UK Green party drops longstanding opposition to nuclear power

Unless you accidentally left out "fossil", as in "burning fossil fuel", then we at least are unlikely to agree.

I certainly intend to continue to gather tree waste and burn it - and I cannot see a problem if forest weight is maintained through replenishment and replacement.

Under the current aircraft protection rules, the containment building has to survive impact of a fully loaded large civilian airplane moving at speed of sound.

For example testing of samples of containment building was done using acceleration of F-4 Phantom mounted on rocket sledge towards the wall. The wall survived the impact without problems.

Do you think the concrete to build an NPP doesn't require a crazy amount of fossil fuel? Do you think the storage will continue to be as expensive? Do you think the storage will continue to be as expensive by the time the NPP is actually completed?

I can have solar now, with batteries next year, and great batteries in 3 years. Or badass nuclear in 7 to 10 years with an average cost overrun of 102% (https://www.bu.edu/igs/2025/05/19/investment-risk-for-energy...), just in time for solar and batteries to be so good that nuclear will be irrelevant.

BTW, Ukraine is not a nuclear wasteland because Putin doesn't think it is worth making it a wasteland, because Russia actually attacked the Chernobyl sarcophagus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_...), thus showing everyone that Putin is not scared by the nuclear fallout taboo. That genie is out of the bottle now, the madmen have shown that they are not mad enough right now.

Your sensor reporting system will be forced to report whatever is needed - regardless of the reality of the situation - as soon as the right manager demands more uptime to an engineer, or otherwise they get fired because leadership demands more profit.

And what's nuts is they can walk away with those profits, buy another nuclear company, and repeat the same process until the same inevitable outcome happens.

We need reform. At a minimum we need make it impossible to have things like LLCs in charge of companies where failure result in huge negative externalities. The owners need to be at risk at going bankrupt. Without that risk, they'll just keep destroying everything so long as it makes an extra buck.

Literally the leftist dense cities have been the ones pushing back hardest against high rises, sustainable transportation alternatives, and in large part, electrification through overly restrictive environmental laws designed in the 70s.

That’s over now. Climate change is here, and you still can’t convert a house to a duplex in LA without jumping through a thousand hoops.

That I think it's an idiotic position is beside the point. Things and prosperity generally are not the problem, and can grow pretty much indefinitely for the foreseeable future if it's done in a reasonable and sustainable way.

Living without AC in a warm summer is one example. It feels like a first world inconvenience to the Green types, that we should all learn to accept. Good luck with democratically convincing everyone else - you'd need authoritarian for a true success in keeping everyone "living with less."

The chances of a Soviet leadership-induced meltdown like at a German nuclear reactor that is properly designed and maintained is laughable.

It is, however, extremely hard to film the slow killing of people by browncoal. It's easy to film a nuclear reactor incident.

A slightly racist belief in the Japanese as superior at following the rules meant a big shock when the Germans realised that even the Japanese could not be trusted with nuclear power.

They were deeply entwined, and still are. The AEC established in 1946 was responsible for both nuclear weaposn and peaceful nuclear technology.

There's been a bunch of civilian dual purpose reactors ran at hanford.

Yes. Much of the waste is from the weapons program. But saying that the site has nothing to do with civilian nuclear plants is just you making stuff up.

It is sad when the premier example touted is South Korea. The country where 68 people received prison sentences totaling 253 years and 9 months from the corruption scandal involving falsified safety certificates, fraudulent components and bribery.

China is also especially funny. Despite the nuke bros perfect environment of stable regulations, cheap workforce, state financing, authoritarian rule and so on nuclear remains insignificant. Sitting at 4% of the grid mix and shrinking. While renewables and storage are absolutely exploding in scale.

Thanks to the inherent safety of nuclear? Or that the wind was, by chance, blowing to the sea when the worst happened?

https://www.ianfairlie.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/fukush...

https://www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/wp-content/upload/2011/...

And who cares about the 150 000 displaced people and the still existing exclusion zone?

Oh, yeah, because the Fukushima nuclear accident is still ongoing. The plant is still too dangerous to access and dismantle. Cooling water is still pumped into the reactors to keep them from melting down. That water is still contaminated by a mixture of radioelements and being released to the ocean after partial treatment. And this will go on for several decades still.

