What about nuclear power

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TL;DR

Hot take

Using nuclear power to generate electricity is very largely carbon emissions free, but it’s often put-forward by people acting in bad faith who want to slow the renewables rollout.

Oh and it’s very costly.

Explanation

I’m not against nuclear power, I think technology-wise it’s a great idea for solid emissions free electricity. But it’s too late. It takes too long to build, it’s very expensive and it’s a distraction from all the other work that needs to happen right now.

People love to talk about Small Modular Reactors - a mythical version of nuclear power that is intrinsically safe and cheap, governments could just buy one off the shelf and plonk it down next door to any suburb. Except they don’t exist. They’re all at research stage and yet to be commercialised. We can’t afford to hitch our decarbonisation efforts to these.

I think another thing that drives pro-nuclear power types is it maintains the status quo centralisation of power generation and revenue. Instead of lots of distributed renewables, let’s keep things like the centralised coal and gas fired model where a few large organisations make the money.

I think another factor to the pro-nuclear push is there’s money to be made by mining companies. Existing rich and powerful miners would love to drive some demand for digging the glowing rocks out of the ground.

What about nuclear power

TL;DR

Explanation

Further reading