EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

I think a good exercise for the reader is to reflect on why they were ever against nuclear power in the first place. Nuclear power was always the greenest, most climate friendly, safest, cheapest (save for what we do to ourselves), most energy dense, most long lasting, option.

I disagree with cheapest. If you factor in twenty years build time and nuclear waste disposal, the whole thing is not economically viable.

Then there's a problem with nuclear fuel. The sources are mostly countries you don't want to depend on.

You are of course right with your assessment that nuclear is green, safe and eco-friendly. That's a hard one to swallow for a lot of eco activists.

It is expensive because of the regulatory burdens associated with making it unreasonably safe. By unreasonably safe I mean that harms predicted by radiation models are unscientific, and death rate expectations are far lower than alternative power generation technologies.

Nuclear fuel storage is relatively straightforward, and volumes have potential to be reduced 30x through recycling.

Nuclear power plants require international laws and international cooperation for insurance, because one serious incident, such as Chornobyl, can wipe a continent.

In Ukraine, profits from all nuclear plants will cover damages, caused by Chornobyl, in 1000-5000 years IF nothing more will happen to Chornobyl or other an other nuclear power plant in those years, which is unlikely.

We can make nuclear safe (enough) but after one big incident nobody wanted the political career suicide to push for this. So we are stuck with criticizing stone-age level nuclear power because we never took it further. The West never stopped doing something just because the USSR didn’t do it properly.

If we did the same with commercial air travel after the first disasters we’d still cross the oceans in boats. Car accidents kill 10-15 times more people every year worldwide than Chernobyl did but we don’t give up on cars either. Heck, smoking kills 7-8 times more people than cars every year (that’s 80-100 Chernobyls worth every year) and we still allow it.

The reasons are political not technically or financially insurmountable obstacles. We didn’t shut down nuclear in Europe for “green” reasons or because we can’t improve it, or because it kills too many people, but because enough Russian money went into politicians’ pockets to do this.

You arguments boils down to «it's OK to wipe a continent once in a while, because nuclear energy is the safest energy option per megawatt produced».

We have had several serious nuclear incidents and none have destroyed either a continent or the people on it