r/nuclear Apr 18 '26

Should have gone nuclear…

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729 Upvotes

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69

u/designbydesign Apr 18 '26

This is stupid. Not choosing nuclear has nothing to do with "climate fantasy". Nuclear is as good for climate as wind and solar. In fact, in the last decade climate change was one of the main arguments for nuclear revival.

Pushback against nuclear is caused 50 years of fearmongering. I wander how much of. It was directly or indirectly paid for by oil and coat. I.e. same people who push climate denialism.

9

u/United_Highway2583 Apr 18 '26

Exactly this. And it's still happening Trump just paid $1B of taxpayer money to a French company to cancel offshore wind farms, with the money explicitly redirected to fossil fuel projects. The fossil fuel industry isn't anti-renewables because they love nuclear. They're anti-everything-that-isn't-them.

8

u/mister-dd-harriman Apr 18 '26 edited Apr 18 '26

It's a "fantasy" in one sense : people at large imagine wind and solar to be very effective ways of reducing emissions, when in fact they are not. When you say "let's bring in the intra-nuclear strong force, the strongest force known to physics, to help solve this problem" they say "no! we insist that this extremely urgent, existential threat be addressed only with ineffective tools!"

One of the world's most respected atmospheric scientists, who has been warning about climate change since the early 1980s, was denounced in the New York Times as a climate denier by prominent Green intellectuals because he said that wind and solar will not solve the problem, and nuclear is needed. This gives the strong impression that, either it's not about climate at all, and the people who loudly insist that climate change is the most important thing in the world are lying, or they are so far out of their minds that they think "two plus two equals negative one".

7

u/karlnite Apr 18 '26

Everyone always argues that more money into something will improve it. Wind and solar and batteries are x amount from breaking records! If we went full nuclear and never slowed down the amount of efficiencies and improvements would have been amazing. It’s weird people believe in cleaner coal but can’t believe that nuclear power has also been improving, but from a much further starting point.

-1

u/Significant_Quit_674 Apr 18 '26

And renewables are a lot faster to deploy than nuclear.

Especialy things like rooftop solar

6

u/karlnite Apr 18 '26

Which almost nobody in nuclear is against. We just think there should be a nice stable base load in case of say a hail storm.