this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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I see nuclear as a transitory source of energy. It doesn't emit any greenhouse gases and FAR better than fossil fuels. We could easily transition to it faster and more cheaply than solar, wind, etc currently. Deaths associated with fossil fuel energy greatly exceed those associate with nuclear energy.
Burning fossil fuels needs to stop and we need to bring down carbon levels to what they were 20+ years ago. Ideally, transitioning to nuclear would be cheap/fast while we build out solar and wind infrastructure, and research how to make these sources of energy more effective.
However, I'm not a policy nor energy expert by any means. I'm just some random person on the internet.
It's interesting to me that the conversation has shifted so far from ecological footprinting to carbon footprinting. I don't think the Navajo Nation would agree that nuclear energy creates less emissions that coal. The mining and end life of nuclear energy is just too toxic for me to ever consider it clean or green.
Of course, I also have an issue with hydropower, so ๐คท๐ป
The question was whether or not nuclear is clean or green. To which my answer is "no", but "better than fossil fuels". If we were to shut down all the nuclear power plants in the world today, much of the world would switch to burning more fossil fuels because in much of the world it's still the most cheapest form of energy. Someone else in this thread already mentioned it, but fossil fuel energy facilities/sources should be decommissioned first before nuclear.