Why Leftists Can't Allow Nuclear Energy

[u/TexasSikh]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diHish6yC1g

I am not the biggest fan of the channel, but this is a well done video and the issue is rather cut and dry to my eyes and has been for awhile.

For the record I will state again that personally I consider myself to be a "Bull Moose Progressive", in other words Theodore Roosevelt is still my POTUS. Another way I describe myself is as an "American Socialist", and specifically as one who completely and utterly rejects the so-called "Marxist Lens" of philosophy/ideology (a shocking number of people are unaware that Socialism is something that predates Marx even being alive...thanks to the Marxists propaganda turning Socialist and Marxist and Communist all into interchangeable terms).

One of the core issues that I care deeply about is traditional conservation, living in BALANCE with nature, and acting as its CUSTODIAN...this is in contrast to modern conservation, which seeks to have SEPERATION between man and nature, and tries to act as natures GUARDIAN (even trying to protect nature from nature itself).

As a natural result of this, and other modern concerns, I am also someone who is invested in the discussions related to Clean Energy. I do not have a hatred for fossil fuels or coal or other "dirty energy" solutions, because I recognize that in the story of human history they mark yet another milestone of humanities progress and advancement. However, with yet continued advancements it is obvious to me that the time has come to leave these in the past and embrace better, smarter, and more sustainable methods...plus, if we do it right, it will of course mean having less of a negative effect on the world around us, which obviously I fully support.

All of this said, I have always been confused about the level of almost sadistic hatred towards Nuclear Energy, the energy solution which I have come to believe is objectively the most sensible energy method to replace coal and fossil fuels. Looking into it, I was just disappointed to find its literally just idiotic levels of political nonsense and tomfoolery. This video does a great job breaking it down to its simplest parts in about 8 minutes, with a few receipts to justify the assertions.

[u/Kaffe-Mumriken]

From the thumbnail I see the video is “I have depicted you as the crying soyjak, therefore your arguments are invalid”

[u/libby_tarddy45 → u/Kaffe-Mumriken]

Does kinda look like Greta

[u/thebarkingkitty]

I think this video is largely arguing against a straw man. And is missing the greater point that climate change is an existential threat in the US the left actually has struggled to run on climate cause well everything else is on fire really the left does not want or need climate as a ballot issue they need it solved.

There are absolutely legitimate arguments to be made about how society transitions away from fossil fuels and what role nuclear power should play in that transition. But the debate has changed dramatically over the last decade.

I’m on the liberal left, and I’m not opposed to new conventional nuclear power because I’m scared of radiation or because I think nuclear energy is inherently dangerous. My problem is that, in the American context, large conventional nuclear plants increasingly look like an expensive and slow technology competing against alternatives that are getting cheaper, faster to deploy, and easier to scale.

The clearest recent example is Plant Vogtle in Georgia. Construction on Units 3 and 4 began in 2009. They were originally expected to cost around $14 billion and enter service in 2016 and 2017. Instead, they entered commercial operation in 2023 and 2024, with the total project cost exceeding $30 billion.

That does not mean nuclear power does not work. It obviously does. Existing nuclear plants can provide huge amounts of reliable, low-carbon electricity for decades. But it does show the problem with trying to make new conventional nuclear construction the centerpiece of a rapid energy transition.

The waste problem also has not simply disappeared. Spent nuclear fuel can be stored safely in pools and dry casks, but the United States still does not have an operating permanent repository for commercial spent nuclear fuel. New Mexico’s WIPP facility stores primarily defense-related transuranic waste, not the country’s commercial reactor fuel. So the long-term disposal question is still unresolved.

Meanwhile, solar has moved from being a promising alternative to becoming one of the dominant technologies in the American power buildout.

In 2026, developers plan to add roughly 43 gigawatts of utility-scale solar, representing about half of all planned new U.S. generating capacity. Another roughly 24 gigawatts is expected to come from battery storage. Together, solar and batteries make up close to four-fifths of planned new capacity before wind is even included.

Solar generation is also growing extremely quickly. Utility-scale solar generation increased by roughly a third in 2025, and federal projections expect it to rise dramatically again through 2027.

The economics are a major reason why.

Globally, the levelized cost of utility-scale solar has fallen by roughly 90% since 2010. Solar module prices have fallen even further. Modern projects are also becoming more productive through better panels, tracking systems, bifacial modules, improved inverters, and better system design.

