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I have, and I have eaten numerous downvotes for it. My point has always been that nuclear energy has too low an EROEI to be a viable answer to the energy needs of a modern industrial society, and I haven't seen any convincing evidence to the contrary. France's nuclear system was only viable because they got their uranium for cents on the franc from Nigeria, and even then it ran out of money and had to be restructured when I was posting about it last. This doesn't necessarily mean that there's no place for nuclear power - having a source of power that isn't reliant on fossil fuels could prove to be particularly useful in a future where fossil fuels are harder to come boy or the Middle East is in a state of war. Similarly, nuclear submarines which don't actually have to make enough money to justify their continued existence but place a huge emphasis on the density of their energy source are another good use for them. If China actually manages to get those molten salt reactors working, that would be fantastic as well. But right now I haven't seen any convincing evidence that nuclear power is a sustainable answer to the depletion of fossil fuels - and a large graveyard of failed attempts.
This is the reason why France has the nuclear system it does- it was de Gaulle's baby precisely because the US doesn't have French (or European) interests at heart. France was under [his] military dictatorship at the time, which helped get things moving.
He was right, of course; both in 1973 with the US-caused oil shortage and then in 2022 with the US-caused LNG shortage.
It's not so much that as it is completely obviating the need to resupply with fuel. And, especially relevant for submarines, nuclear power functions even with a complete lack of oxygen, so doing that is a no-brainer.
It's the only alternative that can work anywhere on the Earth's surface on a calm, cold night. Lighting a fire is the classic method to get energy at that time, but "magic hot rock" is fine too.
I once heard stated that the reason it's difficult to get good output from nuclear is because they simply can't run the reaction hot enough- hence the emphasis on exotic coolants (molten salt, etc.)- whereas with LNG the exhaust heat is sufficiently hot that you can heat the steam driving a secondary turbine to the point where it's very, very efficient. Of course, because we want to reserve the right to quench the reactor if it gets too hot for... certain reasons, we'd like a coolant that doesn't make the problem worse if we do that. At least with LNG you can turn the gas off and the reaction will stop.
"Work" is the key sticking point here - does it provide enough energy to pay for itself? To pay for the extraction of the raw material from the ground, refinement into usable fuel pellets, transportation to the plant, the construction of the plant, the lives of the people who run it and then on top of that provide usable power for the rest of the society that sustains it? The answer is, at present, "No."
That's the entire basis of my objection - even if you just handwave away the problem of storing dangerous radioactive waste that lasts for millenia and hope it doesn't leak into the rest of the environment, nuclear just can't pay for itself. Every single existing nuclear program I'm aware of is made viable on the basis of government subsidies or exploitation (i.e. the hilarious prices France paid for Nigerian uranium). Every single proposed nuclear program that doesn't have these problems (fusion, molten salt, thorium, etc) is 20 years in the future, and has been 20 years in the future for the past 60 years.
The whole nuclear waste discussion is immensely frustrating to me. Yes, depleted fuel remains dangerous for a long time, but the implication that we therefore need to also develop containment solutions that last for millennia is completely and utterly bonkers. The part that most scares people about radioactive substances is that they can cause injury and death by just being present in their vicinity. However, spent fuel is dangerous to the touch for a few decades at best, after that, the health and containment concerns are identical to those of any other chemical waste (basically, making sure it does not come into contact with the food supply and drinking water). Except, there is a universal method to detect radioactive contamination. Compare this to detecting chemical contamination, where one could run hundreds of tests and still miss the presence of a lethally toxic substance. Some toxic waste, particularly heavy metals, remains dangerous indefinitely. However, you never see any heated political debate about ways to permanently isolate entire waterways. The only reason we even have this discussion with nuclear power is because the physical amount of high level waste is tiny and because it's one of the only energy sources where most of the waste it produces stays neatly contained in a single building.
I don't want to be needlessly antagonistic, but the nuclear waste argument needs to die and whenever anyone brings it up in a discussion I also die a little inside.
I mean sure I'll be dead by the time that problem shows up, but I do actually care about the world that we will bequeath to our descendants.
Yes, that is the entire problem! And sure, we can detect it - but that doesn't stop the river that could have supplied entire communities with life turning into a source of cancer instead.
