I was curious and did the reading. The technology still doesn't exist as far as I can tell. Even according to the Commonwealth Fusion Systems who says they will build in Virginia.

The International Atomic Energy Association says:

> there are still some technological issues to address before a commercial power plant can operate. A prototype of a fusion reactor (DEMO) is expected to be built by 2040. [1]

[1]: https://www.iaea.org/topics/energy/fusion/faqs

Please note the date. This is the reactor being built. CFS has come a long way since inception. DEMO is a joke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4

But fusion power plants needs to breed and separare tritium, prevent excessive tritium losses in the first wall. The plasma-facing materials in tokamak are subject to very harsh conditions, mutch harder conditions then reactor walls in a fission power plant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma-facing_material

This part is quite well known and follows the design of classic thermal power plants.

Radiation heat from the fusion heats-up the inner wall of the vacuum vessel. This heats up working fluid flowing behind the inner wall (in case of CFS then plain is to use a molten salt: FLiBe). Also there a second, more important effect: deuterium-tritium fueled tokamaks release 80% of produced energy in the form of high energy neutrons. Large part of energy of neutrons has to be captured by the working fluid for the power plant to be economically viable.

Heat from the working fluid is transferred using a heat-exchanger to heat water and produced steam, which drives a steam turbine and an electric generator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLiBe

FLiBe as a working fluid is not a new concept and has been already demonstrated in molten salt fission reactors.

Nuclear power plants will be run by private companies that will weasel out on maintenance to save a penny. Yes, they will weasel out, this time will not be different to other industries.

Nuclear power plant cost overruns by more than 3x.

Nuclear energy being already more expensive than solar.

No private insurer wants to insure a nuclear power plant because the potential payout is gargantuan. So it is the country the one that has to insure it.

Nuclear waste maybe will get reprocessed one of these decades if we really get very lucky, but it is expensive and gets in the way of the profits. So we create a shell company to deal with it, and if it happens something, we bankrupt the shell company and the country has to pay it, again. We get to keep the profits, of course.

What if an accident happens? Well, the country is insuring it, so they have to pay for it. We don't have to be that careful anymore, we don't have to pay for it!

But there are 32 layers of protection, nothing bad will ever happen! We are going to a world with more active wars. Your 32 layers of protection will be blown apart by a well placed hypersonic missile. I hope this never ever happens, but my gut feeling tells me otherwise.

Nuclear would be great if it, and the world, would be run by responsible adults, not by profit-maximizing locusts and warmongering oligarchs.

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.

If you want to try live without technology, try living in Somalia for few months. Average Somalian would change for you at any moment.

The Middle ages had effectively more technology than the Romans (all the stuff that was invented til the Romans, plus the stuff that was invented later), yet they fared worse, mostly because of religion and feudal lords sabotaging what the Romans managed to achieve.

" There is little record of other sanitation systems (apart from sanitation in ancient Rome) in most of Europe until the High Middle Ages. Unsanitary conditions and overcrowding were widespread throughout Europe and Asia during the Middle Ages. This resulted in pandemics such as the Plague of Justinian (541–542) and the Black Death (1347–1351), which killed tens of millions of people. Very high infant and child mortality prevailed in Europe throughout medieval times, due partly to deficiencies in sanitation. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_water_supply_and_sa...

Even today countries without technology for clean and safe drinking water and sanitation have big problems.

" Without better infrastructure and management, millions of people will continue to die each year from preventable, water-related diseases like malaria and diarrhea. "

https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/water-and-sanitati...

I am as pro nuclear (actually pro anything not fossil fuel), but this was actually the best counter argument I came across:

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.

If a mining company extract lead and silver from the ground, we kind of know that they won't be around to safeguard waste for all eternity, nor will they be able to restore the environment when the company eventually goes bankrupt. If society want to allow such commercial operations then it need to also strike a balance so that society don't have to bear too much of the negative externalities.

In Sweden, the goverment here owns the energy company that operate the nuclear power plants and the mining company.

That is not correct. Vattenfall has nothing to do with Oskarshamn, and had nothing to do with Barsebäck.

Forsmark

- Vattenfall: 66.0 %

- Mellansvensk Kraftgrupp (essentially Fortum): 25.5 %

- Sydkraft Nuclear Power (Uniper): 8.5 %

Ringhals

- Vattenfall: 70.44 %

- Sydkraft Nuclear Power (Uniper): 29.56 %

Oskarshamn

- Uniper (through Sydkraft): 54.5 %

- Fortum: 45.5 %

Barsebäck

- Sydkraft Nuclear Power (Uniper): 100 %

I am in the same boat. Companies will optimize for profit and rent-seeking, all else be damned. A nuclear meltdown would be a negative externality, if line goes up it would have been worth.

> We need reform

Any reform needs to account for corporations being machines optimized to generate profit. Regulations should ensure "negative externality" is not really externalized.

Corporations only understand profits, and investors should be understood as entities willing to leech from society. The only way to heandle corporations is by having failures threatening the money that investors can leech through this pipeline.

Of course like in the well known capitalist regime of the USSR that precipitated the big nuclear problem. If only we had the government instead of the evil capitalists to run things then we could be safe from those profit maximizing parasites.

Chernobyl happened because the son of a central committee member needed data from a dangerous experiment that was conducted at the powerplant. They literally disabled safety systems with wrenches. Both the design itself would have never allowed in the west nor would the experiment that caused the accident. Also, the HBO movie was very inaccurate so please don't bring up something you saw there, many of the things in the movie aren't even scientifically possible.