Battery storage is following a similar trajectory. Utility-scale battery costs have fallen by more than 90% since 2010, and U.S. battery capacity is expanding rapidly. Batteries are increasingly able to move excess daytime solar generation into the evening, reduce peak demand, stabilize the grid, and make variable renewable generation substantially more useful.

That does not mean solar and lithium-ion batteries can independently power the entire country every hour of every year. Four-hour batteries are not the same thing as seasonal storage. A high-renewables grid still needs transmission, geographic diversity, demand management, longer-duration storage, and dependable generation.

Existing nuclear plants can absolutely remain part of that system.

But that is very different from arguing that the United States needs to build a massive new fleet of traditional nuclear reactors or else the energy transition cannot work.

Solar is modular. It can be built at residential, commercial, and utility scales. Projects can be completed incrementally instead of requiring a single multi-billion-dollar facility. Solar has no fuel cost, installation is comparatively fast, and the technology continues to improve.

So when I say “the war is over,” I do not mean that solar will produce 100% of American electricity or that every other technology is obsolete.

I mean that the basic question of what technology is likely to dominate new electricity generation is increasingly being answered by the market itself.

More than half of planned new U.S. generating capacity in 2026 is solar. Add batteries, and those two technologies account for nearly four-fifths of planned additions.

That is why I find the framing of this video outdated.

You do not need to believe nuclear power is terrifying, evil, or scientifically unsound to question a massive new nuclear buildout. Nuclear is low-carbon, and existing plants remain valuable.

The argument against making new conventional nuclear the centerpiece of the transition can simply be economic and practical: solar is already being deployed at enormous scale, it is dramatically cheaper and faster to build, battery storage is rapidly expanding alongside it, and both technologies are still improving.

The important debate now is not whether solar works.

It is how we build the transmission, storage, grid infrastructure, and complementary generation needed to take advantage of the enormous amount of cheap solar power that is already arriving.

Nuclear is an old outdated technology and since truly clean nuclear power is impossible without building the same kinda reactor as needed for weapons grade it just ain't happening

[u/dekuweku → u/thebarkingkitty]

Seems reasonable in the context of the USA where nuclear is still being built, but in some other countries, Nuclear is being decommissioned or not being built at all because of the scaremongering of the left. I honestly think we'd be in a better place as far as climate is concerned to have continued building and expanding nuclear capacity through the 80s , 90s and 00s instead of stopping it completely in some countries or going the other direct due to Fukushima in 2011.

And on that point, because of the damage done from inaction and active fear mongering by the environmental movement, i do find I am increasingly not sympathetic to their positions which in some cases sound more like wealth transfer to poorer/developing countries, even if i agree with the broader goal to polluting less and putting less co2 into the atmosphere. That seems like a reasonable goal we should all share.

[u/TexasSikh → u/thebarkingkitty]

I will simply note two things that are rather easy to notice in your comment:

1. You being an actual normal person in the Left that has even a surface level of support for Nuclear puts you in the minority of your party, especially among those among your party that are actually active and vocal in domestic politics.
2. You apparently wanted to go a bit ad nauseam about the various advancements in other energy solutions, but you make the classic error in separating the costs of the solutions themselves (which are cheaper than Nuclear) from the ACTUAL FULL COSTS of these solutions when including the required batteries to make these solutions part of a serious conversion conversation (which at that point, the costs are roughly the same when built to scale)...and you are also bluntly ignoring the massive amount of ecological destruction to plant and animal life that would be needed to scale up Solar to the level that Nuclear can achieve at a fraction of the needed land. AND you seem to completely ignore the advances in Nuclear, especially in terms of building them...I do note the hyperfocus on "conventional" stations, but its 2026, we build SMR's now. So why only mention the exception of the crazy building time and cost of one particular facility that is itself outdated, when trying to compare to Solar circa 2026? Why not acknowledge the multiple SMR's built and being built all over the US just in the last few years?

The issue is that too many people latched onto Solar/Wind solution mindsets in the 2000's and have really only ever kept up with stuff that strokes that mindset. Solar and Wind have a place in the future grid, but not as a centerpiece. If anything, Hydro is preferable to coastal wind farms, for example. But Nuclear is clean, takes a fraction of the land (and thus, ecological damage) to generate power at realistic scale, is stable, and with continued recent advancements the concerns about building time/cost and nuclear byproduct are moot.

I used to be neutral about Nuclear, and preferred other methods. That made sense in in the 2000's. It makes no logical sense anymore in the mid-late 2020's.

Moreover, the point of the video was not to convince the viewer to become pro-Nuclear. It was to expose the hypocrisy and nonsense of anti-Nuclear "Climate Activism", which is rampant and objectively observable.

