I am not arguing that nuclear is green, only that its impacts are less than other baseload sources. Personally, I would choose a deep borehole (~5 km hole per MIT) next to my house over a chemical plant to make PV cells. At that depth in crystalline granite, the stuff is not going to come back. Of course, risk perception is highly individualized and nuclear’s old history (especially old mining) burned a lot of bridges with local communities.

Can we build a reactor in your back yard? Maybe we can store the nuclear waste there, too. Nuclear, to me, makes no sense, as a 21 year old who already has to deal with the effects of a insane energy system and will be for the rest of my life. I’m about to go to an Indigenous Environmental Network conference, where a lot of workshops will be focused around the nuclear renassiance and its terrible, unjust impacts on native communities, from uranium mining to nuclear waste storage. Pine Ridge reservation in the Dakotas has water so contaminated from uranium mining that women spontaneously miscarried. Solving global warming won’t happen if we continue to treat people as trash and disrespect the earth.
I for one am not down for an energy future where we spend billions on an unjust and unsafe form of power because we don’t have the vision to see truly clean, just alternatives.

The advantage of radiation is that it has been studied more in depth than more other phenomena. It is easily measured and tracked. There are places such as Kerala, India where natural doses as high as 3 rem (i.e., higher than most of the Chernobyl contaminated areas) are measured yet no discernable effects have been found (i.e., linear no-threshold model is for making regulations not predicting cancers at low doses). If more certainty is needed for nuclear waste, one can use deep borehole technology (~5 km instead of 800 m). I am not saying nuclear is perfect [after all, then I could retire...], only that it is good enough to be on the list of low carbon baseload options.

I recently read that salvaged steel from pre-war battleships is in high demand for shielding radiation-sensitive facilities (involving precise measurements) because all steel made after 1950 or so is mildly radioactive. Using nuclear has a longer impact on the global environment than any other human activity I’m aware of — the timescale is pretty much forever. It’s the standard-bearer for the twentieth century’s charge to dominate and utilize the natural world rather than align with its rhythms. It is, in a word, hubris. Believing the industry when it says “no, now we’ve got it figured out” is silly. They had it figured out in 1950, too.

The Oklo phenomenon is proof that nuclear waste can be sequestered for very long periods of time. It will be easier to sequester nuclear waste than the huge amounts of carbon (though that is probably doable as well). As for accidents, even with Chernobyl (and nobody advocates building THAT design) the deaths per unit energy of nuclear are much less than most fossil technologies.

Nuclear plants have been built in Japan in as little as 39 months. As for changing over the US to an all-renewable grid in 10 years, no one has tested a “smartgrid” with all renewables and energy storage combined. Such a combination must first be proven (I am all in favor of the Xcel smartgrid project in Boulder CO) before any regulators will allow wholesale transformation of utility grids. Yes, nuclear is controversial and has its issues, but it has a much better safety record than most fossil technologies. It can make a contribution to solving the carbon conundrum.

Also, it only takes one nuclear accident to blow that safety record out of the water. And what’s the plan for all of the new nuclear waste?

Yes biomass can help as well, but to really replace the baseload with low carbon energy, some nuclear is likely needed for such a large shift in energy supply.