Can we afford to be afraid of nuclear power?

Which strawman is the nuclear energy lobby trying to defeat this time?

Across Europe, the median build time since the year 2000 has dragged out to almost a decade. But it’s not a problem with nuclear power per se; it’s a symptom of the west’s chronic inability to deliver large pieces of infrastructure, an ailment that affects everything from laying high-speed railway lines, to building new housing estates, to filling in potholes.

Ah, yes, the problem is all these regulations that checks notes reduce risk (increase safety):

(this safety:)

There’s also a perception that nuclear power is dangerous, yet the data show it’s as safe as wind and solar.

And

Elaborate backup systems won’t cut it, either.

Implying that nuclear energy is NOT an elaborate system is delusional.

Tim Gregory is a nuclear chemist at the UK National Nuclear Laboratory and author of Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World (Bodley Head).

Boomers

Unfortunately nuclear power plants would lead to higher bills for electricity as it would be up to the people to recoup the cost for building them.

Renewables are better.

Today, 700 million people live in extreme poverty (defined as living on less than $2.15 per day). They won’t climb out of it without access to more energy. Making as much energy as possible available to as many people as possible ought to be a defining goal of the 21st century.

And what energy sources can be safely and cheaply deployed in Burundi, Somalia, Liberia etc? Nuclear or solar?

Tim Gregory is a nuclear chemist at the UK National Nuclear Laboratory

I see.

Yes. Give me a bank, insurance, place to build, place to store AND show me how it can run without sibsedies and we can talk. Do the Söder-Challange now

We certainly cannot afford not to go full renewables, like yesterday.

With all the advantages renewables have (please use and develop them!), there are some instances where they can't reasonably be used.

For example, I live in a city of 5 million people that gets very little direct sunlight (weather is cloudy most of the time + city is located 60° North), has highly irregular seasonal winds, has rivers too small to make hydro make sense on such a scale, and barely has good hills for pumped hydro. It is almost exclusively powered by nuclear energy, because under these circumstances, there's barely a greener alternative.

There is also the need to have a backup power source for most solar/wind installations, as through some parts of the year they can only provide negligible output.

Finally, some regions might require temporary power - either due to such seasonal downtimes, or because main grid has failed. For that, Russia and China operate vessels with onboard nuclear power plants to source energy through these periods - and then move on to help somewhere else.

For example, I live in a city of 5 million people that gets very little direct sunlight (weather is cloudy most of the time + city is located 60° North), has highly irregular seasonal winds, has rivers too small to make hydro make sense on such a scale, and barely has good hills for pumped hydro. It is almost exclusively powered by nuclear energy, because under these circumstances, there's barely a greener alternative.
I heard they're trying out these new devices that can transport power over long distances. Apparently you just need some big ass towers and long cables. Super cool cutting edge stuff.
(The wind is always blowing somewhere.)
- Sure, but transporting power over very long distances comes with two issues: losses and disruptions.
  Seasonal winds, when they actually happen, are very strong, commonly breaking the cables and necessitating repairs. The longer the cable - the higher is the chance something will break somewhere, and leaving a city of 5 million without power is a no-go. So, the city uses nearby power source (as close as it is allowed for a nuclear plant to stand next to a huge city) and primarily underground cables.
  Also, the energy losses associated with such power transfer will be quite massive even at very high voltages. Which, again, isn't cool when the end consumer needs up to 9 GW of power at any given moment.
This is the first time I've ever read of China or Russia using "vessels with onboard nuclear power plants to source energy through these periods - and then move on to help somewhere else."
I searched and cannot find any source to back this claim, do you have one?
Because the only vessels I know of with onboard nuclear reactors are naval aircraft carriers and submarines, and neither of those ship classes are designed to deliver power to shore.
- Sure, here's a Wikipedia article:
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_nuclear_power_plant
  Here's IAEA:
  https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/floating-nuclear-power-plants-benefits-and-challenges-discussed-at-iaea-symposium
  Aside from that, nuclear power is used in some of the icebreakers since the Soviet era:
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_icebreaker
  Also, I was under the impression China has such ships deployed, while they are actually being built. Russia has an operational one.

So… to summarize the argument: we have to build nuclear plants, even though they are the most expensive renewable per kWh and they take the longest amount of time to build (even by the author’s “fast” timeline standards) because we don’t have batteries that can store wind and solar energy, even though there are multiple emerging potential solutions that could result in days-long storage capacity.

Not buying it. I don’t buy the “unsafe” argument but I also don’t buy this argument

Edit: this same publication that published this op-ed published a pretty negative review of this book, funny enough: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jun/02/going-nuclear-by-tim-gregory-review-a-boosterish-case-for-atomic-energy