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.

Which already exists. For example, India (so that you cannot say "this is something only available to USA) has the Agni-V (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agni-V) that supports a 7.5 ton bunker buster with Mach 24 terminal velocity. It costs $5 million each (like a battle tank).

Your squishy 747 moving at Mach 1 is nothing in comparison.

What other countries do already have something similar, or will have something similar, let's say, in the next 5 years?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnieper_Hydroelectric_Station#...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Derna_dam_collapse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

The biggest reason the world is seeing more active was is that we are dependent on a few unstable countries for our energy needs. Solar and wind power can produce very cheap energy when the weather is optimal, but suboptimal weather can equally produce extremely expensive prices to the point where social and economical stability start to break down. We are giving money to warmongering oligarchs because of the fear of what happens if prices goes up to high, which would not happen if energy and heating infrastructure was secure and geopolitical independent.

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.

For example Denmark is importing lot of wood from Baltics, UK lot of wood from Canada.

https://www.eubioenergy.com/2025/03/13/no-smoke-without-fire...

I certainly didn't claim that there was, but thank you for rebutting a point not made.

Burning wood has at best similar environmental impact as beef. In theory it can be produced using just "waste", but we have to extend the word "waste" beyond recognition when production is scaled up and the profit-maximizing locusts become part of the picture. The world is suffering from deforestation.

We are not talking about using garden waste to burn a log in a open fire place, but rather grid sized power plants and central heating plants. I should however mention that there are air quality reports that points to issues with individual homes burning wood inside cities. Open air fireplaces do not scale well with dense population areas.

Err, lets perhaps stick with

* Cutting down massive amount of old growth forest is harmful to the environment ( whether it's for burning or bauxite )

and

* Cutting down forest faster than regrowth rate is harmful to the environment (as that's net loss wrt surface sequestration)

and perhaps examine "harmful to bio diversity" (is it? checker-boarded plantation forest has about the same biodiversity as it ever has - it's not old-growth but it's not devoid of life or diversity), "dangerous to humans" (really? with modern logging machines on plantation forest? - the deaths in logging largely come from non plantation clearing on steep slopes and happen to humans aware of the risks)

> True tree waste is very minimal today

Is it? Many people hereabout heat their homes from limb lopping, dead fall, and tree deaths.

> not enough to power a nation for any duration

I don't recall suggesting powering a nation - just pointing out that there's an acceptable attrition rate for forests.

Modern plantation forest involve draining of water, and that causes green house gases to be released. After logging, the area also release more green house gases during the first 20 years then they pick up. Logging also changes the level of ground water, and how much of the ground water get filtered, which in turn reduces quality of the water downstream. Logging also increase erosion, which has it own set of risk to humans.

> I don't recall suggesting powering a nation - just pointing out that there's an acceptable attrition rate for forests.

The article is about nuclear power plants, in the context of the UK green party. In order for wood to be an alternative it would need to be able to provide energy in a green, sustainable, and national independent way. Power plants that burn wood pellets do exist, but how green and how sustainable they are is debatable. It also questionable if they will just use wood, or if they mix it in with other even less green and less sustainable fuels, but sells the energy as green energy produced on waste products.

It does not scale. That’s how they are cutting down ancient pristine forest in Central Europe. It’s useful as a supplement to use wood waste; it cannot be a major source of energy.

My point is that AGW is sensitive to the source of burnt fuel and not to the act of burning fuel alone (although it is a balancing act between carbon released and carbon captured - thrown out of balance during the anthropocene by the act of dragging up "old" carbon from the depths).

Just like commercial aviation companies then, right?

> Nuclear power plant cost overruns by more than 3x.

On average or what?

> Nuclear energy being already more expensive than solar.

What's "solar"? A solar panel? Sure. Solar+8h worth of batteries? Maybe. Solar+enough batteries to guarantee a stable grid? Hmm. Solar+batteries+the externalities of burning fossil fuels to compensate?

> Nuclear waste ...

Let me stop you right there. Head on over to https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/fifteen_minutes and look at how much coal&gas waste (no, not just CO2) we are dumping into the atmosphere at this very moment.

Now go ahead and tell me again that we need to badly find a solution to the huge problem of inert, solid, compact nuclear waste that's just sitting there.

> What if an accident happens?

Idk, what if an accident happens with anything else that's already 99.999% safe, like aviation? Odd question to ask about the objectively safest power source we have.

> Your 32 layers of protection will be blown apart by a well placed hypersonic missile. I hope this never ever happens, but my gut feeling tells me otherwise.

Right. You're getting attacked by hypersonic missiles and your priority is your nuclear power plant safety.

Empirically, somehow Ukraine is not a nuclear wasteland despite their nuclear power plants being very much under threat of attack by not so sane people.

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.

My sources say: nuclear power 20-33 months, coal power 33 months, peat power 26-27 months, gas power 21-27 months, wind power 7 months and photovoltaic power 60-95 months.

https://inis.iaea.org/records/kgzhn-ark54

Which means, among other things, that solar is already net negative before nuclear is built and starts to produce.

And also, solar panels are rated to 25 years 80%, which means they retain 80% of initial production after 25 years, not "explode after 20 years and you have to replace them".

But even better: let's go wind and beat nuclear and solar by a crazy margin.

During the last decade Europe went for wind and solar, but wind is quite expensive to build. Solar was expensive but is now a lot cheaper, mostly because it's mass produced in China using cheap, still quite coal heavy, electricity.

