Ask Lemmy

I'm nuclear industry adjacent, and I work in public safety. My thoughts, which are only my own:

1. Renewables are the future. Nuclear power is expensive and takes a long time to build, mostly because people don't like the idea of a reactor near them. While that's also true of things like wind farms, the lawsuits on those don't take as long, I guess.
2. Small modular reactors may have a place in our future energy landscape, but the specifics remain to be seen. SMRs are (obviously) smaller, so they have less fuel in them, generate less waste, and would be easier to build (like modular homes, they'd be all made basically the same in a factory and shipped to their site). They are in a race against good enough battery technology to carry the base load. Who will win? Well, nuclear is getting a lot of extra support currently, but still, who knows?
3. Nuclear power is so much safer than people assume. Nuclear reactors have reactor buildings which are big thick concrete monstrosities (part of the reason they're so dang expensive to build). It's quite hard for them to leak, so releases will end up being little amounts out of limited area. Yes, even Fukushima, which while very bad and very expensive to clean up, wasn't the thing killing people. One person officially died, years later from lung cancer. Cancer he might have gotten anyway; we can't know. In the US at least, a lot of money goes into emergency preparation at nuclear power plants, trying to mitigate the impacts of any kind of event, but the concern is cancer, not radiation poisoning. 3.5 interestingly, SMRs will probably not get big thick concrete structures around them, or at least not as big or as thick. It's because the risk is lower in those designs but also because there's just not as much material that could be flung around. This may have changed though (this is not my specific area, just something I hear a lot about). Maybe it will be more akin to naval reactors or something. Those are very small, and very very safe.
4. Nuclear waste storage is a political problem. The nuclear industry has been paying for a long-term storage solution for decades and recently sued the US government over it. We absolutely built a house without a toilet, but we could change that with enough political will. Until then, the waste sits at the plant under guard. It's not great but none of the plants are going to run out of room or anything.
5. The US government is going away from certain standards that are generally recognized as being the safest approach to radiological exposure. This, quite frankly, may be disastrous, but likely not immediately. Eventually I could see it leading to eroded safety culture and that could be a problem long term. But I'm a notorious pessimist, so...
6. Renewables are the future. Anyone telling you anything different is selling something. Probably stock in an SMR company.