- Fear of nuclear accidents, 'not in my backyard' reactions from communities - Dealing with radioactive waste safely - Cost/time overruns building nuclear plants
Although I think all of these could be resolved, and I've heard some interesting things about thorium reactors which could be even better. I do wonder whether nuclear power is a good answer to climate change in particular though (beyond keeping the current ones functioning until end of life), nuclear power station design/building often takes decades and it seems like we have a shorter amount of time than that to make a significant difference.
It takes decades now, but we know hot to build them quickly and more efficiently. We’ve done it in the past.
Now, it is too late to avoid climate change anyway, and almost certainly too late to avoid crossing the +2 degrees threshold in a couple of decades. We are too late already.
But if we want to minimise the cascading issues that are heading our way, it’s not “let us do something or something else”. We need to redirect as much as we can of our industry to decarbonised energy. This means wind and solar and nuclear fission and hydrogen, and a whole bunch of R&D into the next steps for all of that (including nuclear fusion). Also, we need to consume less. Quite a lot less, in fact.