Still solar and wind are weather dependent and need to by supplemented by fossil electricity production in Europe in the winter months, which is why we see these days market electricity prices around 300 Euro/MWh in Europe. (The plan, decade ago, was to use cheap Russian gas to supplemented solar and wind. Things didn't go according to the plan).

It's hard to convince people to change a stance they made a part of their political and personal identity.

"Science progresses one funeral at a time".

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

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

The large portion of the environmentalist left are degrowthers who literally want people to just live with less, which means "less energy" is actually good. It will never be a politically viable position, but again, we're talking about a party that until recently has never come close to wielding power.

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.

There are a lot of things that would work fine if done in a reasonable and safe way but we have plenty of examples of people making unreasonable and unsafe decisions.

And most of these things have impact much bigger than just the climate. They pollute in a lot more ways than that. Resource extraction, manufacturing pollution, transport, waste disposal.

It's stuff like forcing repairability that allows us to do with much less impact on the environment.

In a perfect world, perhaps. In the real world, it very often does.

It really does. You can live without clothes, that's less. You can live on 1500 kcals a day. You would be at the brink of starving all the time but you would be alive. I could lock you in a cage and just give you the bear minimum of bread and water. Just enough heat so you don't freeze and never let you out. That's certainly less. Just how much less do you want?

PS Young people almost always use more resources than the old. When my kid isn't here, our trash and recycling containers are pretty empty. When he is here, they overflow. And he is only a 50% increase in the house's population.

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."

If you accept both of these then like Vaclav Smil, you'll conclude that you need to use less fossil fuels and nothing else will replace them. And if you care about fairness globally then 1st world nations need to really use less.

It all makes perfect sense if you believe all the lies told about renewables.

Most of the people mocking it helped spread those lies, which makes attacking the people who believe them a bit rude.

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.

Basically, converting from one form of energy to another usually can be done at 50%. The lone exception is voltage potential (electricity) where we can get 90% for motion but 10% for anything else. And when you use motion for transport you have all the problems of a heavy battery reducing efficiency. This is why we can make an EV but not an electric plane. Then there are the problems to do with storage (remember 2 conversions so 25% efficiency there unless you use a battery). Finally, remember that capitalism is really good at efficiency. When people started trying to find energy uses to cut, this was easy in less developed places but in the US it was nearly impossible. Every cut caused problems elsewhere (even for something as minor as an HVAC fan). Ironically we learned this during COVID when the older "inefficient" buildings were healthier than the newer ones because they moved less air.

I was talking more about general decarbonization.

This is wrong for two reasons.

One: you can make heat with electricity from renewables sources, if that were necessary.

Two: you don't need heat because you can make ammonia with green hydrogen from electrolysis then follow the standard Haber-Bosch process. The normal fossil route does this too but gets the hydrogen by splitting fossil gas and vents the waste CO2.

* (2022) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-022-01043-9

* (2026) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036031992...

soon to be piloted .. with results expected to take a while.

Part of it was a Soviet psyop to get Western citizens to oppose West's nuclear weapons. Encourage people to oppose nuclear in general, both nuclear power and nuclear weapons.

Sure, you and I can talk about newer plant designs that fail safely, or about how coal plants emit more radiation by far. But if we had the ability to rapidly convince large swathes of the populace of provable scientific facts, then clean power is only one of the many many problems we would be able to solve.

The leader of Germany that phased out nuclear and made Germany fully reliant on Russia then took a job... at Gazprom. The VP from the Greens responsible took a very high paying job lobbying for foreign Gas firms, too.

It has to be one of the most successful foreign influencing campaigns in history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schr%C3%B6der#Business... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joschka_Fischer#Business_activ...

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.

The waste will burden hundreds of generations for millenia and the reason? Our current consumption

Such greed and disregard for following generations

Climate change is a minor problem in comparison

Yes there is, bury it. Its what we do with lots of other waste. Of course, you have to be a bit more careful than you would be with a standard landfill. But the engineering is well understood. It is usually just the fact that nobody wants it buried near them that causes political issues.

>The waste will burden hundreds of generations for millenia

Pumping more carbon into the atmosphere is also a huge burden for future generations.

>Climate change is a minor problem in comparison

What do you base that on?

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

B) We could reprocess the waste

C) There are reactors that produce 95% less waste, regulation prevents their testing and deployment

D) All the nuclear waste in the US (the country with by far the most NPPs) fits in 1 Olympic sized pool

Nuclear waste is great for several reasons:

- the first one is quantity: very small in comparison with how much energy it produced (a nuclear reaction generates one million times more energy than a chemical reaction so less resource usage across the whole lifecycle);

- the second one is that most of it (over 90%) can be recycled and used with gen 4 reactors;

- the third one is that it stays local, i.e. unlike CO2 it doesn't go into the atmosphere (and then the ocean), and since CO2 is inert, from a human time scale how long CO2 can stay in the atmosphere is, I would argue, comparable to nuclear waste decay.

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

You maybe mixing up danger and risk, those are two different concepts. Nuclear waste is dangerous, but it doesn’t have to be risky. Consider this: where do we have the most unknown (risk): long-term geological storage of nuclear waste, or the consequences of climate change and our ability to adapt?

I really wish I could share the educational resources that I have with you, unfortunately it’s all in French…

That said solar panels and batteries are so bloody good now, why even bother building nuclear reactors in much of the world? And geothermal looks promising too, with the new fracking tech they're using. But who knows.

https://www.legislation.qld.gov.au/view/whole/html/inforce/c...

