Yes. While renewables are great supplemental energy sources, they’re high in manufacturing and maintenance cost and require maintenance that, when comparing overall output to maintenance costs, will cost significantly more than a nuclear plant in its lifespan.

Then there’s of course the environmental effects from the manufacturing process for things like solar panels and wind turbines - also shipping from all around the world, contributing to greenhouse gasses.

Then, there’s the required space to get enough power for the masses - especially in the marine environment, where we’re already arguing how lobster pots are bad for whales - imagine what a few hundred metal towers climbing from the ocean floor off the coast of Maine could do.

Then, you have to factor in power storage, since these sources don’t provide reliable, consistent energy. Current battery technology still relies on rare materials, mined in poor countries with questionable-at-best worker protections. And to provide the sheer amount of energy we currently use, that is A LOT of batteries. Yes, the technology is improving. And yes, nuclear also relies on rare materials mined from the earth, but in much lesser numbers.

All in all, per square foot, nuclear is going to be the safest, most efficient, most reliable, and most environmentally friendly energy source for the future. The sooner we start improving and adding to our nuclear energy infrastructure, the sooner we can kick our dependency on fossil fuels and other environmentally insensitive energy projects.

No, but no energy production has zero environmental impact.

Nuclear power's biggest environmental impact is actually building the plants and warming local water sources when they're used for cooking. Nuclear waste can be reprocessed to turn 97% of it back into fuel. The remainder can be safely stored in a facility like Yucca Mountain.

Only nuclear offers low-carbon base load power. There’s literally no other option.

For what it's worth, a large portion of the "radioactive for thousands of years" problem is solvable, and there are a couple ways to solve it.

The problem is that comprehensively solving it and having a system in place for it being solved is not done yet, because either you need to build enough plants that burn the waste (plus systems for transporting it etc) or you need to switch to something like thorium as fuel, which generates much less / less toxic waste in the first place. Either of those things is doable, but they take A LOT of work.

Decreasing energy usage with an ever increasing population? Good luck.

Europe has been largely powered by nuclear for a long time and all is well.

You have good points.

I will say that solar PV needs a LOT of area to generate power in amounts that we currently use/need it as a civilization, but, blanketing far more urban surfaces with PV installations even in marginal areas could make a big dent in our energy needs. I believe this type of policy has been effective in Germany.

The other issue is that tons of new solar generating capacity would absolutely have to come with grid-scale storage for when the sun isn't shining, and that's not yet a solved problem. Researchers are working their asses off to scale up battery storage to grid scale but it's not yet ready for prime time. Another 5 to 10 years will likely solve that, but it remains an additional capital cost + logistical issue to then set up a bunch of grid-scale storage facilities, plus all the changes to the power grid to accommodate them. Edit: there are also other forms of grid storage, but they're either less developed than batteries, or have requirements that limit them to favorable geographic areas (pumped hydro and the like).

A couple things to keep in mind about nukes:

First, modern reactor designs are drastically safer than the reactors everyone thinks of when they think about nukes. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima are generations-old reactor designs with many many more failure modes than current designs. Chances of accident with a major radiation release are so much less with current designs, you can't ever truthfully say zero, but they really are leagues better than the type of nuke plants we're used to thinking about.

Second, nuclear waste is largely a solvable (not solved - but solvable) problem. As long as we are using uranium for fuel, it's possible to build reactors that then burn the waste for power, the resulting waste of that process is both less in quantity and less problematic. There is also the possibility of switching to thorium for fuel, which generates much less / less bad waste in the first place, unfortunately thorium reactors haven't yet been scaled up / installed / operated for years at grid scale. So either of these solutions have a ways to go before they are actual solutions, but, at least they are possible. If new nukes do become a policy then it would be good to push that policy towards solutions like this.

But who is gong to build the farms?

Orsted 💪

It's all about the $$$ for them. Not about the environment.

Exactly. The problem these folks have is they forgot nobody cared about the economics of the bids....just the narrative. They could have charged double.