The time has finally come for geothermal energy

I fully understand that waste management of fission reactors is a Very Big Deal. But I still stand behind the argument that opposing nuclear power in the 70s and onward is possibly the biggest own goal the environmental movement has ever achieved.

At worst, nuclear waste contaminates a discrete section of the Earth. Climate change affects literally everywhere. The correct answer would have been to aggressively roll out fission power 40-50 years ago and then pursue renewables. You can argue that other solutions would make fission power obsolete, but we would have been in a much better spot if it'd at least been a stepping stone off fossil fuels. Instead, we have 40-50 years of shrieking and FUD from environmentalists over an issue that can be kept under control with proper regulation. The US Navy has operated reactors for over 60 years without incident, proving it can be done with proper oversight.

TL;DR nuclear has issues, but I'd take it over coal every day and twice on Sundays, at least until something better can scale.

I agree. I think the correct environmentalist position at that time wouldn't have been to oppose nuclear, but to advocate for improvements, streamlined approvals of improved designs, and public investment or incentives.

I wasn't really commenting on the merits of 20th century environmentalist movements, more raising the general point that fission power has inherent costs which weren't reflected by narrow 1950s analyses of how much energy was extractable from U-235. Operation of a fission plant requires much more capex and opex than it would if we didn't care about cleanliness (waste management), security (fissile material theft prevention), or safety (meltdown prevention).

Fusion power is more complex to invent and practically depends on modern technologies that didn't exist 50 years ago, but once the first demonstration plants are operational, marginal costs to deploy and operate more should be much lower and ultimately become very low at scale.

A lot of housing politics from 'old school' environmentalist groups are a pretty big own goal as well.

Denser urban living is pretty energy efficient, and forcing lengthy commutes on people because of NIMBYism is a huge waste.

People want houses. Planners can either yell and stomp their feet about this or adapt to circumstances. It's like electric cars. People want cars. Better they have the ability to have an electric SUV or pickup, because if you try to force them into little tiny econoboxes or lecture them about how they should really be using mass transit, they're just going to flip you the bird and walk away.

Similarly, better to have people be able to have reasonably energy-efficient houses than demanding they all live in apartments.

People want a place to call home. Those come in many shapes and sizes. Denser living does not mean a smaller living space. By building 'up', you can provide both.

The only ones demanding anything are those who show up to try and stop apartments.

Allowing people to live in apartments is not demanding that they do.

Reversing the downzoning of the 70s - 00s is about allowing construction in cities again.

"People want houses."

(Source needed. This probably depends on a lot of variables in play.)

Plenty of people in dense urban areas are happy with living in an apartment and, where I live, buying a condo in the city is at least as frequent as buying a house 20 km away from it for the same price.

Living in suburbia has its downsides - long commute, very limited entertainment and cultural possibilities, very limited choice in schools. Not everyone loves cutting the lawn etc. either, I surely don't. If any of your family members has any disease that could flare up, ambulance response time tends to grow worse with the growing distance.

Of course, a lot depends on factors such as "is the transport authority willing to make public transport actually safe and nice". That requires keeping raving drugged lunatics out of it, plus paying enough money for it. AFAIK in the US, Republicans have an ideological problem with the "paying money for it" part and the Democrats have an ideological problem with the "suppressing antisocial behavior in it" part.

People want houses, but absolutely hate other people having houses.

Back then, it affected everyone in two ways, which were the things Greenpeace campaigned against: nuclear weapons, especially overland testing, and dumping waste at sea.

Chernobyl took out Welsh farming for years, and in a few places decades, because it spread a thin layer of bioaccumulative poison over the whole of Europe.

Neither of these have anything to do with running a well-regulated nuclear power program. Chernobyl happened because of the apathy and incompetence endemic to any Marxist-Leninist system, not because a modern democratic state is incapable of regulating the nuclear power industry.

Know what else spreads a thin layer of poison over the whole of the world? Coal power.

People want a lot of things, many of them conflicting. I'd love a huge house on a large lot in a walkable area and it to be cheap, and also close to nature. Letting markets work is a good way of resolving people's revealed preferences. Some will prefer a condo in a walkable area, others a large lot outside a less expensive city, others will pay through the nose to have a single detached unit in a high cost of living area.

The problem with that argument is that nowhere did environmentalists in the 70s or 80s prevent nuclear power plants from being build. Nuclear has received much more subsidies than solar or wind ever did (even if we ignore the indirect military->civil subsidies) and it still never became economical. Back in the 70s and 80s coal was much cheaper, and now solar and wind are so much cheaper it doesn't make any sense to invest in nuclear. The nuclear power plants that were build, got built largely for political reasons (energy independence, and military), and the reason why not more got build was not those pesky environmentalists, but that it was expensive.

While I agree about the coal thing:

Democracy just as lazy and apathetic is whatever the USSR counts as; the point of capitalism (which is different to democracy) redirect the laziness into something more productive — this works to an extent, but depends on competition which is greatly reduced in the case of nuclear reactors.

That it's a different axis than democracy-communism is also why the not-at-all-democratic military reactors around the world seem to be doing fine.

I’m relatively sure that at least in Germany the environmental movement had a lot of influence preventing the aggressive pursuit of nuclear power. Your point about subsidies still stands of course, but economics of power generation notoriously ignore the costs of climate change.

Its funny how mass transit was once seen as a way out of the crisis of too many city horse carriages and all the manure they produce. Metro and rail was simply considered the natural solution, which combined with denser living space allowed for labor intensive industries to sprout up around cities. But then came the horseless carriage and suburbian sprawl became a thing and now we have too much of that. Too much hardened soil and flooding is becoming a much bigger problem, animal and insect populations wither, road networks have upkeep, transport and storage costs make everything imperceptably more expensive. In my scifi fantasy future vertical farming will become a thing which should allow a major shrinking of hinterlands around dense population areas, though preferably not replaced with suburbia. Maybe we could go live in the clouds too.