"Lie" is such a click-baity triggering word to use here. Sounds more like they overstated the harm of cumulative small doses of radiation.
But, I mostly just skimmed through the beginning of the article, so maybe it gets better, like maybe the author reveals an international cabal of influential anti-nuclear activists who are holding human progress back.
> Sounds more like they overstated the harm of cumulative small doses of radiation.
Not even that, they simply didn’t know because they couldn’t measure, so they took a conservative approach.
Btw you can count me in to the cabal of anti-nuclear activists. Humans simply are too greedy and incompetent to manage the technology responsibly over the long term. We’ve already irreversibly altered the biosphere with the nuclear activity we’ve engaged in so far. Time for it to stop.
Your not wrong, but you seem to be missing one significant detail: we have altered the biosphere even more by not engaging in nuclear activity, instead opting for less-scary-but-worse alternatives like coal, oil and gas.
Unless by "viability" you're completely ignoring price, I disagree (I would argue that excessively expensive solutions aren't viable). We don't have good alternatives to gas (carbon fuel) peakers yet. Nor is winter generation a solved problem. Non-nuclear carbon-free generation needs a tremendous amount of battery storage to get to 0% carbon-emitting.
Nuclear is expensive because nuclear is defined as expensive.
The problem lies with the standard of As Low As Reasonably Achievable. If you had reasonably priced nuclear power you could add more safety. Thus you have to add more safety. Thus you no longer have reasonably priced nuclear power.
And, when it comes to power it's a totally wrong standard. You should not be looking to minimize individual technology risk, you should be looking to minimize total risk of competing technologies. Making your nuclear plant safer instead drives generation to natural gas (~10x as dangerous as nuclear, plus climate effects) and oil (~10x as dangerous as natural gas, even more climate effects.) Or even coal (~10x as dangerous as oil, even more climate effects plus nasty stuff going up the stack--including emitting more radiation than would be tolerated for a nuclear plant.)
If I'm making a decision about what generation capacity to build next, I can't change the definitions, and renewables are already the cheapest option. The only reason you're seeing data centers get natural gas is because they are mobile units that don't require permitting. That's not an economic problem, it's a regulatory problem, but it's a pretty easy one to fix in comparison to the national level nuclear regulatory problem in basically every developed country.
Just because you can't change the definitions doesn't mean society can't. As a company that wants some power you are right, natural gas is the cheapest.
Storage is more expensive than generation. Always.
We see some storage on the grid because storage is fast. Batteries can respond to load changes a lot faster than anything else. Demand goes up, the batteries are drawn down while cheaper generators are spun up. A few places use pumped hydro for the same purpose, but that's very situational.
I'm just smoking the math, man. LCOE for renewables plus necessary battery storage to level out those renewables is way cheaper than nuclear. If you don't believe me, go find some comparisons.
No it isn't. Storage capacity for energy is expensive, if you want to have a grid that is largely dependent on intermittent sources and still have a stable grid providing power at all times you need large amounts of storage as well as generating capacity.
For example if nuclear costs 1bn for a GW and solar+wind costs 0.6bn but you need to also install 0.5bn of storage to make the grid reliable to the safety margin you deem acceptable then it is no longer a cheaper system.
Amount of storage needed scales up rapidly as you get towards an grid with entirely intermittent generation.
You're not wrong, but you seem to be missing one significant detail: if we had invested in renewable energy resources like solar and wind to begin with, we wouldn't have needed (as much) assistance from nuclear, coal, oil, and gas.
I didn't miss that at all! I think we should definitely build more solar and wind.
I also think we should build more nuclear. I've seen estimations saying we could supply the current grid demands with renewables in about 10 years time if we start building now. Thing is, in ten years, power demand will have doubled. So we should build renewables and nuclear. Any other plan will end up using coal oil and gas.
I think you missed my point, which is that if we had invested early on (think 1970s) in wind and solar, by today they would be at a capacity such that we would need far less nuclear, coal, oil, and gas than we do currently.
>we have altered the biosphere even more by not engaging in nuclear activity
You imply that we could have made enough nuclear plants to replace coal, oil and gas and that would have prevented the effects of fossil fuel consumption.
That's not the case. It would have been entirely impossible to make enough plants to even replace coal and oil fast enough, and even if we did, electricity is only 25% of emissions.
The claim that lack of nuclear power is to blame for global warming doesn't hold up because even in a best case scenario, nuclear power can only replace a small part of the activities that cause global warming, and it takes way too long to even replace that.