And of course have a chat with the traditional custodians of the land, and see if they're keen.

( eg: Noonkanbah - https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/sep/30/the-d... )

They do make agreements and keep them when they are part of the discussion from the outset and consulted for advice.

ie: find a place to make a hole that is both stable and not a significant site.

It doesn't help that more recent good faith agreements have been torpedoed by, say, Rio Tinto not keeping their word going forward.

( in recent follow up news from an epic Rio FUBAR - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-25/juukan-gorge-archaeol... )

>Climate change is a minor problem in comparison

No one knows what the best and worst case scenarios for deaths during to climate change as they effects might include AMOC shutdown, sea level rise, forced mass migrations of people, wars, shortages of food, etc. In all credible scenarios the deaths and suffering in even the best case scenarios will be much, much, higher than any deaths due to radiation exposure from nuclear waste.

Nuclear: hundreds

Don't let perfection be the enemy of improvement.

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.

You are also missing that the evacuation was expanded in stages:

- Accident day: Loss of cooling, 3 km evacuation.

- 1 day after: 10 km. Followed by extended to 20 km when unit 1 exploded. Followed by unit 3 and 4 exploding as well.

What did Japan's nuclear regulators do after Fukushima? They expanded the emergency planning zone from roughly 8 - 10 km to 30 km.

https://theconversation.com/evacuating-a-nuclear-disaster-ar...

Also, you can't spell.

For example Greenpeace had it roots in the oposition to nuclear weapon testing at the end of 1960s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpeace

Sellafield's current expected bill is £127B over the next 100 years. Hanford is looking at a cost between $364B and $589.4B.

The imagined economics sold to the public never delivered followed by accidents like Windscale, TMI and Chernobyl.

With climate change the nuclear industry saw the possibility of finally having actual product market fit. So another round of subsidies were created in the 2000s and 2010s. At the same time renewables were seen as the upstart, and storage barely crossed any minds.

The outcome being ruinously expensive plants as seen in Vogtle, Virgil C. Summer, Olkiluoto, Flamanville 3, Hinkley Point c and so on.

What we're seeing now is a token investment to subsidize the necessary industry for military research and reactors. But no one expects it to deliver electricity at a relevant price, or point in time, compared to renewables and storage.

But not anywhere near the nuclear frenzy seen online.

Also, Hanford has nothing to do with civilian NPPs and the processes used there would never be done as part of power generation.

Finally, the cost of NPPs is almost always about the lawsuits. Look at how much Korea and China payed for their NPPs. It was less than 20% of what we pay, they were online in less than 5 years and they are producing 2.8GW for each country for the last decade.

PS The UK has never deployed a standardized design for a NPP. All of their NPPs are different types of experimental designs. Just buy a AP1400 and be done with it for far cheaper.

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.

> I've said this before and I'll say it as many times as is needed.

> The problem with the waste (and nuclear and radioactivity in general) is the messaging coming from those who do understand it. That is what solidifies misconceptions and fear, just as much as what anti-nuclear activists fearmongering may contribute.

> The average person believes that the mere existence of nuclear waste is an existential threat. That it's like a monster trying to break free from its container, and if it does, or if someone lets it out, it will wreak absolute devastation on the biosphere of potentially the entire Earth.

> You cannot appease or dispel such fears by insisting about how seriously waste is being handled and how we've gotten much better at it and that we've reduced the chances of accidents and contamination by this and that.

> Those arguments do not matter when the belief is that the threat is world-ending. People do not believe that the chances of accidents are zero - nor should they be expected to.

> What you need to tell people is that their inherent belief is wrong. Like it's absolutely, completely wrong on so many levels that it isn't even in the same ballpark as ludicrous. I know, I know, they will probably not believe you, at least it will take a lot of time for them to start believing you. But you have to say it nevertheless. Stop reinforcing their fears by always talking about how safe you've made the process, that will never work. Never.

This talks about nuclear waste but I think it applies even more to nuclear accidents. At least it applied to how I saw nuclear power before I actually decided to learn about it (after watching the Chernobyl series lol !)

The best time to build up nuclear power was 4 decades ago - when the supply of fossil fuel was obviously fraught, and things like solar and wind power were nonviable.

Whether it makes any sense to push for nuclear power now is unclear. Nuclear was quite expensive even back then - but decades of NIMBYism, "environmental" activism and overregulation have damaged the industrial capability and eroded supply chains to the point that getting a buildout going at scale and on a sane budget and a sensible timetable would be an uphill battle. At the same time, renewables aren't anywhere near as opposed, the economic outlook for solar, wind and grid storage is better than it ever was, and the situation is likely to improve even further.

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.

Are they really?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_U...

Possibly, but I vote for them and here in Bristol, they control the council and we have a Green Member of Parliament.

They've been around for decades, but they're grabbing more attention and headlines (especially the whole "Zionism is racism" declaration).

You got one guy on here claiming a fusion reactor will be built in Virginia (lol). Yet another claiming that the reason that everyone hates nuclear power is because of the byproduct of nuclear waste and that it's worse than climate change (rofl). Like what kind of drugs are you people on?

Nuclear loses on pure accounting and time to build.

So for the same rate of investment you can decarbonize 2-3 times faster. And that doesn't figure the long lead times for nuclear vs solar, wind and batteries.

Both Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own Green Parties. There is no single UK Green Party.

If only. There's people and parties (not in the UK) who would rather see the rest of the country suffer than admit they were wrong, so they feel compelled to die on that hill and take everyone with them, because defending their principle is more important.

