Both the association with nuclear weapons and several high profile nuclear accidents worked to shape public perception negatively towards nuclear power.
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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And the tiny tiny matter of it never having been economically viable. Both the R&D and construction were massively subsidised by the state. Then the corporations were allowed to skim off the profits while the nukes were running. After that the state gets stuck with the bill for decommissioning. It's always been a racket. The only reason "civilian" nuclear power exists is as a fig leaf for nuclear armament.
The only reason "civilian" nuclear power exists is as a fig leaf for nuclear armament.
I don't think post war Germany had the delusion of their own nukes. Here the nuclear industry just exists to shuffle public money into private pockets.
Franz-Josef very much wanted Germany to have the bomb. While the German nuclear program was ostensibly always civilian, they absolutely wanted to keep the option open.
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Also propaganda and lobbying by fossil fuel industries.
Of course.
As if the public decides anything
If that was the case propaganda wouldn’t be necessary.
Propaganda is for fomenting consent.
You think of propaganda as if its goal is to convince the general public
I guess I have to keep asking every time this shit idea of nuclear as green energy pops up: where to put the waste? Have we figured that out yet? Or will we continue hiding that stuff somewhere and hoping it stays there? 20 years ago I joined the protests in this location, where they were going to store nuclear waste in an abandoned salt mine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorleben_salt_dome
Despite thousands of people blocking roads the train full of nuclear waste arrived anyways. Guess what, briefly after that (or who knows, they probably knew anyways) they found the salt mine wasn't such a great idea. And now that shit sits there in some storage building waiting for an accident to happen. Maybe Russia wants to drop a drone onto it when they feel like it, or in time the whole thing just gets abandoned because nobody has money to care anymore.
Only way to make energy green is degrowth, so spending less of it. Every single way of producing energy is damaging to the environment, and inventing new stuff or rebranding old stuff as "green" isn't going to change it. They tear up the country I live in for lithium and the people can't grow their gardens anymore, common lands are now filled with wind power and the people cannot send their herds onto the mountain anymore, they produce fuel out of maize and large areas of monoculture now grow fuel instead of food, huge areas of agricultural land are being filled with solar panels. It all causes damage, just stop spending so much energy. Don't produce shit nobody needs, switch the fucking AI off, stay at home and just relax.
If you were to take all of that nuclear waste ever produced in the US, processed and stored inside dry cases, it would fit within an American football field less than 100 ft high. That's an insanely tiny amount of space for all the waste ever created for an entire type of energy production. For some comparison the amount of coal removed from the ground each year would form a cube over a mile wide.
However, most nuclear waste is low level waste and decays within a decade or less. Some of the medium level waste lasts a few decades. The longer stuff is a small fraction of overall waste. But some of it can be reprocessed and used as fuel again. It is also perfect for the starter fuel for some Thorium-based nuclear breeder reactor designs. Some are useful for various nuclear medicines. Very little of it actually has no use whatsoever.
As others kinda said, it take isn't that much waste, especially compared to like coal ash. And it's actually much safer too in dry casks. There are also bigger problems with nuclear than the waste, but thats not your question. The way to solve waste is a combination of:
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big ol fuckin hole in the ground (e.g. salt mine or similar, where it will get sealed in)
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molten salt reactors and other modern designs, which more completely use up the fuel. Old rod designs are actually like kinda really inefficient.
what are you suggesting tho, fossil is clearly and factually worse for the enviroment compared to nuclear, i mean do you know how big the earth is? sure radiactive waste may seem big and scary to you, but as halcyoncmdr mentioned earlier, it is really not that much of an issue, the earth is really big and we can just hide it really deep below, much better than putting shit in the atmosphere for us to suck into our lungs.
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Initially, world was very nuclear-positive. Engineers envisioned nuclear power being the holy grail of energy technology and a foundation for our future. Extreme energy density and low price-per-watt of nuclear fuel promised an energy revolution - and for a while, it actually began.
Added to expand: add to this the boost of military. The Cold War required many countries to build up nuclear arsenal, and to make weapon-grade plutonium, you need to conduct uranium cycle - one that conveniently produces a lot of energy and can be used to generate power.
Then, Idaho, Chernobyl and much later Fukushima happened, slowly turning the world against nuclear as a dangerous energy production option. Association with nuclear weapons and Cold War didn't help, either.
