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TLDR: Nuclear is the only viable, long term option to produce enough power to meet demand. Why is there not more action pushing nuclear power?
Nuclear is undoubtedly the way of the future. Battery sites are good backups, but have their limitations as well as being much more of a hazard than most other power generation sources. Solar is inefficient, wind is inefficient and produces an enormous amount of waste. Anyone pushing for wind obviously doesn’t realize that there’s still a massive amount of fossil fuel usage in that pipeline. Fossil fuels themselves will run out much sooner than nuclear, not to mention the negative environmental impacts. While nuclear isn’t perfect, there are use cases for spent uranium. If you’re going to say that nuclear waste is just as bad because it ultimately ends up buried in the desert, go look at where wind mill blades end up at their end-of-life (which is much shorter than uranium EOL).
While infrastructure is more built out for fossil fuel usage, we could easily pivot to building more nuclear reactors. Too many have already been shut down, at the cost of power supply throughout the nation. The boobs in San Onofre, CA (which have since been shut down) were, at peak, responsible for about 20% of Southern California’s power supply (\~2.25 Gigawatts). The void in power supply is the reason that Southern California now has to import power from Northern CA, Arizona and Mexico.
Companies like OKLO that are running on empty promises of small modular reactors are nowhere near viable, not to mention they don’t even have the permits necessary to actually produce at scale.
What we do have already are large, regulated, efficient nuclear power plants that produce vast quantities of energy with negligible concern to public safety. There is still a massive supply of uranium to be mined, so running out of fuel would not be a concern for a very long time.
The word is undoubtedly scared of nuclear due to events in recent history (Chernobyl, 3 mile island). What the vast majority of those idiots don’t realize is that Chernobyl was fundamentally flawed as it was not designed to shut down automatically in emergencies. Modern reactors are designed with a negative temperature coefficient, whereas Chernobyl had a positive temperature coefficient meaning that in an emergency, the reactor went super critical causing a power surge, instead of automatically shutting down. Three Mile Island on the other hand was purely operator error, which has since been corrected with updates to nuclear regulations from various oversight committees.
What is the bear case for nuclear? What am I not seeing? Why is the world still so scared of nuclear power? I understand some plants have been approved (like a new one to be commissioned in Georgia the next few years), but this is not enough to offset the lack of supply for the consumption we currently have in the US, even before considering the data center ramp up.
Disclaimer: I have no positions in nuclear, but will likely add Constellation Energy and UUUU if enough of you guys tell me to. Also, I am retarded, so take this all with a bucketload of salt.