With climate change looming, it seems so completely backwards to go back to using it again.
Is it coal miners pushing to keep their jobs? Fear of nuclear power? Is purely politically motivated, or are there genuinely people who believe coal is clean?
Edit, I will admit I was ignorant to the usage of coal nowadays.
Now I’m more depressed than when I posted this
Yes, countries like Germany are turning to coal as a direct result of nuclear-phobia.
The US, with all its green initiatives and solar/wind incentives, is pumping more oil than Saudi Arabia. The US has been the top oil producer on whole the planet for the last 5-6 years. The problem is getting worse.
Sorry, this is just false info. Germany is not turning to coal as a result of your called nuclear phobia.
I will repeat my comment from another thread:
If you are able to read German or use a translator I can recommend this interview where the expert explains everything and goes into the the details.
Don’t repeat the stories of the far right and nuclear lobby. Nuclear will always be more expensive than renewables and nobody has solved the waste problem until today. France as a leading nuclear nation had severe problems to cool their plants during the summer due to, guess what, climate change. Building new nuclear power plants takes enormous amounts of money and 10-20years at least. Time that we don’t have at the moment.
Germany has not build any new coal plants. At least not in the last five years.
Edit: Why are people down voting a factual statement? Go ahead and provide better info if you got it.
Renewables are great until the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing.
And that’s more likely than enriched Uranium becoming unavailable or locally unobtainable?
There is no “nuclear lobby” stop making shit up. Nuclear isn’t profitable, that is why we don’t have it. If it’s not profitable, there will be no industry lobby pushing for it. The fact that it isn’t profitable shouldn’t matter. I care about the environment and if Capitalism can’t extract profit without destroying the environment (it can’t) then we need to stop evaluating infrastructure through a Capitalist lens.
As people pointed out in another thread, nuclear energy is NOT the future and also a really bad short term solution,so countries like Germany are going back to coal short term to make the transitions to renewables in the meantime.
It’s not a great solution, but without Nordstream, there’s really not much else more sensible to do right now, just to make the transition.
- It takes 20 years to build
- nobody knows how much nuclear fuel will cost in 20 years
- you have to take out a big loan and make interest payments on it for maybe 30 years before you start making a profit
- if you don’t have enough water for cooling because of climate change, the plant must shut down
- if your neighbor decides to start a war against you, your nuclear plants become a liability, see Ukraine.
I think smaller, decentralized renewable energy is cheaper in the short and long run and has a much lower risk in case of accidents, natural Desasters or attacks.
A single new reactor takes decades to build and costs billions. Investing in solar, wind, the grid and storage instead will generate more energy, faster, and for less.
It’s just nuclear phobia.
It’s literally the second safest form of energy production we have only behind solar.
It’s literally safer than wind power.
Yeah there’s been a few disasters with older reactor designs or reactors that were put where they shouldn’t have been, but even with those it’s still incredibly safe.