“People act reasonably when left no other choice”

It stuck with me.

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.

To attack you just need an inside man and an USB stick to fake an accident.

And with the AfD they get the information about critical infrastructure free of charge

we have the right to criticise countries too right?

Edit: what is your point? Being able to criticize? Sure, but so what?

It is obviously a good thing if a democratic nation state is independent from a totalitarian dictatorship.

> Not like life expectancy in Germany is low, for example.

It's not about life expectancy. They now have to make a choice between supporting an aggressive totalitarian state vs. suffering damage to their economy due to higher energy prices. That is obviously a bad position to be in.

But Germany wanted the cheap gas, so they ignored the risks and Russia ultimately invaded Ukraine.

But regarding gas, one has to understand that a tiny fraction (15%) of gas is used for electricity and most for heating. So nuclear power is completely irrelevant here.

I also would like people realize that many nuclear plants in Europe and elsewhere still depend on fuel from Russia. So energy dependence is a bit more complex.

You know that homes can be heated with electricity from nuclear power? The reason why Germany uses gas for heating is because it was historically very cheap compared to electricity, because it came from Russia. Good, while the attached strings could be ignored..

Meanwhile renewables and storage are reshaping our global energy system due to being the cheapest globally scalable energy source in human history.

We also need to keep in mind nuclear supply chains. After 21 sanction packages the EU still haven't sanctioned Russia's nuclear industry.

We're simply too deeply entangled across the entire supply chain: nuclear fuel, enrichment, reprocessing, technological partnerships, reactor maintenance, new construction and more.

Ukraine said that Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia said that Russia invaded Ukraine. And Russia has a long history of invading its neighbors - that's why it's already so big. We have no reason to doubt that Russia invaded Ukraine.

In the UK, Sellafield was a nightmare. Lots of less serious slip ups and malfunctions punctuated by a few critical incidents, between 1954 and 2003. You might understand why yesterday's Green Party might think it an issue worth pursuing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

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

Or the panic when the next drones appear near a power plant

What do you mean?

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.

How about some useful policies like removing planning constraints for grid expansion and solar farms and compulsory wind farms on golf courses owned by foreign billionaires

Even back then, those economic comparisons were idealized for nuclear. Build it run it count up to the dollars and there you go. Except you need to secure it, you need to handle waste, and roughly the same cost over runs are bedeviling decommissioning as they were construction.

On top of all that, why is nuclear still uninsurable in the private market?

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.

You think it's axiomatic that the insurability of nuclear power has to be socialized. Insurability is a strong and reliable financial signal. We're seeing this every day in the tech industry now with data center build out that needs credit default swaps. If you can't buy insurance at any price, it's probably not going to end well.

Grid-scale solar plus batteries is cheaper? Citation needed.

Energy costs, of course, vary by location - so that linked report is the Australian national science (both theory and very much applied) body determining that conditions in Australia are such that the economics of nuclear power here have costs greater than that of grid scale solar + batteries + other storage technologies on horizon and being firmed up.

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.

For existing nuclear, stealing it from the other grid users is cheaper than building clean power today.

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

Brit here: we need renewables and storage and nuclear.

> compulsory wind farms on golf courses owned by foreign billionaires

We need this x100.

It's not.

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.

Batteries: https://www.tesla.com/megapack/design Solar: just google 1gw solar cost

So you claim as representative, not the average and not the median of nuclear power plants.

But the most expensive nuclear power plants ever produced.

Even without knowing any details about those plants, that's either statistical illiteracy or malpractice. Take your pick.

And it doesn't get better when you know the details:

- The ones you picked were all First of a Kind build (FOAK). So prototypes. It is well-documented that FOAK builds typically are 50% more expensive and longer to build than serialized builds (Nth of a Kind, NOAK). These were more around 100% longer than NOAK, for a bunch of reasons.

- A number of these were the EPR. The EPR has since been discontinued, because the manufacturer found it too hard to build. It has been replaced by the highly simplified EPR2. How is a discontinued reactor type representative of future builds?

- All of these builds were in countries that had a long hiatus in nuclear construction, so had to build up experience in the workforce, supply chain and regulators, so FOAK on steroids. Even the most experienced, France, had a gap of 18 years between the start of the previous build and the start of FV3.

- All of these builds had regulatory changes during the construction process. Sometimes massive changes, for example over 4000 changes for HPC in the UK. And not trivial things: the concrete of the outer protective shell had to be increased by 40% or something. Which has knock-on effects, because now things inside don't quite fit any longer. etc.

- New construction techniques such as modularization, factory production etc. all decrease the cost of serialized builds, but vastly increase the risk during First of a Kind builds.

And of course you are comparing installed capacity, which is an almost completely irrelevant metric. In the UK, capacity factors for solar are between 9-12%. So you have to multiply your solar numbers by 10 just to get equivalent output on average. Except average is not good enough. There is winter, there is night, there are clouds. 4h of battery are not going to get you through winter.

And you "forgot" that nuclear power plants last much, much longer than solar installations, at least twice as long, more likely 3 times and possible 4 times. All of the plants in the US that have applied have been approved for 80 years of operations, they are now looking at 100 years and see no significant problems.

So without even taking into account new developments, you have to divide the nuclear numbers you gave by 2 and multiply the numbers for PV you gave by at least 20-80 (and that's not covering winter yet).

So $8B/GW vs. $20-80B/GW without any firming.

