Takes decades to build/ projects run over time and budget/ where would you build?/ where would you store nuclear waste (bonus points for: in your region)?/ contributes little to global energy mix atm/ uranium is limited. Where do you get it from? Etc
> where would you store nuclear waste
The fact that nuclear energy produces globs of concentrated, easily collected waste is a feature, not a problem. Air pollution from fossil fuels (including radioactive particles) is a leading cause of death worldwide.
Every one of your points is a non issue, made into a big deal because of ideology.
As much as any large scale energy project.
Per kW it is quite effective.
The implication of GP's reasoning is that were Green not yelling about nuclear these would already be built because the projects would have started long ago.
>> where would you store nuclear waste (bonus points for: in your region)
People don't want solar farms, windmills, or oil rigs in their backyard either. Fun fact, coal emits orders of magnitude more toxic waste (including nuclear!) than nuclear itself; it's just stored in the atmosphere.
Also people largely don't want to cook themselves to death because the atmosphere has turned into a literal oven.
Instead they read the news, yap "oh my god 50degC shadowside that is horrible", turn the newspaper page and Gell-Mann-amnesia-forget about it because it's happening at the other side of the world, comfortably sitting on their couch with their HVAC pumping heat outside further contributing to the problem.
>> contributes little to global energy mix atm
Catch-22. Because there's not enough nuclear reactors.
France has a ~ 70% nuclear 10% renewable 10% fossil 10% hydro mix.
> France generates roughly two-thirds of its electricity from nuclear power, well above the global average of just under 10%. This heavy reliance on nuclear energy allows France to have one of the lowest carbon dioxide emissions per unit of electricity in the world at 85 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour, compared to the global average of 438 grams
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
>> uranium is limited.
Uranium is aplenty.
> more than antimony, tin, cadmium, mercury, or silver [~40x!], and it is about as abundant as arsenic or molybdenum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium#Occurrence
The problem is enrichment, and it is not even a technical problem. We're doing more difficult things producing nanometer scale compute wafers by the millions.
Nuclear has drawbacks. I don't think it is the endgame. I'm still waiting for anyone to come up with a less bad solution that actually a) addresses nuclear drawbacks and b) works, because all I see is yelling at nuclear and the proposed alternatives are either unobtainium or nothing at all, both equivalent to the status quo that turns the planet into a death trap.
> As much as any large scale energy project.
We have data on this. Nuclear is not only the energy source most likely to overrun time and cost, it's one of the worst big projects period.
Right up there with big IT and Defence projects, "Nuclear waste storage sites" and "the Olympics".
Which is a solvable problem. We didn't have these cost and time overruns in the past to this degree. China and other places don't have them much either. I presume they don't set up a board of people and file a tower of paperwork when the lightbulbs in the toilet of an unrelated building are due for replacement but no longer produced.
Imagine if people said renewables were unfeasible and pointed at germany's insane expenditure on it to get only part of the easy output done after decades.
Solar projects are more likely to be under budget than over.