Even France, that is heavily pro-nuclear, can't find the economics to build new nuclear energy at decent pace.
Also, nuclear was not replaced by more carbon, except again a for a couple of years in a small country (by global standards) called Germany. Everyone else is planting more clean energy.
What we did: growing China and all Asia at high rates based on coal, for decades. Offsetting by a lot internal combustion engine efficiency by buying bigger and more cars. Buying stupid and useless stuff on the other side of the planet. Everyone first hobby today is "travelling the world", preferably by plane. Being 10 billion people, and richer (more capita and more consumption per capita). None of those thing would be solvable with more nuclear plants.
They are the biggest economic force bar none (at least for now, lets see in few years when their car industry will be mostly a thing of the past). They steer 500+ million continent like a fiddle.
I have to crap on Merkel here yet again - she was horrible, utterly despicable leader. Much of the backlash in popularity of extreme right across Europe is her doing. She killed nuclear which wasn't in greatest shape, but it was well before we had actual replacements. She studied as nuclear physicist. Europe as a continent would be in much better shape politically, economically, militarily and socially if she didn't get so much power for so long. German ADF is completely her doing.
Of course when she met real power dealers like putin she caved immediately so he played her like those proverbial fiddles.
I'd take it.
https://atomicinsights.com/smoking-gun-robert-anderson/
https://truthout.org/articles/top-oil-and-gas-lobby-spent-mo...
http://climatecoalition.org/how-american-petroleum-institute... (sorry, no https)
Russia has huge influence in German politics. I believe there is connection there as well, but I cannot find any public information to cite regarding funding of anti-nuclear power movements.
I am not sure what else you want. Quotes from each one, inline?
If you don't have the time to read what I posted, and understand how it applies to this thread, then please copy and paste this thread into an LLM chat bot, and ask for clarity. I just tried that, and even an LLM understood my response.
"Environmentalist groups were in some cases entirely formed by fossil fuel interests."
It's clear from context that you're talking about genuine organizations and not astroturfing. So far you've not named a single one that was "entirely formed by fossil fuel interests."
Hence, pure fiction.
> In 1969, Robert O. Anderson, an oil man whose long career included a stint as the Chief Executive Officer of Atlantic Richfield (ARCO) (now part of BP, the company formerly known as British Petroleum), gave David Brower $200,000 to start Friends of the Earth (FOE).
FotE was founded by David Brower, Donald Aitken, and Gary Soucie as its Wikipedia page and multiple other sources corroborate. Emphatically, it was not "entirely formed by fossil fuel interests". Hence, your claim is a lie.
Moreover, Robert O. Anderson donated a large portion of his fortune to philanthropic causes. Among them, an art museum and a literary magazine. $200k was chump change to him. Anderson's philanthropy was his own personal interest and had nothing to do with the "fossil fuel" industry.
So unless you want to make the rather dubious claim that Harper's Magazine was bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry, you have nothing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_the_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Orville_Anderson
1. The fact that nuclear power has been quite safe so far does not mean that it would have been just as safe if its deployment would have rapidly spread.
2. Nuclear energy is unfortunately tightly coupled with nuclear weapons, as well as the treaties and geopolitics that were designed to keep them only in the hands of the few. Quite many late 1900s crises in Europe could have looked different if nuclear material was even more widespread than it was. I don't even wanna think about nations outside Europe that have been extremely unstable in the past and in recent history.
3. Seeing how intensely fossil fuel companies spread misinformation and disinformation about green technology and climate science, it's hardly a far-fetched idea that that same industry had a hand in helping policymakers steer away from an energy source that would unseat it from the throne.
* Building nuclear plants is a 5-10 year plan. More if you haven't built them in a while.
* The first economy in the world has quite literally started wars over oil because it wants to keep using it.
* The countries that would be the biggest emitters right now are also the ones doing the most in electrification.
Building more nuclear wouldn't have changed shit: there is an ongoing work to maintain the world dependent on fossil fuels. We can't even get electric cars to properly pick up.
With that further changes can be very quick as forcing EV no longer requires reallocating money from other things.
You might also see battery prices push the price of new cars well below that of second hand ICE vehicles.
Even if the replacement window for existing vehicles doesn’t change, the environmental impact would run ahead of the adoption curve. High volume use cases like delivery and Ubers would be the first to switch to EVs.
Climate change is related to our consumptions, period, focusing only on energy or transport doesn't tackle the whole problem: we consume too much, eat too much (cattle and fish in particular) and destroy too much in our quest for more and more.
Inefficient transport or energy is just one aspect of the whole problem.
But I'm tired of hearing how it is just a matter of energy or transport, it's literally missing the forest for a tree, even if it might be a particularly big one.
But it's our consumption and expectations that feed into it.
And now, not even the French are pursuing them, sending the strong signal that nuclear is off the table as anything but a minor contributor to stopping CO2 build up.
And then you are also going to trust the same people when they are saying the waste issue is solved.
If your arguments are luddites and fearmongering you have not improved trust in any way.
No nuclear accident has involved a reactor built after the 1960s. Yet we regulate as if a dozen more Chernobyls have happened