So does literally every other power source. Nuclear is, if anything, among the least bad options in this regard.
> and it just does not scale to solve the problem.
It absolutely does, if we're willing to actually try.
Evidently, we'd rather just keep killing ourselves with coal.
We are trying that since 66 years, since the first nuclear power plant.
What we have achieved so far is a nuclear industry which is hardly able to keep the status quo of installed power generation, sky high rising costs for building nuclear power plants, extremely long build times, very little technological progress in the last decade, unsolved financial and technological problems, ...
If it were commercially viable and scalable, it would thrive by now.
All the promised next-gen problem solvers like breeders, thorium fuel cycle, reprocessing industries, ... have been more costly and financially toxic.
Evidently not very hard, as I've seen in my home state of California. Any nuclear development gets constant fierce pushback, and if it does somehow come to life, every last issue with it becomes yet another reason to kill it in the crib.
If we were earnestly trying to achieve energy independence, then Rancho Seco (near where I grew up) would've been done right and still operational, rather than half-assed and doomed to fail.
> If it were commercially viable and scalable, it would thrive by now.
Ah yes, the "two economists walking down the street and there's a dollar bill on the sidewalk" argument. Never heard that one before.
And almost all of the alternatives have costly problems too, like causing more deaths for most of them.
Large scale solar might be less lethal, but pretty much every other power source causes more short term deaths.
I'm not arguing against renewables. I'm arguing that this fear of nuclear costs huge numbers of lives by extending the lifetime of e.g. hydro and fossil fuel plants, all of which are far more dangerous.
The fear mongering over nuclear has killed more people than nuclear ever has.
Germany accelerated the development of renewable energy. That was the goal. Nuclear had to go first. Coal is following. The Germany time scale to rebuild its electricity landscape goes over many decades.
By investing many many billions into renewables, instead of investing them into nuclear, Germany helped to kickstart the renewable energy industry, which will over a long period of time be much more successful replacing fossil fuels, than nuclear ever did or will do.
Just building a nuclear power plant here and there will not solve the CO2 problem. Scaling renewable to make it cheap and able for large scale distributed deployment is the way forward.
Anyway, the argument is that instead of panic-closing nuclear power plants requiring more gas and coal plants being run in their place, they could have instead ran them as long as possible while building up the renewables.
