Nuclear should be considered part of clean energy standard, White House says

There is a bad stigma associated with nuclear energy that I just don’t understand - Nuclear less impact to the environment when compared to other energy sources. What is is the problem with nuclear? Is it the cost of maintaining these power plants ?

I went back and forth a few times with my opinion on nuclear over the years and some points I've gathered, good and bad are:

-Nuclear is indeed a low-carbon energy source.

-It's also what you would want as baseload.

-The costs of storing waste properly have been underestimated - a few years ago nuclear operators reached a deal with the German government through which they paid 23bln Euros to make the waste the government's problem. The overall sentiment is that they were let off the hook easily and the total cost will be much higher.

-Both nuclear plants and waste storage facilities are easy targets for terrorism - fortunately that didn't happen yet, but things like Stuxnet proved that it's entirely in the realm of possibility. My pet conspiracy theory is that this, not Fukushima was the reason Germany eventually accelerated its plans to phase out nuclear.

-You can reprocess spent nuclear fuel which helps both with fuel accessibility and waste management.

-It's trivially easy to use the reprocessing infrastructure to create weapons-grade plutonium.

-Nuclear is generally safe.

-That being said its mode of failure makes a large area inhospitable essentially forever. Topsoil radiation measurements usually don't give the full picture of the problem.

-Every nuclear disaster resulted in increased safety by uncovering design flaws which were a result of cutting corners, so especially in the decade after Fukushima costs went up around 24% making nuclear the single low-carbon source to become more, not less expensive.

-As it stands even China cannot deploy nuclear fast enough to compete with renewables on delivered MWh. Since 2012 wind consistently delivered more energy in China than nuclear and the gap has been widening ever since. With the cost of storage plummeting we're heading towards a future where centralised power generation may become antiquated.

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Overall nuclear has some advantages but there aren't enough of them to break the trend of using renewables + gas and storage, which on average replace coal faster and cheaper.

It's basically a textbook example of "worse is better".

I think nuclear is also the least disruptive, least ecological footprint of all technologies we have. The amount of Lithium mined, the production of solar panels, plus all the install locations. Solar might be cheaper, but overall it means we need to move and manufacture much much more stuff, and all of that requires energy and land use changes. In order to fully power our economies with solar, we need to gobble up even more land than we are already using. That literally means deforestation and destruction of other habitats for wildlife.

Nuclear is the lowest footprint, biggest-bang-for-the-buck technology.

Please excuse this question, but how do you think Lithium is "mined"?