We have no way to communicate the danger of the waste to people 55,000 years in the future

That greed, yours and mine, could create that dangerous pile of rubbish, that will be deadly to people who will never know of our existence

What astounding recklessness and hostility to the future

For current consumption

Unbelievable

You cannot predict t that any place on Earth will be stable, or stay local, over hundredsof millenia

Wishful thinking so you can make future generations pay for your consumption

Nuclear: hundreds

https://storelectric.com/dunkelflaute-energy-storage/

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/677bc80399c93...

The main difference in nuking a fission plant over any other area would be creating longer-term fallout.

If the attacker is at all rational, unlikely to be desired because it makes the area hard to inaccessible for troops on either side.

If the attacker is horrificaly irrational and just wants to cause pure, long term, irreparable harm, unfortunately salted nukes would be a feasible option, independent of having a fission plant anywhere near the drop zone...

Nuclear disarmament, international cooperation and reliable defence alliances can (hopefully) be used to protect against this, along with resilient fission designs within reason. Not having a fission plant by itself unfortunately and targically wouldn't prevent an utterly irrational attacker willing to cause as much long term damage as possible.

Very aware of that harsh fact, living in a country that has a section in our constitution making nuclear power illegal (yes, very stupid) and is not part of any defensive alliance (while expecting the countries around us to defend us anyways), if someone wanted to "salt the earth" around Salzburg, Vienna or Graz, they could do it, even if we have no plants.

Look over at France, frequently touted as a "successful" buildout. But reactors got more expensive the more they built, not cheaper, and they never met their initial goals for number of builds.

And look at the one place with modern-day "successful" builds: China. They like to tout the reactors as great successes, and they are on time and on budget, or at least as on budget as we can tell in an economic system like that. But they missed their 2020 and 2025 five year plan goals for deployment, and will miss their 2030 goal too. Meanwhile, they deploy 20x-30x as much wind and solar each year, each tech. That's after adjusting for capacity factor! So the best nuclear builders in the world are only building enough of it to be low single digits of their energy mix.

Nuclear was always oversold as a technology, always underdelivered, and has not seen a positive learning curve that a normal technology would. It was doomed from the start, IMHO.

And "quite expensive" vastly understates it - high temperature gas-cooled reactors are in theory more efficient in operation at the expense of increased construction cost. In reality, construction costs far, far outweigh the raw cost of fuel (reprocessing is a different matter!) so we landed ourselves with all the extra expense for very little benefit (probably actually a negative benefit since the much-vaunted ability to refuel whilst at full power turned out not to work in practice).

So they were late, hideously expensive, completely failed to be sold to other countries, and now have an availability factor no higher than that of offshore wind.

We knew that they would be unlikely to live up to their promise as early as 1964 and yet still went ahead despite several opportunities to change course. The nuclear industry never learns.

Unlike fossil fuel power plants, NPPs don't depend on a steady supply of a high volume of costly consumables just to keep running. Reactor fuel loads last months to years, naturally buffering any price shocks or supply chain issues. And you can maintain an "energy security" stockpile of nuclear fuel that would add you even more years of runaway.

To have your nuclear power disrupted, you have to face an adversary that's both capable and willing to hit targets on your soil, and on top of that, is willing to target NPP infrastructure specifically.

A random rogue state lobbing mid-range drones over a strait wouldn't cut it. Neither would a war halfway around the world.

Definitely risks in the supply chain there, but probably less than Russia?

E.g the ex chancellor is now paid handsomely https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/world/europe/schroder-ger...

I believe more recently there was an expose about some other politicians at that time having links to Russia, although don’t have them to hand right now.

The cost of Nuclear has raised in the same way every other civil industrial project has risen.

A pipeline in Canada was supposed to be $8B it cost $30, subways and tunnels go 3-5x over budget because the actors can extract that wealth.

Think of the builders like Nvidia - they are not incented to build something for 'cost plus' - they want to make sure they suck all of the surpluses out they can. Why build for $10B when you can build for $35B?

Contractors are incented to price all the way to the point where it's 'not viable'.

