why we don’t rely on nuclear power plants more, especially these days
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I may be a bit late for this, but…
I work for a government organisation dedicated to lowering carbon emissions. We do a lot of broad research on the “best” way to lower emissions and make the country carbon neutral.
**The biggest single obstacle is that nuclear has a** ***terrible*** **reputation.**
* Yes, the plants are big, but they use space far more efficiently than wind or solar and have less restrictions on where you can put them.
* Yes, they use a lot of water, but if you live in an island nation (like mine) where water is abundant, that isn’t a major concern like it would be in less water-rich places.
* Yes, they’re expensive to build. A lot of people in the comments are hung up on costs, and yes, they are expensive… but that isn’t a blocker in the same way reputation is. If people wanted nuclear, we’d find the money.
We know that Chernobyl and Fukushima are extreme edge cases. Fukushima was caused by a confluence of natural disasters, while Chernobyl was caused by horrific mismanagement and human error.
But that doesn’t matter, because nuclear’s reputation is in the absolute gutter. No local authority wants a power station near them because they don’t want to be the next Fukushima. The majority of voters will vote against nuclear-based measures. Greenpeace, one of the largest international environmental charities in the world, are staunchly anti-nuclear, and campaign rigorously against new nuclear power plants.
There are some other less-important problems. One major one is that nuclear power plants cannot be ‘turned off’ easily. Once a nuclear power plant is turned on, it’s on, and switching it off is a slow and careful operation (you have to stop the reaction, which takes several steps).
This means that you can’t shift nuclear power in response to demand. More conventional power plants are turned on and off throughout the day in response to national demand. The current plan in most developed nations is to solve this problem with batteries – allowing excess power to be fed into battery banks during times of low power demand. But sufficient capacity batteries don’t exist yet, and the current options on the market are both expensive and inadequate.
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