You don’t have to be “pro-nuclear” or “anti-nuclear.”

Placing some bets on nuclear make sense (France gets 80% of electric generation from nuclear) but counting on nuclear is risky because nobody can make nuclear plants cost efficiently anymore. America should probably keep trying on a small scale and if they can figure it, then ramp up. The big problem is that nuclear is essentially a big government project, and America is very bad at those.

This is bad writing for a lot of reason.<p>First the author tells us that if we consider ourselves pro or anti nuclear we can&#x27;t possibly have thought through the pros and cons of nuclear power. It must be because we identify ourselves as left or right. Or green or not.<p>Then he tells us that if we _do_ have a policy position, we are probably wrong because &quot;its complicated&quot;. All of which I find mildly insulting.<p>Then he proceeds to look at nuclear &quot;purely though the lens of climate change&quot;, which as far as I&#x27;m concerned is not useful because many of the reasons one might choose to be anti-nuclear are not climate change related.

When Bernie&#x2F;AOC lead with rhetoric like &quot;climate change requires WWII levels of mobilization&quot;, it strikes me odd that they think that level of change is feasible, but that the unprecedented mobilization and centralization of efforts can&#x27;t be applied to nuclear technology. It&#x27;s bizarre and makes me think that it&#x27;s a blatant political agenda much more than sensible application of technology to solve problems in the world.

Interesting idea: you can opt out of identity politics.

If it&#x27;s really the case that the only way to make nuclear viable is to <i>deregulate the industry</i>, then Bernie is absolutely right that we need to end reliance on nuclear power.

I have met with quite unreasonable (to my mind) fears about nuclear waste&#x27;s supposed deleterious effects on people and nature, even if stored in a remote underground facility. Whenever people have gut reactions without evidence, the conversation quickly becomes non-productive.

The main argument against nuclear is that it absolutely requires a highly educated, well organized society and workforce. If something really serious disrupts our elaborated, complex societies, then nuclear plants will become really dangerous.<p>With looming climate change, energy crisis, overpopulation and other problems, you can&#x27;t be sure that we&#x27;ll be in a stable enough world long enough to be completely safe.

&gt; You don&#x27;t have to be &quot;pro-X&quot;or &quot;anti-X&quot;<p>But don&#x27;t we? We have to be completely polarized on every topic. How else will the binary political system survive?<p>OK, onward without the sarcasm ... This same kind of critical thinking must be applied to every issue, or we&#x27;ll just end up in the dark ages again.

How do plants deal with rising water from floods, or falling water from drying out, or overly hot cooling water from high temperatures? These are all in our future. I&#x27;m genuinely curious and not trying to troll

Sorry folks give up the ghost nuclear was dead at least 3 decades ago. Solar and wind are the future. We don’t have a decade to build a new nuclear plant, in that plan we’d need a time machine going backa decade to abate climate change that’s now locked in. I’ll spare you all the risks and externalities, it’s just dumb. Again sorry.

50 years ago they said we would have fusion power plants in 50 years.

Carbon neutral is a fancy way of saying &quot;let&#x27;s pollute the same as we do now&quot;. Generally achieved via fake offsets, as we do not have the technology to offset something like US pollution.<p>Even EU ETS (the most developed offset system) is much too slow to cause major dent in the problem.<p>Where most climate predictions require us to <i>stop altogether</i> to avoid most painful results of climate change.