Thats why with oligarchic vendors, you will never, ever have cheap energy. Never. Because the supply chain will take all the surplus. That's why we have competition. Groceries are not like that.

Insurance - this is a debilitating issues stopping nuclear because there's no way to know what the outcome would be. We don't know how the courts would rule on damages if there was a problem.

This is something that has to be socialized, at least on some level.

Farmers and property owners have to 'live with' the fact there are 300f monstrous windmills obstructing their view for the public good. It's minor but very real. In a more extreme case, we have to contend with the fact there are certain cases in which people may have to 'vacate their properties' in some cases. How do we compensate? It's hard to say, but that has to be worked out and made clear otherwise nothing will get built.

Regulations around storage are another problem - governments have not pushed hard enough for material solutions, kicking the can down the road because just leaving the problem sit in pools beside reactors was 'good enough'. Were we to have invested this for decades we would be much further along.

US, Canada and France etc. have pretty good records, though the US situation is too 'open' it could be tightened, and there's no reason we couldn't have already 35%-50% base nuclear energy all over North America.

Ontario does is quite well.

This should have happened decades ago.

Renewables are a long way off from covering the base load.

They are only now crossing the threshold into 'key supply factors'.

There are literally 0 confirmed deaths to due exposure at Fukishima. Zero.

Literally installing solar panels is more dangerous. Most of the are will be recoverable in a few decades.

The wars in Russia, Iran and frankly the entire Iraqi conflicts, and Yemen as well - are all 'Oil Wars'. Without high Oil prices and global dependency - none of that would exist.

If we had followed through with buidling out nuclear from the 1980s - and did it safely, we might have 1 more Fukishima, and also learned from it (there are htings about Fukishima that should have never happened) - and most of the West would have 50-65% base load from Nuclear.

We may very well have had all electric cars 20 years sooner and Oil would be used for jet fuel and a few other things. Maybe not even that, as we can synthesize fuel with electricity already.

Or.... the full-system economics of renewables may not actually be as good as advocates claim.

And do you actually believe they are comparable?

German nuclear plants were producing for less than 2 cents/ kWh. Firm, day + night, summer + winter, profitable.

Intermittent renewables cost multiples of that and require massive subsidies on top and are allowed to place the burden of their intermittency on the firm producers on top of that.

As Joe Kaeser (Chairman, Siemens Energy) observed "There isn't a single nuclear power plant in this world that makes economic sense.“

Or as Steven P. Nesbit (former Chair of the ANS) said <<The “Nuclear Renaissance” foundered when advanced light water reactors turned out to be much more expensive than their marketing claimed, while alternatives—primarily natural gas—plummeted in price. We tend to point to impediments to nuclear technology, such as overly restrictive licensing requirements and adverse public opinion, but these matter only to the extent of their impact on the bottom line. Again, it comes down to the money.>>

We’re already in a situation where we have more power than we need during certain hours of the day in some states/countries, and that’s not even counting the massive, accelerating buildout that will happen between now and the years before new nuclear is built… even it was started today.

And that you can’t scale nuclear to provide all the power as the peaks are only needed rarely.

Which means that when other sources are cheaper (renewables), those must be banned to ensure nuclear gets paid more?

Nuclear fans across the internet seems to have adopted this talking point recently and none of them have noticed it doesn't make any sense.

What are you even claiming here?

The veracity of the claim that Zionism is racist is independent of any implication you’ve arbitrarily attached to it. I both believe that Zionism is fundamentally racist - like many of the other ethno-nationalist 19th century movements - and that Israel has a right to exist. There’s no reason that both can’t be true.

You argument fails at the first sentence. The list of deep collaboration between Israel and the UK is too long for this post, and I won't list them, as you know it but are not arguing in good faith.

>The entire concept is tinged with antisemitism

But we can't say Zionism is tinged with racism? A blindingly obvious double standards.

The Zionists parties of Israel want to do ethnic cleansing in the Palestinians territories, and will purge the Arab Israeli the second they grow too big. Is there a gentle Zionism somewhere, that only wants Jews to emigrate to Israel to live their faith without all the war crimes? Maybe, but it is as relevant as the religious anti-Zionism that objects to it on religious grounds. Which is too say: not at all relevant.