| It is though. Climate change due to fossil fuel use is not a risk, it's a guaranteed disaster. If you have to choose between a risk and certain disaster, you never choose the guaranteed disaster, yet that is what the anti-nuclear movement has done. I get it, nuclear accidents are scary, but we have to be able to take a step back and look at the entire picture and not get blinded by some detail. |
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| ▲ | Spooky23 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think you’re kind of off the rails in context of Ukraine, where a foreign army is shelling major power plants and torturing the engineers for fun from time to time. Maybe consider context before pasting your standard argument? | | |
| ▲ | boxed 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Not really. Imagine a world where Ukraine, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Finland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria scaled up nuclear power in the 70s. In that situation Putin wouldn't have had any money for his army in the first place. You have to think about the system as a whole as I said, not get blinded by some detail right now. And yea, scaling up nuclear right now is probably not super useful as batteries and solar have dropped so much in price. But we certainly shouldn't shut down nuclear reactors like Germany did. |
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| ▲ | AdamN 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's a really fallacious argument. Nuclear wouldn't stop truck emissions, car emissions, boat emissions, long distance freight train emissions (unless electric), and airplane emissions. It wouldn't stop military emissions (which are significant). We could have done a lot more nuclear but it's not clear that it would have done more than a few percent of CO2 savings in the overall scheme of things. You can see this most clearly in China which is still burning tons of coal in 2026 and have had no compunction with nuclear ever. | | |
| ▲ | empiricus 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If electricity is cheap enough, you can take CO2 from air and make fuel (not sure what is the threshold? 5-10 times cheaper then now?). then you can use that fuel where you need its energy density. I agree that it seems pretty dumb to ignore China (and soon India) CO2 emissions. Again, if you manage to make nuclear cheap enough, you could just gift reactors to everyone that needs them. It can be argued that cheap and safe nuclear was not really tried. | | |
| ▲ | boxed 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think that is a pretty unrealistic scenario though. Nuclear won't get that cheap. | | |
| ▲ | empiricus 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well, it is quite difficult indeed, but I am curious what will happen in the next 20 years, with China very interested in this, and some renewed interest in the west too. I am also not sure which is more unrealistic, cheap nuclear or fusion. |
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| ▲ | boxed 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You can just look at the total emissions from France and compare with Germany. It's quite amazing the difference. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c... Imagine having HALF the CO2 emissions. HALF. That would be amazing. If we had that in most of Europe and the US instead of listening to the anti-nuclear lobby we would have a ton more runway to fix the issue than we have now. | | |
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