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WillowOne's Positions

Nuclear Power

My Positions

  1. I support nuclear power as a key component of a sustainable energy policy.
  2. Nuclear fission offers a low-emission, high-output, reliable alternative to fossil fuels and should be part of a broader strategy to reduce carbon dependency while meeting global energy demand.
  3. Opposition to nuclear power from the environmental movement has been, on balance, one of the most damaging own-goals of the last fifty years. Every reactor that was not built was, in practice, a coal or gas plant that was.
  4. Renewables and nuclear are complements, not rivals. Wind and solar are cheap but intermittent; nuclear is expensive to build but produces continuous baseload power regardless of weather. A grid needs both.

Notes

  1. Safety. Measured in deaths per unit of energy produced, nuclear is among the safest sources of energy, comparable to wind and solar and orders of magnitude safer than coal, oil, gas, and biomass, once air pollution is counted. Coal kills more people every week, through particulate pollution, than nuclear power has killed in its entire history including Chernobyl and Fukushima. (Our World in Data, "What are the safest and cleanest sources of energy?")
  2. Chernobyl and Fukushima. Chernobyl (1986) was the result of a reactor design with no containment building, operated outside its safety envelope, in a political system that suppressed information. Its confirmed death toll is in the dozens, with estimates of eventual cancer deaths in the low thousands. Fukushima (2011) was caused by a tsunami that killed around 18,000 people directly; the reactor accident killed one worker from radiation and the evacuation, which was probably excessive, killed over 2,000 mostly elderly people through stress and displacement. Both accidents are arguments for better reactor design and regulation, not against the technology. Neither is relevant to modern designs.
  3. Waste. The volume of high-level waste is small: all the spent fuel the United States has ever produced would fit on a single football pitch stacked ten metres high. It is solid, contained, and monitored, which is more than can be said for the waste from fossil fuels, which is dispersed into the atmosphere. Deep geological disposal is technically solved (Finland's Onkalo repository opened in the 2020s); what remains is political will.
  4. Cost. Nuclear is expensive to build in the West, largely because we have forgotten how. Countries that build reactors continuously and to a standard design (France in the 1970s and 1980s, South Korea today) build them at a fraction of the cost of one-off projects like Hinkley Point C. The cost is a consequence of policy, not physics. Small modular reactors may or may not solve this; standardised large reactors certainly would.
  5. Carbon. Lifecycle emissions from nuclear are around 12 gCO₂/kWh, comparable to wind and lower than solar. France decarbonised its electricity grid in about fifteen years in the 1970s and 1980s by building reactors, and still has among the lowest-carbon electricity in Europe. Germany spent over €500 billion on the Energiewende and, by closing its reactors, ended up with electricity that is both more expensive and more carbon-intensive than France's. This is the natural experiment, and it has a result.
  6. Fusion would be better still, and should be funded, but is not yet a power source. Policy must be made with the fission we have.

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