by crote | 2025-05-08 16:25:48+00:00
> a proven technology with excellent safety record

Excellent safety, if you ignore Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, the Tokaimura accidents, the Church Rock spill, the beaches near Dounreay, and dozens more.

Nuclear power rarely kills anyone, but when (not if) things go wrong, it tends to create a massive mess which costs billions to clean up - if a cleanup is even possible at all. It is the only power source which has made entire cities impossible to live in.

I personally don't believe this is necessarily a dealbreaker with modern nuclear plants in rich countries, but if you want to convince people of its safety you probably shouldn't be mentioning its historical record.

> a completely closed fuel life cycle

Only if you completely ignore the huge amount of pollution and waste generated by mining, reprocessing, and disposal.

Again, I personally don't believe this has to be a dealbreaker, but the waste generated by the nuclear industry is still an unsolved problem. We've been operating nuclear reactors for 80 years now, but permanent waste disposal and reactor decommissioning is still in its infancy. The current state-of-the-art is essentially "let it rot in place and hope nothing goes wrong while we figure out a way to deal with it". I think it can be solved, but unless we've done so you probably shouldn't make it part of your argument.

> If we (the West) had built out nuclear to satisfy our electricity needs

We did. France hit 80% nuclear, for example. 9% of global power is supplied by nuclear plants. There are over 400 plants currently operational, and 700 have been decommissioned. We aren't on "baby's first nuclear reactor" anymore.

> implementing new nuclear power tech as it improved

We did. It made the plants too expensive to be commercially viable.

> You’d just pay for amps, say 50 amp, 150 amp, 300 amp, all you can consume.

Not a chance. Although fuel would indeed be quite cheap, power still isn't going to be free: someone has to pay off the massive construction loans.

Consumer power consumption is also a lot more flexible than something like internet. People don't suddenly start to consume a lot more data when their internet gets faster - a single person is still only going to watch one Netflix stream at a time, and that'll work just as fine on a 100Mbps connection as on a 8Gbps one. And all the equipment is already prepared for the faster connection, so it's not like they are saving any money by keeping it slow.

But if your power is free, why bother with gas heating? Why go for a heat pump when resistive heating has cheaper equipment? Why bother isolating your home? Why shut off your lights when you leave your home? Making electricity free means we'll be using a lot more of it, which means having to build significantly more expensive nuclear power plants.

If this was an option, countries with abundant hydro would be providing free power. And they aren't.

> But instead we have expensive electricity

Taking all costs into account, nuclear is currently the most expensive form of generating electricity. While building additional nuclear could get us (mostly) off fossil fuel, it is definitely not going to make your power bill any cheaper. Nuclear power is only viable with hefty subsidies - which in practice means turning off dirt-cheap solar and wind to run expensive nuclear plants.