The thing is.... nuclear is even more expensive than battery capacity combined with smart power management.
the most expensive renewable
Ftr, Uranium is not renewable.
I don’t buy the “unsafe” argument
The thing is that the well-known nuclear catastrophes, at a minimum all resulted in fairly large areas right in the middle of civilized land being lost to humanity for the foreseeable future. So, even if overall death rate is only somewhat higher than for e.g. wind energy — wind energy does not lead to such devastating local effects. The other thing is, nuclear needs skilled teams to manage plants at all times, even when they're shut off. As soon as your country goes off its routine because military coup!, nuclear plants become a massive danger. Also, nuclear plants can make for devastating attack targets during a war (obviously the attacker would need to value mayhem and defeat above colonizability).
And finally, nuclear danger is (within human time frames:) eternal because you need to store some materials safely for a very long time; "nuclear semiotics" is an actual thing studied by scientists somehow — yet I've never heard of "oil semiotics" or "solar semiotics".
- Ftr, Uranium is not renewable
  And Russian Uranium even less so ... which is what much if Europe uses.
The way I see things, the unsafe part is more related to how capitalism works, more than anything else. Capitalism is not a safe system.
Super-briefly, time and money related to: planning, maintenance, decommissioning, and last but not least, nuclear waste.
Imo and due to climate emergency, we'd be better putting the money that would go for nuclear towards renewables. Let's keep in mind that numerous nuclear projects were funded with enormous amounts of money for 10-20 years, to be abandoned before producing any electricity.
Just a few relevant links:
Why Nuclear Maintenance Equipment Requires a Single-Source Solution
Dismantling work begins at Hamaoka nuclear plant
Exposed: French nuclear companies dumping radioactive waste in Siberia
- The way I see things, the unsafe part is more related to how capitalism works, more than anything else. Capitalism is not a safe system.
  In that regard, the socialist system, at least how it was implemented in Eastern Europe and the USSR, wasn't any better.
Days long doesn’t work if there’s not enough wind and sun, for example in the winter in the north (here in finland we have exhausted our hydro potential already btw)
“Emerging”- what does that mean? Whats the timeline on them? The failure rate? The cost at the scale needed? I mean if you’re gonna complain about nuclear being more expensive then the batteries need to be cheaper necessarily. Also what materials are they made out of?
- I suppose you know don't about the superbattery projects already implemented, e.g. the one in Australia and its huge benefits to their grid?
  About sodium based batteries which have become commercially viable in recent years?
  And because of the implication also that nuclear reactors produce extreme waste of building materials (e.g. Greifswald, ran for 26 years, dismantling in operation since 35 years and projected to last till 2040 at least, because higher contamination than estimated) and mining for them is at least as bad as for Lithium?
  If not ask the search engine/ai of your choice.

Whenever people try to sell nuclear power, they simply "forget" to tell us...

How much co2 is produced by mining and enriching uranium and how much water is used so it can be used for reactors
How expensive it is to build a plant, and how much building them will go over budget (see UK)
That nuclear plants are uninsurable
Because of the above, tax payers are responsible for the costs of clean up and dismantling because that is not factored it
That nuclear plants have to shut down when it's too hot
Transport of used nuclear pellets is expensive
Most countries struggle with final storage of nuclear waste
That nuclear plants are often more contaminated and more expensive to dismantle than anticipated

I hope thorium reactors become a reality soon, they'll probably fix or lower most of your concerns with current uranium reactors.
- People should stop trying to manifest new reactor types. Especially in the face of climate change which really doesn't leave us much time before shit hits fans even harder. Usually, the lead time on new reactor designs is even longer than on other reactor designs and half the promised features don't materialize, and you'll likely learn that the private company building the plant has accidentally forgotten one crucial element on the spec-sheet.
Every nuclear power plant in the United States carries no fault insurance by law. They literally are all insured every single one
The rest of these are all just Big Oil talking points because they don't want competition

Never understood the freakout over nuclear ..... when you measure up the long term statistics

Gas/Oil/Coal have killed more people over the past 100 years than nuclear ever did (even if you threw in the bombing deaths in Japan in WWII)

The deaths caused by gas/oil/coal are just not as dramatic ... all those people died from global pollution, poisoning, early death, shortened lives, lung problems, bad health ... and all by the millions

I think all of us here agree that fossil energy sucks. Please instead compare against wind/solar/batteries, not fossil energy.
- The problem is that the world needs a giant energy source as we transition in between .... before we get to the point of using fully or primarily wind/solar/batteries, the world has to use several decades or a century or more of some big source of energy and most governments and industries are just banking on forcing everyone to stay on fossil fuels
The general populace isn’t looking at statistics, they’re looking at scary news stories
- And the article image of a screaming person.
- The public is never good at stats, or complex ideas that cannot be converted into a good old fashioned sound bite.
  Maths hardly ever change major policy by themselves. Often it’s only an accident of political necessity when policy is backed by statistics or science

Some early Fords around the Model T era had a switch on them to flip between running on ethanol or gas. The idea being that farmers would brew their own fuel as needed. Big Oil didn't like that, and so it went away. Where we are now isn't thanks to science and technology, just pure greed off the backs of everyone.

It's about independence from any monopoly. Energy companies own the field, equipment, transportation, electricity generation, and distribution. I'd like my own generator and storage to lower costs.

Nuclear perpetuates the same system where safety is cut as a cost saving measure. You know they would be less safe if they legally could. Also the infrastructure is in bad shape to move radioactive waste by rail- ask Ohio.

Also you are directly dependent on the country where you get your uranium from. Which for Europe was/is mostly Russia. That also does not seem a good idea.
- Akchually, Czechoslovakia used to export uranium to the USSR because it had the greatest, most accessible reserves of the Eastern Bloc.

Can we afford not to be?

No, but that won't stop people from acting like idiots and giving in to FUD. Look at how many millions are on Xitter, Facebook, and Reddit.