why we don’t rely on nuclear power plants more, especially these days

Question

why we don’t rely on nuclear power plants more, especially these days

In: 441

Answer 1

Fear and lobbying.

Fossil fuels are “easy” to understand: burn rock/gas/oil, make fire, fire boil water, steam turn turbine, electricity! It’s how we’ve been doing it since the industrial revolution, basically (skip the electricity to just get a steam engine).

Nuclear energy sounds SCARY! It doesn’t help that it’s associated with radiation that can cause cancer, and one of the first true shows of force of nuclear power that EVERYONE knows is the atomic bomb. Most people can’t understand that there’s a big difference between THAT and nuclear power generation. (BTW, nuclear power plants, how do they work? Take *fancy* rock, make *fancy* fire, fire boil water, steam turn turbine, electricity!)

There’s also been a few VERY public nuclear power plant emergencies: Chernobyl, Three Miles Island, Fukushima are those that most people can recall. And honestly…. That’s almost all of it. No seriously: [in more than 70 years there have been less than 30 incidents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents) with either casualties or >100 million dollar in damages, and only 10 of those register as an “accident”, which is a term used in the scale to say that there are at least local consequences. BUT people remember the bad things that were very public more than the good things about nuclear energy.

People: nuclear fuel has caused, and if we continue to use it, will cause, way less death and destruction than fossil fuel plant emissions cause, both directly by ruining our air quality, and indirectly by FUCKING UP THE CLIMATE.

Cost of energy, over the lifetime of a nuclear plant, is also only beat in latest calculations that I know of by wind energy. Wind wins because of how cheap the wind mills are, compared of how “little” energy they produce. Nuclear power plants are massive, but they produce a MAAAASSIIIVE amount of energy over their lifetime.

So why? Because of lobbying by the fossil fuel sector. All these companies earning massive amounts of money suddenly saw this power source come up that, quite frankly, didn’t need them. So they lobbied governments to make ever more difficult rules for nuclear plants to adhere to, they made astroturf public groups to protest the construction of nuclear plants, they pushed the link between nuclear plants and atomic weapons,… all to hang on a bit longer, and squeeze out a little more profit for shareholders.