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».

> OK to wipe a continent

Why not exaggerate to the "entire planet" if we are going this way..

Regardless, in hindsight humanity could have prevented (at least to a significant extent) climate change if we doubled down on nuclear 40-50 years ago instead of stopping most expansion. What will be the cost of that?

I doubt so: 416 industrial nuclear reactors are deployed in the world today. They produce 10% of the electricity, itself 20% of the final energy, so nuclear power produces at best 2% of the energy consumed.

Nuclear power would provide 10% of the energy, which would be far from sufficient since it is necessary to electrify uses (in order to reduce the quantity of fossil fuel burned) and therefore produce more electricity, if we could multiply the power of the fleet by 5, therefore building around 1500 new reactors and keeping the existing fleet active. Hoping for this before 2100 would be absurd.

Well, its way too late now. 80 reactors were launched between 1960 and 1970, 185 between 70s, 237 in the 80s, in the 90s it was barely 60.

Instead if it kept doubling every decade it would be well over 10%.

Of course electrification of transportation etc. should have starter much earlier.

Obviously none of that was economical compared to coal/gas/oil back then.

> doubling every decade

Uranium deposits mined under the right conditions can supply the current stock for at best two centuries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Peak_uranium

To extend this beyond that, we must hope for a revolutionary production process (pursued in vain for decades: breeders...), the ability to exploit less promising uranium deposits, thus tolerating increased emissions and costs, or the discovery of a large deposit.

Hoping for such a discovery is risky because intensive prospecting began at the end of the Second World War (the quest for nuclear weapons), and the rapid and sharp rise in the price of uranium (a bubble) that occurred around 2007 triggered a massive investment in prospecting, the results of which (15%) are very inadequate.

Therefore, multiplying the stock by five would leave at best 40 years of uranium certainly available under current conditions, and would therefore be an inept investment (one needs to amortize the plant).

Moreover there are geostrategic considerations: many nations don't have any reserve not want to have to buy uranium (creating a dependency) or technical expertise.