources, we're still burning a huge amount of coal and oil.