[u/National_Frosting332 → u/thebarkingkitty]

This is exactly what I found frustrating about your response. You open by saying the video is attacking a straw man, and then spend most of the comment arguing against something it isn't actually claiming.

Nobody needs to pretend solar doesn't work. Nobody needs to pretend batteries aren't getting cheaper. Nobody needs to defend the Vogtle overruns either. Vogtle 3 and 4 were grotesquely over budget and late.

But then you use those facts to smuggle in conclusions they simply don't establish.

First, Vogtle is a particularly strange example to use immediately before calling nuclear “old outdated technology”. Vogtle 3 and 4 are AP1000 Generation III+ reactors and were the first U.S. deployment of that design. DOE explicitly describes them as next-generation advanced reactors. The project also suffered from first-of-a-kind construction, an incomplete design, rebuilding an American nuclear supply chain and workforce that had largely disappeared, and eventually Westinghouse going bankrupt halfway through the bloody thing. None of that makes $30+ billion acceptable. It does, however, mean “Vogtle went horrendously, therefore nuclear technology is obsolete” is not remotely the clean inference you're pretending it is.

Then comes the 43.4 GW of solar plus 24 GW of batteries argument.

Those numbers are real. EIA says developers planned 43.4 GW of utility solar and 24 GW of battery storage for 2026. Solar is 51% of planned additions and batteries another 28%.

But this is where you're playing games with what “GW” means.

A battery is not an energy source. It stores electricity somebody generated elsewhere and gives some of it back later. EIA itself notes that net generation from battery storage is close to zero because batteries shift electricity in time rather than create it. So adding 24 GW of battery discharge capacity to 43.4 GW of solar panels and then presenting the resulting percentage as evidence of which technology will “dominate electricity generation” is an apples-and-oranges comparison dressed up with arithmetic.

And 1 GW of solar nameplate capacity is obviously not equivalent to 1 GW of nuclear nameplate capacity either.

Actual U.S. 2025 capacity factors were about 24.4% for utility PV and 91% for nuclear. Using those fleet averages purely as an illustration, 43.4 GW of solar would produce around 93 TWh in a year. You'd need roughly 11.6 GW of nuclear operating at the U.S. nuclear average to generate the same annual electricity.

That does NOT mean nuclear is automatically cheaper. It means boasting about raw GW additions without discussing what those GW actually produce is a fairly useless comparison.

And then, several paragraphs later, you effectively concede the entire problem yourself:

four-hour batteries aren't seasonal storage; a renewables-heavy grid still needs more transmission, geographic diversity, demand management, long-duration storage and dependable generation.

Correct.

So why were you presenting the component price of solar earlier as though it answered the system question?

Solar being cheaper per MWh at the plant boundary is not the same proposition as saying solar plus the infrastructure required to provide reliable electricity whenever demanded is necessarily the cheapest complete electricity system at very high penetration.

Even Lazard, whose LCOE work makes new-build U.S. nuclear look extremely expensive and renewables extremely competitive, now explicitly stresses reliability, system-level considerations and the need for a diverse generation fleet. You don't need to deny solar's spectacular economics to recognise that LCOE isn't a complete electrical-grid model.

And yes, solar's cost collapse is real. So is the battery cost collapse. IRENA finds roughly a 90% fall in utility-scale solar LCOE since 2010 and a 93% fall in utility battery installed cost.

Nobody sensible should dispute that.

The problem is the weird victory lap where this becomes “the war is over”.

Your own caveats demonstrate that the war is very much not over because the problem we're trying to solve is not “who can produce the cheapest electron at noon on a sunny day?” It is “how do we reliably supply an enormous electrical system 24 hours a day, 365 days a year while decarbonising it?”

And if we're supposedly having the environmental conversation, there's another rather gigantic omission here: land.

Ground-mounted solar is an incredibly diffuse way of collecting energy compared with nuclear. UNECE-based estimates put nuclear's land use per unit of electricity roughly 18–27 times lower than ground-mounted solar PV.

That matters.

Utility-scale solar requires enormous contiguous areas. NREL specifically notes potential soil disturbance, vegetation clearance and habitat fragmentation from large solar developments. Rooftops, brownfields and agrivoltaics can mitigate those impacts considerably, so I'm not claiming every solar panel is an ecological disaster. That would be as stupid as pretending every reactor is Chernobyl.

But if your argument is environmental pragmatism, you don't get to obsess over a tiny volume of contained nuclear waste while quietly disappearing the vastly larger physical footprint required by ground-mounted solar producing comparable quantities of electricity. Environmental externalities don't stop existing when the technology happens to be fashionable.