And which is why the price for installed capacity is not the right metric at all.

The cost of a kWh delivered reliably 24/7 is the right metric. And there nuclear shines.

And intermittents are simply not up to the job. Which is why pretty much the entire world is giving up on the fantasy of supplying an advanced industrial society using only intermittent renewables. And even the most hard-core greens are coming around, as TFA.

As I wrote: Germany's nuclear power plants delivered reliable electricity at below 2 cents per kWh.

If nuclear is cost effective it makes sense to build it for all capacity - in the U.K. that’s about 50GW.

Otherwise, you are just making the circular argument that because we haven't built we shouldn't build. That makes no sense.

And yes, nuclear for all capacity makes a lot more sense than intermittent renewables for all capacity. But a more balanced mix tends to work out better.

The real question is cumulative emissions. Cheap and fast, even if imperfect in the shorter timeframe wins the day.

The question to answer is: Poland. €100 billion. 2026. What cuts the most cumulative CO2, fastest?

None. Nuclear is cheap and quick and investments in nuclear not wasted.

We have wasted decades going down the wrong path. As an example, Germany has spent almost 25 years on the failed "Energiewende" and we haven't even completed the easy half. Nuclear did not require subsidies. Intermitten renewables anywhere from €30-50 billion just in subsidies. Per year.

France converted its electricity grid to nuclear in 15 years. For a total of €228 billion in 2011 money. Not "per year", not "subsidies". But total investment.

The existing French nuclear fleet was built with enormous state support. Germany pays €18B in EEG support. And that is decreasing as old extremely expensive renewables are leaving the problem.

What you are doing is crying about late 2000s and early 2010s renewables being expensive. Let me ask you, what relevance does that have in 2026? We don't pay those prices today.

The reality in 2026 is the outcome of Flamanville 3, Vogtle, Hinkley point C. Then we have modern projects, and proposed subsidies like:

- Darlington SMR: Close to Vogtle - Polish AP1000: Vogtle like - Czech APR1000: A step below Vogtle. - French EPR2 fleet: Absolutely insane at €100 per MWh and interest free loans alreay assuming large learning effects.

And that is before the usual timeline and budget overruns for new nuclear has happened.

Given this reply it seems like you are straying farther reality since the prospect of new nuclear is crumbling. You're not even presenting a logically sound argument. Its just victim complex and dreaming about times past.

The question to answer still remains: Poland. €100 billion. 2026. What cuts the most cumulative CO2, fastest?

The nuclear renaissance is in full swing.

FACT SHEET: The Golden Era of American Nuclear Energy Has Arrived

https://www.energy.gov/articles/fact-sheet-golden-era-americ...

2026/09/25 | The Nuclear Renaissance: Financing the Global Expansion

https://fiasi.org/events/event/2026-09-25-the-nuclear-renais...

The nuclear power renaissance in the 21st century: Analyzing past trends, present status, and future outlook

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2026NucAn...500231A/abstra...

Clear-Eyed about Nuclear Renaissance

https://events.weforum.org/en/events/world-economic-forum-an...

If new nuclear was cheap and quick, why are the recently proposed western subsidies tens of billions per reactor? This just doesn't add you. You realize that right?

Your own financing conference link acknowledges construction costs in the tens of billions, timelines exceeding a decade and unresolved financing.

The DOE fact sheet lists billions in government support. Does that sound cheap and quick to build?

All the links you've presented looks like an industry despereately public handouts from tax money.

But this is not surprising. The nuclear industry doesn't deliver new projects, it currently has product market fit living on tax money handouts. Presenting PowerPoints they hope to never have to flesh out the details on, since that would requrie them to admit to the costs. Just like mPower and NuScale were forced to do. The now shunned previous golden boys.

The question remains unanswered:

Poland. €100 billion. 2026. What cuts the most cumulative CO2, fastest?

They aren't, and some guarantees are necessary, because VEE subsidies have dramatically distorted the markets. Even the cheapest producer cannot compete with subsidized overproduction that drives prices to zero or negative, with the government picking up the decidedly non-zero cost for just those producers that are causing the problem.

And you are projecting the reality of VEE subsidies onto nuclear.

I asked Google AI if subsidies for intermittent renewables in Germany will fall:

Total volatile renewable energy (VRE) subsidies in Germany are projected to rise significantly in the short-to-medium term (peaking around 2029 at over €22 billion), driven by falling wholesale electricity prices and legacy contract obligations.

In the long term, direct generation subsidies are legally structured to fall as older contracts expire, but the total public financial burden will likely remain high or shift into different mechanisms—such as grid infrastructure funding, battery storage incentives, and backup power plant strategies—to keep the structurally unprofitable intermittent energy system viable.

Renewable subsidies are being phased out all over the world. They aren't needed anymore.

And now you've shifted the goalposts again. First, nuclear was supposedly cheap and quick. Now it needs enormous government guarantees because renewables have somehow "distorted" the market.

So which way is it? Is new nuclear cheap and competitive, or does it need taxpayers to absorb its financial risks?

You can't have it both ways.

Why should we waste our limited resources on ruinously expensive new nuclear that won't deliver meaningful decarbonization?

The question remains unanswered:

Poland. €100 billion. 2026. What cuts the most cumulative CO2, fastest?

I’d bet you the cost will be $140B when it’s all said and done, but this website won’t be around in 2044 (assuming no delays, good luck with that). You can bet regulations won’t stop changing over the span of decades either.

I’d rather have 70GW of solar and batteries deployed in a few years, and replace them with even cheaper ones in a number of decades.