In the meanwhile, renewables like solar and wind, which were initially prohibitively expensive, got more traction and investment, and as a result of new developments and economies of scale, they eventually managed to become cheaper than nuclear in most areas of the world, rendering nuclear power financially inefficient and thus largely obsolete.
This was always propaganda to butter over the fact that the investments into nuclear power only made sense as a basis for a nuclear weapons program. Without that (or the ambition for one) nuclear power has always been an economic black hole and with renewables becoming so cheap it is even harder to argue for it.
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Full disclosure: I am not from the industry
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Yes, fear mongering is a factor. If you are a political power that opposes the nuclear, you can win a couple of points.
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Dependency on a major player. You can't just build a nuclear plant as a country. It's a multinational project and even countries like Turkey rely on countries like Russia for building a plant. The choice is not that wide also: France, China, Russia, or the US.
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Then, you need to buy fuel from these players. There are a couple of examples where the plants were partially rebuilt to work on fuel from another country, but the drive was always political AFAIK: Ukraine and Finland made themselves independent of Russia's nuclear supply.
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It's a long project with sky-high investment at the start and zero to no profit. It should be politically motivated. Like even in Russia I know of 2.5 newly built nuclear plants since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Others were upgrades of existing plants which require less money. But Russia builds nuclear in Turkey, Egypt, and Bangladesh.
To point 2. South Korea can be added tot the list.
TIL.
Man, they have a broad nuclear program. Such a tiny country covered with rice fields
US nuclear propaganda is strong with you guys.
Scientific education rather than emotional reactions to the unknown does that.
where can i read more about this i dont know shit ngl
Well you can look at the rollout of renewables vs Nuclear in the UK
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycNqII5HYMI
tldr: Nuclear power plants are expensive to build (complicated to build), expensive to run (need well trained staff to handle the complexities), the stuff that they run on (Uranium) isn't easy to acquire, and on top of all this the waste product is difficult to dispose of, I believe in Germany for example when the power company shut down its Nuclear power plants it told the Germany government they can deal with the nuclear waste... so basically even though the german people get 0% of their power from nuclear power plants they pay every day to store the nuclear waste from previous ones that are no longer operational...
... and when things go wrong they REALLY go wrong
Coal on the other hand is relatively cheap, the technology is fairly simple, running them is fairly cheap, there's no radioactive waste the coal power plant has to deal with etc
Coal on the other hand is relatively cheap, the technology is fairly simple, running them is fairly cheap, there's no waste to get rid of etc
Well, the waste gets thrown into the atmosphere. And that coal ash contains radioactive waste. Radioactive particulates up to 10x more concentrated than the raw coal fuel are injected directly into the atmosphere and spread by the winds. You know, the actual dangerous part of those nuclear accidents everyone is always thinking about.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
If a nuclear plant leaked even a fraction of that amount of radiation it would be shut down immediately. But all of that gets to be ignored, because it's not a nuclear power plant.
There's no waste to get rid of
It just flies up into the atmosphere for free, indeed
there's no waste to get rid of etc
Yeah we breathe it in and then go in the ground so it's pretty good.
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This is a video about Europe (mostly Germany and France), not the world as you asked, but I think it includes some answers to your question.
thanks, i mean i dont really think we should just have nuclear yk, but i wish it was the main power source, although the only issue i really have is that if i personally would love a more decentralized power grid, how could that ever be acomplished with nuclear energy? its not like we can just have mini reactors, right?
There has to be more to the story than that, as medical tools using radiation have had terrible accidents, but are still used a lot all over the world. And for example every day there are terrible accidents with motorcycles and in some countries that's basically the primary mode of transportation for most people.
The true story has to be a bit more complex and nuanced?
There's no alternative for medical instruments and riding a bike is a voluntary choice. Sitting in a radiation cloud because Chernobyl had a meltdown isn't one.
higher ups 100% look past the fearmongering of chernobyl and other accidents, nuclear is the safest compared to the many accidents that occur in solar, wind etc (if you look past the accidents which just dont happen nowadays, also considering that china has literally made a reactor that is physically impossible to meltdown)
Propaganda in favour of the wildly profitable fossil fuel industry
This! Even the Simpsons is guilty of it.
People are scared and stupid.