>>14148913The thing is that although construction and mining is filthy, nuclear powerplants put out a ridiculous amount of energy over their useful lifespan, and even though nuclear fuel is stupid expensive per Kg, it spits out an even more stupid amount of energy before it's depleted. It's not a scam, but the industry has been painfully stagnant for decades. New plants are really expensive and take a long time to bring online, so the return on investment is really slow compared to a gas fired plant. There are companies trying to solve this issue, but the nuclear industry has been almost crystalized in the oddly specific regulatory environment of the 90's, so that it takes the better part of an eternity to get a completely new design approved. I've seen nuclear engineers completely disregard entire fuel cycles, not because they're bad or unsafe, but because they're unaccounted for by existing regulations, which means even a little research reactor will get caught in a dense net of red tape, and require politicians to update the rules before any progress can be made. But politicians don't want to touch anything nuclear because it draws the ire of the tree huggers.
Also, all energy sources have similar lifetime issues, though they're all dwarfed by coal, just because coal mining and coal burning is extremely filthy.
The way I see it, the immediate priority is to get off coal as quickly as possible, so it really upsets me when tree hugging eco brainlets demand that completely functional nuclear power plants be shut down when there's no "greener" alternative available to compensate. Also, wind and solar in particular are extremely reliant on long term grid scale energy storage which we just don't have, and none of the current solutions are even close to filling the void when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow. This storage won't be free either, and will really drive up the cost of an all renewable power grid, which the tree hugging types tend to forget.
