Nuclear is always touted as such a good idea on this site, but I want to take the opposite stance.
- Nuclear power has inherit risks that are not present in other forms of modern energy generation. You can claim that todays designs are 99.9999999% safe, but there is no such thing as 100%. If humans build it, it will fail, and a single catastrophic nuclear plant failure isn’t acceptable.
- Nuclear waste is difficult to deal with. Our current strategies include finding a secret underground cave, and hoping no one accidentally stumbles onto it. Not to mention we have no plan for dealing with widespread use of nuclear power and the waste that would produce.
- Nuclear plants take ages to build, and are insanely expensive. These costs make it impractical for a city to invest in. They also require massive amounts of concrete (bad for the environment, locally and globally) and absurd amounts of space.
- Nuclear is centralized, and vulnerable to attack. In a national defense situation, nuclear power plants are large, easily identifiable, delicate targets that can take an entire area’s grid offline with a single hit to a cooling tower. The damage doesn’t even need to be severe, just enough to warrant a shutdown and inspection.
Compared to other readily available green power sources, I cannot fathom why nuclear is preferred to a safe, distributed, clean grid of solar panels.
Maybe one day when humanity is a space faring race we could look to nuclear to support us then, but using nuclear on earth today is a bad decision.
edit:
A large number of replies seem to think I am pro-shutdown of plants or pro-coal, but that was never stated. My argument is against further investment into nuclear when there are other more known technologies available, like solar and wind.