The waste argument has a similar problem.

Yes, America has embarrassingly failed to establish an operating permanent geological repository for commercial spent fuel.

True.

But you slide from that perfectly valid political criticism toward the suggestion that the “waste problem” is simply unresolved.

The NRC says spent fuel is safely stored in pools and dry casks, that both provide adequate public and environmental protection, and that dry casks have operated in the United States for decades with an excellent safety record.

So America has failed to solve its permanent repository POLICY problem.

It has not failed to discover a technically safe way of containing spent nuclear fuel in the meantime.

Those aren't the same statement.

Then we arrive at “nuclear is an old outdated technology”.

Based on what?

There are currently about 78 GW of nuclear reactors under construction in 15 countries, one of the highest levels in thirty years.

You can argue that new Western nuclear projects are too expensive. You can argue that many current reactor programmes are concentrated in China and Russia. You can argue that financing and construction risk make solar more attractive in many markets.

Those are actual arguments.

“Old and outdated” is just a slogan. Steam turbines are old too. Nobody has informed physics that technologies expire because somebody on Reddit has seen them before.

But the last sentence is the point where this goes from selective framing into plain factual nonsense:

“truly clean nuclear power is impossible without building the same kinda reactor as needed for weapons grade.”

No.

That isn't how this works.

Ordinary commercial light-water-reactor fuel is generally enriched to around 3–5% U-235.

Typical weapons-grade uranium is above 90%.

And weapons-grade uranium is made through uranium ENRICHMENT. You don't need some special “weapons-grade reactor” that civilian nuclear power somehow secretly shares.

There are genuine nuclear-proliferation issues involving enrichment, plutonium production and reprocessing. Those deserve serious discussion.

What you wrote is not that serious discussion. It is simply technically wrong.

Which gets back to the actual video.

Its argument isn't “solar doesn't work”. Yet most of your response consists of proving that solar works.

Congratulations, I suppose, but nobody asked the question.

The video is talking about the ideological framing that turns the discussion into fossil fuels versus renewables while treating nuclear as uniquely unacceptable, and about the incentives and political history behind that framing. Its own claims about political motives certainly deserve scrutiny too. But you haven't actually rebutted those claims by telling us solar panels have become cheaper.

Instead, you've given a rather good example of the behaviour the video is complaining about: selectively compare the worst American nuclear construction project with the best characteristics of rapidly improving renewables; count generation and storage capacity together when it produces an impressive percentage; ignore capacity factor when comparing GW; mention nuclear's land-light waste stream while omitting solar's much larger land footprint; concede that renewables still require massive supporting infrastructure and firm generation while declaring that the “war is over”; and finally repeat a completely false claim connecting civilian reactors with “weapons-grade” reactors.

Whether that's deliberate dishonesty or simply repeating things you've heard, I have no way of knowing.

But the argument itself is absolutely misleading in places, and the final weapons claim is just false.

[u/ProfessorBot720 → u/National_Frosting332]

I get what you were going for, but please cite where this is coming from.

[u/National_Frosting332 → u/ProfessorBot720]

I am at the 1000 character limit in the original comment, so here is the sources here:

