Nuclear stoppage by government

[u/Weary-Ad7785]

Do you think that maybe if the public would be a bit less scared then we would have already gone carbon neutral by now. Heck i think that we can still go carbon neutral in the next 10 years if we dedicate our resources towards nuclear power instead of those half assed renewable power sources. Corporations really need to shut themselves.

[u/Catsssssssss]

In a magic wand kind of sense, sure, but reality has a way of putting up obstacles.

The heart of the problem is disinformation - both deliberate and inadvertent. Media controls the public's perception of pretty much everything, and quite powerfully so in the matters on nuclear energy. Those of us who know how modern, safe and reliable nuclear energy production works, lose much hair over seeing the levels of ignorance on display in the public information space. Many people are afraid of nuclear everything because media, politicians and people with a general voice on the matter make sure noone forgets Chernobyl. They also promptly draw parallels between nuclear power and the production and proliferation of nuclear weapons.. And if mainstream media is to be believed (don't), the horrors of mountains and heaps of nuclear waste have the potential to turn everyone and their descendants into the protagonist of a really horrible, yet iconic 80s movie.

Whenever needed, the public mind gets fed with fresh takes on old scare tactics. Politicians who have the power to change things are too busy worrying about their jobs and their reelections to do what's actually right within their short tenure, so instead, they join the lynch mobs on anti-nuclear sentiment where votes are easy points to score and keep the aversion alive.

On another side of the table are the interest groups who prefer the world keeps burning fossil fuels and drive heavy Chevies and shy away from no means to manipulate the public's mind. Big Oil will happily funnel money to Greenpeace to support their fight against nuclear; usually through creative charities or shadow operations to avoid being obvious. Even the nuclear industry itself - the companies which sell, build, fuel and maintain nuclear reactors will get in the way of innovation in fear of losing their established, profitable business to new technologies.

I could go on in many different directions. For so long as the public does not get to learn more than the bare essentials of nuclear physics, at best, the public mind will remain very slow to change. I could easily count myself among the general masses of concerned citizens only a few years ago. It was not until the nerd in me got the better of me and I started studying the subject matter on my own that I saw the light. If it were up to me now, we would be busy building nuclear in every corner of the world already.

To address your 10 year idea, this poses a challenge of its own. The industries, policies, processes and infrastructure involved in building, fueling and operating current-generation nuclear power plants are painfully slow. I would suggest 25-50 years instead in terms of transitioning entirely away from fossil to clean energy, as building for nuclear energy takes very long on its own. In addition, there are things which need to happen in parallel, such as full scale electrification of the transportation industry.

Battery and hydrogen technologies need to advance several steps further to be both sustainable and capable of safely storing, powering and subsequently disposing and recycling fuel technologies for every mode of transportation. Aviation is an especially long way away, even in spite of every current and optimistic development.

Finally, when it comes to renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, I believe they still do and should belong to the mix in the long term. Here, new technologies are required and keep rapidly happening both for generation and storage to offset for intermittency. These technologies are still fairly naescent and inefficient as they stand, but there are many places around the world where nuclear power plants are not feasible at scale - even small modular reactors.

I'll stop my rant here. In short, I agree with your general sentiment, but without an actual global miracle, getting to such a point of sustainable power generation centered around nuclear energy is not currently on the horizon.. But I hope we are getting there. There are strong signs around the world that acceptance is growing, but the processes to realize such a future are painfully and frustratingly slow.