I am an environmentalist who does actually care about this issue. You're right, that is a big problem - but I'm not particularly moved by claims of hypocrisy when I have actively protested against this kind of thing in the past.
If my descendants in a thousand years' time haven't figured out some futuristic technological solution to disposing of nuclear waste, then fuck 'em. Presumably they're going through some horrible Max Max/Dark Ages thing to have regressed so far, and a bunch of radiation deep underground in the desert is the least of their problems. This is just papier-mache moral grandstanding, hence your need to resort to snark - it's much more reasonable to care about giving clean, reliable power (bracketing the cost question) to your actual immediate descendants than to prioritize some hypothetical 3035 descendant who finds themselves building a hut in whatever godforsaken place we put a waste dump in.
I'd feel ashamed if I ever said that about my descendants. I think this might be a case of differing moral frameworks - I really can't relate to this perspective.
What snark?
"Bracketing the cost question" lmao. If you don't care about the cost of the power produced then there's no point even talking about the viability of different energy sources at all. Assuming I misunderstood what you meant here... If nuclear power actually did provide clean, cheap power that was too cheap to meter then there would actually be a real discussion to have here but it doesn't! It has failed to do so for decades, and I see no signs that this will change in the near future. What we actually get is power that is more expensive than fossil fuels or renewables and creates a huge waste problem on top of that. My government's chief scientific body recently produced a report on the relative cost of different energy sources, and nuclear ended up being roughly twice as expensive as solar/wind (https://www.csiro.au/en/news/All/News/2025/July/2024-25-GenCost-Final-Report).
My descendants in 1000 years will presumably have as little to do with my values, culture, genes, and life as I do to my many ancestors from the year 1025. Yeah, I care somewhat about these hypothetical people, but not so much that I would sacrifice real gains for my children and grandchildren because someday, in a scenario of civilizational collapse where they're all fucked anyway, one of them might go out into the Nevada desert and drink from a stream that has nuclear waste runoff in it. The reality is, either we keep going along the trajectory of technological progress, or life for our descendants will be so much worse that nuclear waste will be the least of their troubles, and I'm happy to judge them for failing the project of human civilization.
You are implying that the person you're responding to doesn't care about the world he bequeaths to his descendants. Come on, man, you knew exactly what you were saying when you wrote that sentence.
I am happy to have you here for the debate on cost, because that's the debate that actually matters - even if I disagree with your position, seeing you argue that will be productive and we can learn new things. I'm saying that the long-term waste storage argument is an irrelevant distraction from the cost argument.
I am actually incredibly similar to my ancestors from a thousand years ago - they lived in a different country and spoke a different language, but there are a lot of things we have in common.
Except that nuclear waste runoff won't be limited to that stream. What bodies of water will that stream feed into? What ecosystems will draw upon that river for water? A single stream being rendered unusable would be a perfectly acceptable price to pay for cheap, relatively clean nuclear power - but that's not the price actually being paid, nor is it what we're getting for that price. A single stream feeds into the broader ecosystem and harms there will spread in ways that cause immense damage to the fabric of life in the future. That radioactive water will reach aquifers and groundwater supplies, it will reach the ocean, it will reach the atmosphere as it passes through the water cycle and becomes rain. Nature will adapt, for sure, but humans don't evolve nearly as quickly as wolves or bacteria - and the evolution of radiation resistance via natural selection would involve incredible amounts of human suffering and pain.
I don't think that qualifies as snark - not caring about the fate of the Earth is a fairly common position among a lot of rationalist circles, especially ones who believe we will colonise space or discover AGI in short order.
Sure, here's the debate: Barring a dramatic increase in EROEI, nuclear power is uncompetitive with solar and other renewables. While it is the appropriate solution for some limited circumstances (nuclear submarines, having a colonial empire that lets you get effectively free uranium, etc), it is no way an actual answer to the energy crisis rapidly approaching the world.
Far from being an irrelevant distraction from the argument, nuclear waste and the proper safekeeping/disposal of it is one of the bigger contributors to the EROEI problems of nuclear power. When the final accounting is done, the costs of that storage could leave nuclear power with a negative EROEI - we would have been better off simply not doing it at all save for the generation of certain medically and scientifically useful isotopes.
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