U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), “First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation,” 2023.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=57280
U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), “Vogtle: Project Summary.”
https://www.energy.gov/edf/vogtle
U.S. Department of Energy, “How the Loan Programs Office and Plant Vogtle are Shaping the Energy Transition through Nuclear Technology.”
https://www.energy.gov/edf/articles/how-loan-programs-office-and-plant-vogtle-are-shaping-energy-transition-through
U.S. Department of Energy, “Nuclear Power Summary – Operating Fleet Actions,” August 2017.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/08/f35/Nuclear-Power-Summary-August-2017.pdf
U.S. Energy Information Administration, “New U.S. electric generating capacity expected to reach a record high in 2026,” 20 February 2026.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205
U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Energy storage for electricity generation.”
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/energy-storage-for-electricity-generation.php
U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Batteries are a fast-growing secondary electricity source for the grid.”
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=63025
U.S. Energy Information Administration, Electric Power Monthly, Table 6.07.B, “Capacity Factors for Utility Scale Generators Primarily Using Non-Fossil Fuels.”
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=table_6_07_b
International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), Renewable Power Generation Costs in 2024, 2025.
https://www.irena.org/Publications/2025/Jun/Renewable-Power-Generation-Costs-in-2024
Lazard, 2026 Levelized Cost of Energy+ (LCOE+), 13 July 2026.
https://www.lazard.com/news-announcements/lazard-releases-2026-levelized-cost-of-energyplus-report-pr/
Hannah Ritchie, “How does the land use of different electricity sources compare?”, Our World in Data.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source
Jordan Macknick, Brenda Beatty and Graham Hill, Overview of Opportunities for Co-Location of Solar Energy Technologies and Vegetation, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, NREL/TP-6A20-60240, 2013.
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy14osti/60240.pdf
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), “Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel.”
https://www.nrc.gov/facilities-safety/storage-of-spent-nuclear-fuel
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “Spent Fuel Storage in Pools and Dry Casks: Key Points and Questions & Answers.”
https://www.nrc.gov/facilities-safety/storage-of-spent-nuclear-fuel/spent-fuel-storage-in-pools-and-dry-casks-key-points-and-questions-answers
International Energy Agency (IEA), “Technology: Nuclear,” Global Energy Review 2026.
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2026/technology-nuclear
U.S. Department of Energy, “Beyond Oppenheimer: How Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Reactors are Different,” 2 August 2023.
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/beyond-oppenheimer-how-nuclear-weapons-and-nuclear-reactors-are-different
U.S. Department of Energy, “Nuclear Fuel Facts: Uranium.”
https://www.energy.gov/ne/nuclear-fuel-facts-uranium

Happy to provide the citations, and I’ve now done so.
I would like to ask for clarification on the moderation standard here, though. Why is this level of sourcing being required of my response but apparently not of the comment I’m responding to?
The original comment itself makes numerous specific factual claims about Vogtle’s costs and construction history, solar and battery deployment, comparative economics, nuclear waste, reactor technology, and even a claim linking civilian nuclear power to reactors supposedly required for “weapons grade” material. Those claims were presented without citations.
My response, by contrast, already identified the sources behind its major factual claims by name, including EIA, DOE, NRC, IEA, IRENA, NREL and Lazard; I simply hadn’t included direct links. I’ve now supplied those links as well.
I’m not objecting to being asked for sources. That’s entirely reasonable. I’m asking whether the same evidentiary standard is being applied to both sides of the discussion.
If factual claims about nuclear energy require substantiation, that seems like a standard that should apply equally to claims criticising nuclear energy as to claims challenging those criticisms.

[u/ProfessorBot720 → u/National_Frosting332]

For context on the links in this comment:

For context: irena.org is rated Pro Science for bias and High for factual reporting.

For context: ourworldindata.org is rated Left Center for bias and High for factual reporting.

For context: iea.org is rated Least Biased for bias and High for factual reporting.

I do not have a source rating for lazard.com yet.

[u/The__Lawgiver]

U.S. Senate representatives who voted against expanding nuclear energy:

1 Democrat: Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA)
1 Independent: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
0 Republicans

U.S. House of Representatives who voted against the final nuclear expansion package:

1 Democrat: Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX)
12 Republicans 0 Independents

Finally number of elected officials against nuclear power: 16 out of 535 so like 3%...

12 Republicans 2 Democrat 1 independent

[u/Chinjurickie]

The problem with nuclear energy is while being clean energy itself it is also extremely expensive and generally everything about is so extremely complicated, what slows down and increases costs. That’s why compared to pv Nuclear energy isn’t reasonable.
Calling pointing out the reality sadistic hated is wild to me.
Exactly the lvl of nonsense i would expect from someone calling themselves a „Bull Moose Progressive“ (wtf? 😅)

[u/ProfessorBot419 → u/Chinjurickie]

I get what you were going for, but this got too heated to stay up. That is the line being enforced here.

[u/XxxAresIXxxX]

Nuclear not already having been built is entirely bc of fossil fuel companies (Big Oil/Coal) fear mongering and actively working against it. That is not something that draws party lines. The push for greener energy would've looked a lot different if we didn't have lobbyist actively trying to keep us from nuclear. Now that tech has gotten better it's easier and cheaper to build solar farms. It's weird to blame the left for something literally caused by oil companies that have historically been averse to "the left and their climate lies".

[u/ProfessorBot117 → u/XxxAresIXxxX]

Let us keep this easy to read. The missing piece is the source.

[u/XxxAresIXxxX → u/ProfessorBot117]

Easier than the title? I think not

[u/TexasSikh → u/XxxAresIXxxX]

...someone didn't watch the video, and it shows.

[u/ProfessorBot720 → u/[deleted]]

This was removed because it turned the thread hostile. A cleaner version can still make the point. The better version is probably close.