> - 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.
We've already seen what the worst-case catastrophic failure of a bad plant design yields and it's…
Not that bad frankly, especially from an ecological standpoint.
> - 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.
The amount of nuclear waste is ridiculously small, the entirety of highly radioactive nuclear waste produced to date fits on a football field 3 stories tall. There are thousands of terrils bigger than that out there.
As for "hoping no one accidentally stumbles onto it", Oklo was pretty hard to find.
> - Nuclear plants take ages to build, and are insanely expensive.
Nuclear plants are like anything else, if you get in the groove they can be built fast and for good prices. At the height of its construction, France completed plants in something like 5 years and had half a dozen going on at any one time.
> They also require massive amounts of concrete (bad for the environment, locally and globally)
So do wind turbines?
> and absurd amounts of space.
Compared to what? Millions of square miles of solar panels? The Paluel Nuclear Plant is 1.6 sq km total, and has the same nameplate capacity as 35 sq km of solar panels. We're talking 35 square kilometers covered entirely in solar cells, once you add access and maintenance you're at 40 or 50.
And that's before accounting for the dismal capacity factor of solar, which increase the surface 2 to 5 folds depending on the location. Or the variability and seasonal unreliability of solar panels.
> - 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.
You don't seem to realise renewable power plants have centralised collector stations you can hit all the same and take the entire thing offline. And unlike nukes, protection against this sort of events is not part of a substation's usual brief.
> 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.
All of which have massive drawbacks, and are not incompatible with nuclear plants.