The backlash against nuclear comes from four points and a meta-point:
1) Weapons proliferation. The standard fission cycle is just too convenient for this (after all, that's why it was developed) and so an international infrastructure needs to be developed around restricting this. See Iran for example. This also prompted a lot of opposition from people who didn't want to live under the threat of their cities being nuked.
This also turned into lethal fights with the environmental movement (the French government sank Greenpeace's ship Rainbow Warrior with a terrorist bombing that killed a photographer, over the question of nuclear weapons testing). A difficult bit of bad blood to bury.
2) Huge scale and persistence of accidents. Chernobyl affected agriculture in the whole of Western Europe, and took decades for an adequate final containment to be built. Bhopal was bad - and possibly worse in effects! - but at least the area isn't a permanent wasteland.
Pebble bed reactors were deemed the promising future, until one of them jammed. It's now unfixable and practically impossible to decomission: (wikipedia) "There exists currently no dismantling method for the AVR vessel, but it is planned to develop some procedure during the next 60 years and to start with vessel dismantling at the end of the century."
3) Waste disposal. A forever problem. I'm old enough to remember Greenpeace fighting it being dumped at sea, but the problem of where we put it remains.
4) Cost overruns. A systematic problem in the industry. Doesn't affect renewables to anything like the same extent.
5) The meta-point: systematic lying about the effects of all of the above. That this happens to overlap with the era of discovering that all sorts of previous advances (CFCs, tetraethyl lead, DDT, asbestos) had nasty side-effects which were also lied about or minimised is not a coincidence. Nuclear advocates take the arrogant position that they don't need to win trust.
1) Ok, this can be a problem.
2) Citation needed. It has lowest number of deaths per kWh. By your logic, planes fall out of the sky, and many people die, so we should never use planes and rely on more deadly methods.
As for pebble bed reactors, mistakes are normal when doing something novel. See the problems LHC faced. Luckily LHC had better funding than nuclear.
3) It's a thousand year problem. The rare metals in average phone are a more of a forever problem. They will never decay to a less toxic compound.
4) Yeah, this is true.
5) Not sure about this one, I see lots of FUD on all sides.
To clarify, I'm not claiming nuclear power is an angel that will save us. But it's a devil we'll probably have to live with if we are to go 0 carbon in near future. Going 100% renewables requires a revolution in battery tech, and a revolution in how electric grid distributes electricity.
Related to (2) and (5), nuclear advocates also tend to assume that the designs being safe if in the hands of a competent, well-supplied, conscientious organization is enough. I used to think the same, but seeing how nuclear plants are neglected even in Western European countries, I no longer think that assumption can be maintained.
All reasonable points, but would you not agree that in the here and now, our first priority should be replacing that coal power station with renewables, and then the gas, then the nuclear?
That's also a bit impossible. There aren't any easy solutions going forward.
You want to replace most power station with non-base load renewables (wind + solar). Well, at peak power are going to add more batteries, to make sure your energy doesn't go to waste. Want to add more batteries, oh you'll need more renewable sources keep it net positive during the winter months and probably keep those battery from draining completely. This is ofc, before the quetion arises, what happens if you have weeks/months of no sun at all :)
Geothermal? Not everyone has access plus possible increases in tectonic activity.
Hydro? Not everyone has access plus possible destruction of ecosystems.
Burning waste to produce power? Probably not enough burnable waste.
Don't get me wrong. Solar scales great if you have a backup to fallback to. California going from 1.9-2.5% of solar would cost as much as a small nuclear plant (around $18 billion dollars).
"The UK has already almost entirely replaced coal"
Indeed. I'd rather take a global approach to what is a global problem though. Germany and Eastern Europe are still burning plenty of coal that could be offset. We are all on the same grid I believe.
The backlash against nuclear comes from four points and a meta-point:
1) Weapons proliferation. The standard fission cycle is just too convenient for this (after all, that's why it was developed) and so an international infrastructure needs to be developed around restricting this. See Iran for example. This also prompted a lot of opposition from people who didn't want to live under the threat of their cities being nuked.
This also turned into lethal fights with the environmental movement (the French government sank Greenpeace's ship Rainbow Warrior with a terrorist bombing that killed a photographer, over the question of nuclear weapons testing). A difficult bit of bad blood to bury.
2) Huge scale and persistence of accidents. Chernobyl affected agriculture in the whole of Western Europe, and took decades for an adequate final containment to be built. Bhopal was bad - and possibly worse in effects! - but at least the area isn't a permanent wasteland.
Pebble bed reactors were deemed the promising future, until one of them jammed. It's now unfixable and practically impossible to decomission: (wikipedia) "There exists currently no dismantling method for the AVR vessel, but it is planned to develop some procedure during the next 60 years and to start with vessel dismantling at the end of the century."
3) Waste disposal. A forever problem. I'm old enough to remember Greenpeace fighting it being dumped at sea, but the problem of where we put it remains.
4) Cost overruns. A systematic problem in the industry. Doesn't affect renewables to anything like the same extent.
5) The meta-point: systematic lying about the effects of all of the above. That this happens to overlap with the era of discovering that all sorts of previous advances (CFCs, tetraethyl lead, DDT, asbestos) had nasty side-effects which were also lied about or minimised is not a coincidence. Nuclear advocates take the arrogant position that they don't need to win trust.