> This is my biggest concern as well. However it needs to be balanced against the alternative, which is trusting governments and corporations to deal with climate change in other ways.
Isn't the alternative actually looking into renewable energy sources?
Portraying things as either Nuclear or nothing is a false dillema, specially as we're seeing highly developed and industrialized countries such as Germany where renewables already cover close to half it's energy demands.
France, Sweden, Switzerland and parts of Canada had essentially green electricity for decades. Nuclear did that for the most part.
Germany has spent a long time, a huge amount of money and political will driving into renewables and they are not even close to done.
France in comparison was far, far faster in transition to nuclear any they did it in the 70/80s with basically 60s technology.
Had Germany started building as many nuclear reactors as they can as fast as they can and build them next to coal plants, they would be as Green as France in the next couple years easy.
However they decided to go to renewables and they are literally decades away from being able to run the country 100% on renewables reliability.
Any country that has actually decided to seriously and heavily transition to nuclear was able to do it very quickly.
> That is trusting governments and corporations to deal with climate change in other ways.
Again, that's a false dillema.
At best, Nuclear is being pushed as one of many possible alternative to fossil fuels, and one which has been discarded entailing both high costs (direct and externalities) and high risk.
> You can keep saying it’s a false dilemma, but that doesn’t make it so.
How exactly is the attempt to frame the problem as either adopting Nuclear or else climate change happens not a false dilemma? Are there no other energy sources? Should we intentionally turn a blind eye to real-world example of countries which are both phasing out Nuclear and lowering emissions towards zero?
> If you are satisfied with the alternatives and think they are on track without nuclear, that is a happy belief to hold.
Again with the false dilemma angle? You might have strong opinions regarding how fast the current phase-out is going, but you can't ignore the fact that some nations, like Germany, are managing to meet their targets while phasing out Nuclear. Even so, Nuclear is obviously not the only option to ramp up energy production to phase out fossil fuels.
Isn't the alternative actually looking into renewable energy sources?
Portraying things as either Nuclear or nothing is a false dillema, specially as we're seeing highly developed and industrialized countries such as Germany where renewables already cover close to half it's energy demands.