For 6 EPR. Each EPR has 1.67 GWe. So 10.02 GW for €72.8 billion or €7.2 billion per GWe. Less than what I wrote. Versus €20-80 billion/GW for solar without firming.

We also have, wind, firming and you know. Relying on fossil fuels for the once a decade emergency.

There's no point having the grid be an ideological purity test when we still have agriculture, aviation, shipping, construction, chemicals, heavy industry and so on to decarbonize.

System studies from Australia to Denmark are converging on finding that new nuclear makes the system vastly more expensive. Even when assuming your "NOAK" costs. Because no one would be stupid enough to build new nuclear at Vogtle or Flamanville prices.

Because the problem for nuclear is that it never solved dispatchability. It always relied on fossil fuels to solve the hard times.

You raise the floor, but that's quite meaningless when the hard times are far far above the yearly baseload requirement. Even when factoring in scheduling maintenance around it. And theen adding that your nuclear fleet may be like the Swedish or French one and have half the capacity offline when it is needed.

I didn't. The post I was responding to compared solar + batteries to nuclear.

Completely incorrectly, it turns out.

Realistic studies show that grids including nuclear are a LOT cheaper.

> There's no point having the grid be an ideological purity test

The only ones who are doing this are the anti-nuclear ideologues.

> Because the problem for nuclear is that it never solved dispatchability.

That is just comically wrong. Intermittent renewables are not dispatchable. Nuclear is.

System costs have been the central argument against renewables ever since they became competitive on LCOE. Which is why energy-system researchers have spent years developing, validating, and publishing models that account for hourly balancing, storage, transmission, flexibility, and sector coupling.

From Denmark to Australia system cost studies find renewable energy systems vastly cheaper than if involving new nuclear. Even when sensitivity testing very low nuclear costs.

The problem with nuclear is that it still needs the same firming to match an actual grid load. It still needs storage and gas turbines.

A smaller quantity than for renewable grids sure. But given how expensive new nuclear is it doesn't matter in the end.

Here's the Danish study:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...

And Australian:

https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Ele...

Please tell me how they aren't "realistic".

Your final comment conflates dispatchability with operational flexibility.

Nuclear output is controllable, and French reactors load follow. Although using a fleet controlling which reactor takes which day, and managing their fueling cycle so they can do it.

Conventional nuclear plants are economically optimized for high utilization, cannot start from shutdown on short notice, and don't eliminate the need for capacity that can respond to sudden shortages, demand peaks, and unexpected outages.

There is a significant difference between supplying dependable energy throughout the year and economically covering the relatively few hours when residual demand becomes exceptionally high.

As an example, the Australian CSIRO "study" you cite is deeply flawed.

1. Incorrect lifetime assumptions

It assumes nuclear power plants only last 30-35 years. In reality they last 80-100 years. So they are actually 3x cheaper than reported. Same trick as used in the infamous Fraunhofer ISE "study"

2. Incorrect assumptions about sunk costs

The report incorrectly treats already spent capital costs (on renewable infrastructure) as "free".

3. Underestimation of system costs

The report incorrectly averages metrics over longer time periods and thus vastly underestimates the costs of intermittency.

4. Incorrect capacity factors for nuclear.

Capacity factors between 50-80% are assumed. In reality even the world-wide average is over 80% and well-run fleets like in the US are over 90%. Again, same shady trick used in the infamous Fraunhofer ISE "study"

So same-old same-old. And as I said before: not going to debunk every single instance of always-the-same disinformation.

Denmark is now looking at nuclear, because the renewables-only strategy has failed.

https://kernekraftalliancen.dk/en/#myths

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClimateShitposting/comments/1xlxdzh...

The problems in the U.K. specifically are more about grid capacity (both long distance and local substation level) and nonsense regulations (why can’t I have pluggable battery to go with my pluggable solar) than in generation.

That said, it seems neither pragmatism nor ideological coherence is really necessary to hold power these days.

> Last year, Adrian Ramsay, then a Green co-leader, criticised government support for Sizewell C. “The money being spent on this nuclear gamble would be far better spent on insulating and retrofitting millions of homes, bringing down energy bills and keeping people warmer and more comfortable,” he said.

Classic negawatt approach, to use Amory Lovins' term.

Seems, though, like most people would rather build impressive infrastructure than improve what's already there. Grid expansion and new energy production development have far more cachet than paying a bunch of people with white vans to go around fixing up houses.

Figure out how much solar overcapacity and batteries you can get, within a year or two, for the price of a nuclear reactor deployable 10-20 years from now.

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.>>

There are aspects of many political parties I agree with, but to me, being against Nuclear Power is the largest short sighted items this and a couple of other parties are/were against.

If many countries took the same road as France, the world would be in a much better place. Imagine the energy advances that could have happened if nuclear was supported for the past 50 years.

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.

Also France is around 7c (euro) per kwh from nuclear generation. If the whole west was all in on nuclear for last 50 years it would have resulted in lower per kwh costs.

Nuclear doesn't need to be the only source of electricity generation. In fact, it can be the base on top of which a serious country expands electricity generation with renewable energy.

I will also remind you that there is not a single industrialised economy anywhere on earth that has successfully supplied new electricity growth with only renewable energy. Not one.

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?

For now this is only a desire, not a fact.

The neutron radiation around a fusion reactor is far more intense than in any fission reactor, because in fusion reactors most of the produced energy is carried by neutrons.

