Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/

There's a huge difference between nuclear and renewables that firmly comes down on the side of renewables: they can be deployed incrementally with variable levels of capital investment, and can be iterated on rapidly.

Solar can be deployed at a scale from a backpack camp charger all the way up to gigawatt-scale solar farms. It's the same technology.

This matters because it's exponentially easier to raise and deploy small amounts of capital continuously than to raise huge lump sums. Nuclear power requires huge lump sums. There are no reactors that, say, cost as much as a car or a laptop or even an aircraft. Reactors start at hundreds of millions for the smallest possible scale and go up rapidly from there.

Incremental cost leads directly to the ability to rapidly iterate. You can't rapidly iterate on things that cost hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. Every nuclear power plant is a monument.

There's been talk of small modular reactors for years, but "small" here is perhaps tens to hundreds of millions. That is still gigantic, too large for the kind of rapid iteration you get with electronics like solar panels and batteries.

I'm all for renewables, but this seems rather distorted in a world where we don't price in the externalities of burning fossil fuel.

> Nuclear proliferation is an unsolved problem

Finland could have nukes if they wanted. If a technological backwater like North Korea can get them, anyone can.

Nuclear proliferation isn't being held back by technical details, but policies, international sanctions from the likes of the US etc.

> Centralized [power] production is intrinsically less democratic than distributed.

Is it? E.g. Norway and Switzerland are diversifying now, but for decades hydro-power dwarfed anything else in their energy mix. Hydro is arguably a lot more centralized than nuclear.

I could just as equally advance my pet theory that if your society doesn't have a collective stake in some sort of centralized infrastructure (health care, energy production etc.) that people are less likely to see any point in the whole project of collective decision making in a democracy.

But I think both of us would just be spitballing at that point.

> Safe very-long-term storage of nuclear waste is still being debated. Affordable solutions to reprocess and destroy existing waste have not been adopted yet.

Nuclear waste is known to be a non-issue to pretty much anyone in the know about nuclear.

If we actually cared about taking care of it we could enrich it and get rid of it that way.

It's not causing any near-term harm sitting in barrels on-site at nuclear power plants.

It's only an "issue" because it's really not, so nobody's had the incentive to really "solve" it politically.

> Deployment of new nuclear power takes decades and ...

DK, NL, and DE recently signed an agreement for off-shore wind that's expected to be fully completed in 2050. Everything takes a long time.

> ....might be too slow do address climate change.

We're pissing in the wind when it comes to climate change at this point.

> Many argue that society should address overproduction and overconsumption of goods, and therefore energy, rather than increasing energy production.

Those people are already free to try for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the Kalahari or Amazon, meanwhile most sensible commentators will note that there's pretty much a direct line between any metric that measures human prosperity and increased energy usage.

There's no issue with increased energy use per-se, just the production methods that have externalities, such as burning fossil fuel (without subsequent capture).