I think it’s more of a “power any way we can get it” sort of strategy.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/27/ai-gives-coal-plant...

Coal would harm the nature for months until the bubble bursts, nuclear waste will last forever. And hopefully the old nuclear plants won’t fail uncontrolledly.

Radiation from coal goes into the air and tailings, which aren’t well controlled, and stays dangerous for centuries.

Radiation from nuclear waste is constrained to steel casks in cooling ponds, and the waste can be reprocessed for use in breeder reactors instead of letting it sit.

The costs of protecting nuclear waste for 100.000 years from terrorists and during wars will be impossible. It's a super easy target. Just attack the power plants and nuclear waste facilities of the opponent and you have won the war.

Well we've had them since the 1950s, where are all these terrorist attacks? The only nuclear disasters have been accidental, and those were made worse by early reactor designs that didn't account for safety to the degree necessary.

The Twin Towers were attacked almost 30 years after.

The mercury and other pollution dusted by coal doesn’t degrade. It has the same two solutions as nuclear waste: ignore or concentrate.

if you operate a coal plant for 3 years until the bubble bursts, you will emit 3 years of toxins and carbon dioxide. If you operate a nuclear plant for just one minute, your highly radioactive waste will be a burden for thousands of generations.

Nuclear waste is not a burden. It's very manageable. The problem would be in any uncontained accident. The probability of that is low but not zero, especially in old reactor designs such as the ones they are talking about reactivating.

Compare in tons please, not in minutes.

Coal has heavy metals and traces of radioactive materials in it. Multiply to the thousands tons and maybe they are more harmful than nuclear.

The old nuclear plants should definitely be inspected and safety issues should be remediated.

I have found this page on nuclear waste to be informative https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-is-nuclear...

Some points: - The generation of electricity from a typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear power station, which would supply the needs of more than a million people, produces only three cubic metres of vitrified high-level waste per year, if the used fuel is recycled. In comparison, a 1,000-megawatt coal-fired power station produces approximately 300,000 tonnes of ash and more than 6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, every year.

Important condition being "if the used fuel is recycled".

To quote from the article on recycling:

"Although some countries, most notably the USA, treat used nuclear fuel as waste, most of the material in used fuel can be recycled. Approximately 97% – the vast majority (~94%) being uranium – of it could be used as fuel in certain types of reactor. Recycling has, to date, mostly been focused on the extraction of plutonium and uranium, as these elements can be reused in conventional reactors. This separated plutonium and uranium can subsequently be mixed with fresh uranium and made into new fuel rods.

Countries such as France, Japan, Germany, Belgium and Russia have all used plutonium recycling to generate electricity, whilst also reducing the radiological footprint of their waste. Some of the by-products (approximately 4%), mainly the fission products, will still require disposal in a repository and are immobilized by mixing them with glass, through a process called vitrification."

There are various informative videos on Youtube that cover vitrification, where the remaining waste is melted with glass-forming materials at a high temperature, and the resulting matter can be safely stored in steel vats. In comparison to carbon from coal, the volume is miniscule.

Old nuclear plants are huge targets for sabotage by foreign spies and terrorists. If they can make one blow up, it will decide every conflict in their favour. It's like having a huge bomb in your garden on display for everyone to target.

Tell that to the people in North Carolina whose neighborhoods were built on coal ash dumps. A little undocumented whooopsie from the power company and all the sudden your kids all have eye cancer.

AI is a bubble and in a few months, expensive nuclear energy will either be not needed anymore or replaced by cheaper solar and wind energy. The plant was decommissioned years ago because it was just not running profitable. And it will never be except within a bubble phase, like AI is currently in. Nuclear energy is the most stupid energy to ramp up during high demand phases.

> nuclear waste will last forever

Nuclear 'waste' is just waiting to become new nuclear 'fuel' in a fast neutron or 'breeder' reactor. Treated this way the volume of nuclear waste can be reduced by 90% while the remaining highly radioactive waste only needs to be stored for some hundreds of years instead of thousands due to its much shorter half life. It also extends the viability of nuclear fission (as opposed to fusion) by a factor of 10 by producing new fissionable material.

Recycled plutonium has negative value. It costs more to fabricate fuel elements out of it than it saves in uranium mining and enrichment costs. There is no great financial windfall waiting here.

There is, however, a marked reduction in the amount of nuclear waste in need of storage as well as a marked increase in the amount of available fissionable material. Given that one of the arguments against nuclear fission is the amount of waste which needs to be stored for a very long period this in itself is worth the effort of reprocessing spent fuel pellets. Do this at a large enough scale and the price of reprocessing will come down as well. As long as nuclear fusion is still 10 to 30 years away nuclear fission is one of the few reliable day-and-night hell-or-high-water power sources which doesn't (or, let's rephrase it, shouldn't) scare those who believe in the CO₂ scare nor does it (or, also rephrased, should it) rely on resources from politically volatile regions.

Waste handling is also a bad argument for reprocessing. It turns out it's cheaper to just procrastinate. If you want to reprocess to reduce waste, you spend less money (incorporating the time value of money) if you wait 10 years. And then you spend less if you wait another 10 years. And so on, indefinitely.