Any material exposed to neutron radiation will become radioactive. Of course the designers of fusion reactors will attempt to choose only materials that are converted into radioactive isotopes with a short halflife, but until someone demonstrates a working fusion reactor we will not know whether this is possible or the production of some amount of long-life radioactive waste must be accepted.

In my opinion, during the next few decades there are far less chances for fusion reactors to be used as a significant energy source on Earth than for some improved kinds of fission reactors.

In any case neither fission reactors nor fusion reactors are strictly necessary on Earth, but nuclear reactors are the only way to achieve interplanetary travel through the Solar System in decent times, so I believe that the future of nuclear reactors is for spaceships, not for terrestrial use.

Assuming all the physics are completely solved tomorrow;

Private capital can easily get better returns, not to mention sooner returns, doing pretty much anything else.

Public capital requires a very long-term govt spend spanning multiple governments. China could do it, but hard to see a western govt doing it. Plus it would add a decade to the schedule and costs would spiral upwards.

All of which is a huge bet against improvements in grid-level storage.

https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/news/ehrc-writes-green-p...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/10/30/thousands-qu...

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/green-party-zio...

We need the Middle East out of our political system full stop. All of it.

And I'd like a pony.

Even if we never put a drop of oil in a fuel tank again, 40% of the world's plastics manufacture is dependent on Middle Eastern oil. It will never not be part of our system.

But he is not up to her standard, and they have MPs in office who show Polanski to be just a silly lightweight (and one who appears to be unable to take responsibility).

(It still blows my mind that his excuse for why he couldn't vote was that he had to campaign. In St Pancras. Which is literally only an hour and twenty minutes away from Brighton by a really nice easy direct train. And he could have voted online.)

The Green Party has jumped the shark now that it’s been colonised by these single-issue loons.

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.

“Zionism is racism” is also some kind of tautology masquerading as an argument. A very diverse selection of races can count themselves as Jewish if they have a Jewish mother. So racism isn’t even the right term to use but “Judaism is tribalism” doesn’t have the same kind of undergraduate-brained ring to it.

A list of examples from history of things going pear-shaped when large numbers of people embraced a form of ethno-nationalism where lineage and genetics is the primary factor in determining a persons worth as a human?

Zionism is a political philosophy - a racist and revanchist one - developed in 19th century Europe. Not all Jews are Zionist - many are anti-Zionist, not all Israelis are Jewish, not all Jews are Israeli, etc. DNA studies show that Palestinians are descendants of the Israelites and Canaanites of biblical times.

Ditto the entire pro-Palestine movement.

I have read your comments and responded to them. Conflating Jewishness and Zionism and "race" is a categorical error on your part.

I've said absolutely nothing about Palestinians or said anything about the current situation in Israel.

Nor have I said anything about the Green Party in the UK.

This is all straw-manning on your part.

I've critiqued Zionism for what it is: it was born of and is a product of mid/late 19th century European political ethno-nationalistic thinking and shares similar traits with other similar political philosophies of the time which were almost universally racist (equating belonging to a nation with genetic lineage) and embracing irredentism.

Your attempts to equate Zionism with Jewishness are disingenuous but also very silly.

Nothing I said indicated I was pro or anti the proposition.

Roughly speaking, of course. Everything about ethnicity is always roughly speaking.

Ukrainians wanting an independent homeland for Ukrainians isn’t racism. Or Greenlanders wanting Greenland to be for Greenlanders. Or when it’s the Irish, Scottish, or Canadians wanting their own country.

The opposition could ally with those parties and end Netanyahu corruption and start the Oct 7 investigation that Netanyahu blocks but they don't.

Explain to us, in light of these very evident and present facts, how Zionism isn't racism. Give us an idea what is going to happen if the Arab citizens part of the Israeli population grows more than the current 20% in regards to "self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland".

The entire concept is tinged with antisemitism, it lacks a nuanced understanding in the religious belief in the restoration of Israel, and it encourages very simple, very straightforward reactions like "these people are all children who have no grasp of politics and shouldn't be near power". Which is my position.

Netanyahu is a horror (and a crook). The current Israeli government is engaged in a cycle of violence that is enabling illegal settlements etc.

It doesn't mean that a British political party should inject itself into a nearly 150 year old cultural/faith position that has its roots in the experience of antisemitism in Europe and the USA.

It's not that different to having a political platform position that Catholicism isn't true Christianity, or that only Sunni Islam is true Islam. Sensible multi-faith parties seeking electability and a broad power base don't do fucking stupid things like this.

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.

I am fully arguing in good faith because we're talking about The Green Party here. It is the political party I am talking about with zero influence. They have zero influence on UK foreign policy in particular.

Please properly read what you're responding to before responding like this.

Complete bad faith, or lack of basic logic.

0. https://atomicinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/LNT-and-NAS-En...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_for_Nuclear_Disarmame...

Nuclear is a great peacetime technology, Europe is no longer in peacetime.

Besides maybe solar, there is always the potential for harm during war times. Heck, even with solar, cutting off electricity supply to a major urban area can tragically carry a death toll that goes beyond even the few severe power plant disasters we as a species have ever encountered.

Fission is not an outlier here and designing any power plant for resilience is a necessary step, whether in war or peacetimes, whether in a tectonically stable or seismically active area.

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.

Regarding drones, most reactors are built relatively hardened. For example, they're protected against a 747 flying into it at full speed. So even a drone attack would take an advanced enemy, and they might as well drop a bomb on you.

If we come to that state of things, then almost anything we do isn't safe.