The argument that we have a choice between nuclear power or global warming is therefore either misinformed or dishonest.
We're already dealing with global warming, and as of 2026 the fastest, cheapest and most effective way to replace fossil fuel is solar power and batteries, not nuclear power.
Batteries are so far mainly deployed in cars, where they replace millions of gallons of fossil fuels from being consumed every day, but they can also effectively be deployed in homes, communities and cities. It takes days to deploy, can be mass produced and distributed to any country in the world with no issue (even North Korea and Iran) and immediately reduces fossil consumption.
Newly deployed solar panels are adding several nuclear power plants worth of new power to the world every year, and they too start working the same day and can be deployed by almost anyone, everywhere.
If we want to stop altering the biosphere by burning fossil fuels, clearly we should hurry up with batteries and solar and not spend billions and decades on nuclear.
The problem is that stopping nuclear activity has ancillary effects -- like increased carbon emissions -- that are potentially much more harmful than the radiation. The results of technological decisions are never independent of one another.
In theory. But in fact, attempting to build nuclear power plants results in big increases in electric rates, and the supposed benefits of nuclear power end up being delayed by many years and in many cases decades.
The effect of trying and failing to build nuclear power plants on time and on budget uses up many billions in capital that could've been applied to reliable delivery of renewables.
Even the supposedly efficient French nuclear power program vastly underestimated decommissioning costs.
In other words project risk for nuclear is hideously expensive, even when you think you've dodged project risk problems, there's another whole very expensive project in decommissioning that has its own set of project risks.
I know a thing or two about project management and I can tell you that the modularity of modern reactor design failed to deliver on de-risking nuclear reactor construction projects. Building modules offsite seems like a good idea on the surface but the problem is that if they're delivered out of order or if they need rework you've made the on-site construction problem 3X harder and more expensive.
You might be thinking "But China!" China also over developed a number of ghost cities full of empty apartment towers so take their claims of an efficient nuclear power construction project with a grain of salt. Even in China, solar and wind projects come online faster, at a lower cost per kilowatt hour, and the projects are completed on time.
> the modularity of modern reactor design failed to deliver
So? Just because one particular approach failed doesn't mean it's impossible.
My father was a nuclear engineer so this is something I happen to know something about. I can tell you from speaking to my father back when he was working (from the 1970s to the 1990s), the nuclear industry was lousy with politics, and there were many, many innovative ideas (his own included) that never saw the light of day because the political pressure against doing anything new with nuclear power was insurmountable.
The anti-nuclear lobby in the U.S. successfully killed nuclear power by 1) stopping all research and development and then 2) saying, "See? We told you it couldn't be done." Well, yeah, but the reason it couldn't be done was you, you idiots. And now we have climate change to deal with as a result, so thanks for that.
It's that way because nuclear power plants are prestige projects. They are now so un competitive with the price of renewables that you can't blame over regulation. Without the politics no nuclear projects would get started because they're not investable.
It wasn't last week that renewables became vastly cheaper than nuclear. It's been this way for at least a couple of decades, and power customers in Georgia are taking it in the pants for having supported nuclear power. You can't blame climate change on a lack of nuclear power, and lead times are so long that nuclear stands no chance of making a dent in climate change.
Small modular reactors are also wishful thinking. We know what size reactor is the most economical and it isn't economical enough.
I absolutely can. If nuclear power had not been over-regulated for 50 years the technology might be much more advanced now than it is. We will never know. It's kind of like pointing to the failure of public transportation in the U.S. and saying that this was inevitable, without taking into consideration the fact that there was a well-developed system of local rail before a criminal conspiracy of car, oil, and rubber companies dismantled it, making the poor quality of public transit into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The reason we don't have good public transit in the U.S. is not because it can't work but because we chose to force it not to work so that car, oil, and tire companies could make more money. It's the same with nuclear energy.
That's a lot of would've could've should've, nevertheless we can test that idea that nuclear power would be more advanced: it wasn't over regulated in the Soviet Union, and that got us the RBMK 1000, a design with inherent flaws that make the remaining reactors in operation a high risk. Nuclear power isn't over regulated in China and their reactor designs are adapted from existing mainstream reactor designs.
Global CO2 emissions would be drastically lower if people hadn't opposed nuclear energy so irrationally. No other technology can produce 1.2GW of zero CO2 electricity anywhere you want.
But, I mostly just skimmed through the beginning of the article, so maybe it gets better, like maybe the author reveals an international cabal of influential anti-nuclear activists who are holding human progress back.