If you’re about to angrily downvote me (or you already did), or write an angry reply, please read the rest of my comment before you do. This is not my individual opinion, this is the scientific consensus on the issue.

When it comes to generating electricity, nuclear is hugely more expensive than renewables. Every 1000Wh of nuclear power could be 2000-3000 Wh solar or wind.

If you’re about to lecture about “it’s not possible to have all power from renewable sources”, save your keystrokes - the majority of studies show that a global transition to 100% renewable energy across all sectors – power, heat, transport and industry – is feasible and economically viable. Again, this isn’t my opinion, you can look it up and find a dozen sources to back up what I am writing here.

This is all with current, modern day technology, not with some far-off dream of thorium fusion breeding or whatever other potential future tech someone will probably comment about without reading this paragraph.

Again, compared to nuclear, renewables are:

Cheaper
Lower emissions
Faster to provision
Less environmentally damaging
Not reliant on continuous consumption of fuel
Decentralised
Much, much safer
Much easier to maintain
More reliable
Much more responsive to changes in energy demands

Nuclear power has promise as a future technology. It is 100% worth researching for future breakthroughs. But at present it is a massive waste of money, resources, effort and political capital.

Nuclear energy should be funded only to conduct new research into potential future improvements and to construct experimental power stations. Any money that would be spent on nuclear power should be spent on renewables instead.

[–] NataliePortland@lemmy.ca 49 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Wow I'm surprised to see people are actually downvoting you and arguing about this. It's common knowledge that the cost, impact, and build-time of new nuclear plants makes them a poor choice for energy. Not only is wind/ solar cheaper, it's faster to build.

[–] regul@lemm.ee 11 points 1 year ago (4 children)

It's also common knowledge that the more often you build something, the lower its price tends to go as that knowledge spreads. It's part of the reason it's so expensive to build trains in the US and so cheap in South Korea and Spain.

[–] burningmatches 32 points 1 year ago

This famously isn’t true for nuclear power. It just keeps getting more expensive.

The French nuclear case illustrates the perils of the assumption of robust learning effects resulting in lowered costs over time in the scale-up of large-scale, complex new energy supply technologies. The uncertainties in anticipated learning effects of new technologies might be much larger that often assumed, including also cases of “negative learning” in which specific costs increase rather than decrease with accumulated experience.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421510003526

And this research was done before Fukushima, which increased costs even further.

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