You keep on returning to the argument that it costs less to do X instead of Y while I point out that one of the arguments against nuclear power has been the problems with nuclear 'waste' as well as the fact that reprocessing this 'waste' increases the amount of fissionable 'fuel' by a large factor. It may cost less money to ignore the 'waste' problem but doing so only adds fuel to the fire stoked by those who want to stop nuclear power no matter what. If access to enough fissionable material is guaranteed - in other words if that material is found within national borders and can be mined without hindrance by 'green' activists (which is not the case in e.g. Sweden where Uranium is available but not mined) and there is a stable storage facility for the resulting nuclear 'waste' and the same 'green' activists are kept at bay it may a good solution to 'procrastinate'. You'll notice there's a lot of 'ifs' in that sentence.

s long as nuclear fusion is not available it makes sense to further develop nuclear fission, including the 'waste' problem.

I keep returning to cost because it's the only issue that matters.

Nuclear power is in trouble because it costs too much. The other issues -- safety, waste, proliferation -- they don't make any difference. Make nuclear much cheaper and we'd build much more of it. Improve any of those other metrics without making it cheaper and it will go nowhere.

Cost also matters because in any situation where choices have to be made between alternatives, you need a way to evaluate the tradeoffs. This can only be done by reducing the alternatives to a metric that can be compared, and that metric is in units of some currency. Even human life is reduced to a dollar value when evaluating choices, the so-called "statistical value of a human life".

Nuclear power is expensive partly because it is bound and tied in endless bundles of regulation and legislation even though going by the statistics it is one of the most safe power sources available. Take away the regulatory burden - which does not mean 'let them do whatever they want', it means 'make sure it is safe and no more than that' - and it will get less expensive rather quickly. Stop treating every single nuclear power plant as a on-off project which needs its own decade-long regulatory approval, replace it with type approved reactor systems and most of those issues disappear.

Nuclear power is expensive because it is supposed to so expensive not to be viable, not because of inherent problems with nuclear power. If the same regulatory burden had been placed on e.g. wind and solar - treat every turbine as a one-off project in need of approval, use land use approval procedures to stall construction, put a turbine blade recycle burden on the turbine owner, etc - those power sources would be just as expensive and unviable. The same goes for coal, oil and gas plants, hydropower installations - which are starting to be treated similarly where I live (Sweden) since the 'green' politicos decided they don't like small-scale power hydro plants - and any other power source. Regulations can make or break a power source, in case of nuclear it seems to be hell-bent on breaking it.

Ok, now you're repeating the usual nuclear bro bullshit.

Nuclear isn't competitive anywhere. Even in China, vastly more renewables are being installed (even taking into account capacity factors.) If the putative excuse you are desperately depending on there is so powerful it applies universally, even in non-democracies, what chance is there it could be overcome?

The same regulatory burden isn't placed on wind/solar because there's no need for it there. Wind and solar are not subject to low probability, very high cost accident scenarios that are the driver for nuclear regulation. And, wind/solar have the advantage of being highly redundant, not being grouped into monolithic units with higher internal interdependency. This makes the renewables far less dependent on extreme reliability of components and their connections, and far less dependent on the skill and consistency of labor and those overseeing construction.

The fact that you're starting to use expletives ('nuclear bro bullshit', 'putative excuse you are desperately...') tells me you're clutching at straws.

Wind and solar are fine until they are not and then what? Gas-fired plants are denounced because they emit scary CO₂, not to mention coal and oil. What are you going to use when the sun is absent and the wind is down? If geography allows for it hydropower is a good option, it also adds the potential for energy storage (pumped hydro) when the sun and wind are cooperating. Many countries lack such geography and in countries where it is available 'green' politicos sometimes make it hard to use this option - this is true for Sweden where the 'environmental party' (miljöpartiet) has been pushing for the removal of small-scale water turbines. What is left to provide the base load when renewable sources are not available? Nuclear is one of these options with the caveat that the high expense of building nuclear generators in combination with the relatively low cost of actually running these installations means that nuclear power stations are only viable if and when they can be run at full capacity 24/7. Given that the backup base load capacity has to be large enough to actually provide the base load and that a nuclear 'backup' option only is viable if it can run at full capacity this means that additional power sources like wind and solar will take up the role of providing extra capacity instead of base load capacity. If and when long-term - think 'months' instead of 'hours' - energy storage from renewable sources (other than hydro which already has this capacity) becomes available this situation will change but until such a time there is a need for a reliable 24/7 base load generation capacity. Given that fossil sources - gas, coal and oil - have been declared to be existential threats to 'the planet' what is left is hydro and nuclear. Hydro is great when it can be used but it is not an option in the flatlands. Nuclear, then, is the remaining option.

Notice I did not use any expletives? Try to do the same and you have a better chance of convincing me I'm wrong and you're right. You may be interested to know I built my own solar infrastructure here on our farm, 15 kW capacity, prepared for high-voltage storage. Since I built it we have only seen negative electricity bills, i.e. we sell more than we buy. I'm not what you'd call a 'nuclear bro', whatever that may be but I do appreciate the fact that there's power to be had from the grid when the sun is gone (which it is for about 20 hours per day) and the wind is down (similar in winter).