The most outrageous part of this is that this campaign is dominated and spearheaded by environmental groups and green parties. By successfully stopping the expansion of nuclear power, these groups have done more than any other faction or movement to increase CO2 emissions.
Secondly, it can't expand. There's not enough Uranium. Add 100GW a year of PWRs for ten years and you can't fuel them for more than a couple of decades (MOX is an expensive scam that saves 20% at best and releases more radiation than fukushima and tmi combined as a matter of course). Breeders might be viable, but they don't centralise power to Urenco and Rosatom so they were abandoned.
You're spreading a lie designed by the fossil fuel industry to delay renewables.
The largest environmental group, Greenpeace, has literally invaded a number of nuclear plants to protest government plans to permit new plants.
>>Secondly, it can't expand. There's not enough Uranium.
There's enough uranium and thorium for 2.3 million years of humanity's total global energy consumption x 1000.
Breeder reactors extract something on the order of 100X more energy from uranium than 2nd generation nuclear power plants, and that's the standard by which you have to judge the sustainability of fission feedstock resources.
Have similar protests in coal mines or fracking or oil wells or on fuel tankers ever done anything to slow down the fossil fuel industry? Did they send state sponsored terrorists to bomb an EDF ship and get away with it completely other than throwing a couple of patsies under the bus?
Greenpeace's objections have absolutely nothing to do with whether or not the permits go through and the very idea that they have more power than the French, Chinese, Russian, and US military and nuclear industries combined is utterly laughable. You cannot possibly think anyone would believe such a ludicrous lie.
It's actually kind of heart warming that you think environmentalists have so much power. Why do you think they chose not to use it to stop coal, plastic or beef?
> Breeder reactors extract something on the order of 100X more energy from uranium than 2nd generation nuclear power plants, and that's the standard by which you have to judge the sustainability of fission feedstock resources.
Not until one exists that actually runs in breeding mode on a commercial scale and that's what you're proposing building. Until then there's about 40 years with the current fleet and the suggestion of building enough PWRs to make a similar contribution to renewables means there would be 20 even after doubling the fuel economy.
Suggesting that you could scale uranium mining 5x to provide the first load for a couple of thousdand PWRs, complete them all by 2030, and then design and build five times as many breeders to keep them fueled in the 20 years you had left so as not to decomission all your freshly built reactors is a ridiculous farce. And that wouldn't even cover all electricity, let alone primary energy.
You can disagree with them if you want, people are free to have their own priorities, but they correctly think that nuclear power is a hidden subsidy for nuclear weapons.
I don't know if the people still banging that drum are being disengenious, or they've just been taken in by the misinformation campaign I mentioned, but generally the more of the items I listed you hate or are suspicious of, then the more suspicious of you I am, as it lends evidence of you being someone who has been duped, so for example:
If someone likes (or at least doesn't hate in a weirdly political way) carbon fees, carbon credit, heat pumps, EVs, renewables, induction stoves, green parties and environmentalists, recycling, efficiency then yeah sure I believe you like nuclear power because it's a low carbon power source, see James Hansen for example.
On the other hand, if you hate carbon fees, and carbon credits, and EV subsidies, and green parties and environmentalists but love nuclear power because it's such a great low carbon source. That doesn't add up to me. You might be sincere but confused, but either way you're not really helping so motivations don't really matter. See Michael Shellenberger for example of someone who is obviously lying, or Bill Gates for someone who's just partially confused.
If you study the history of nuclear power, you will see that environmental groups and green parties have been the singular force stopping its expansion. This criticism is not an exaggeration and justifies my harsh judgment of them.
>>See Michael Shellenberger for example of someone who is obviously lying
What makes it obvious that he's lying?
https://www.desmog.com/michael-shellenberger/
Like you he claims to be pro-nuclear but is also scathing about government subsidies and expensive power. Which doesn't add up, not for two decades if you're paying attention, and certainly not for the last five years even if you haven't. Renewables are cheap power.
It's like his audience is a couple of decades behind the facts if they can accept this as a logical argument.
His very pro natural gas stance is also a weird anomaly.
