Sure, we may be heading right into a massive climate crisis in the next few decades, but what about the hypothetical post-humans who will dig up spent nuclear fuel 10_000 years from now?!
Transportation and storage are still issues we have to deal with today, though.
There was definitely a window, maybe fifty years ago, where widespread adoption of nuclear energy would have stopped and reversed climate change. We may have had an increase in Chernobyls with the proliferation of non-modern reactor designs, but in this hypothetical reality maybe people would have been OK with that.
The problem today is that renewables are getting too cheap and too good, and the storage problem shrinks every day. Meanwhile, it takes upwards of a decade to license and build a single reactor. France's fancy new reactors won't be online until 2040. Nuclear is just too slow.
I feel like 10 years from now it won't even be a debate or a contest, nuclear will just be the most expensive option by a country mile. Greenhouse gases will peak within the next 2 years[0]. The nuclear lobby missed their chance, which does mean we'll have to deal with some effects of climate change we could have avoided.
My feeling right now (and I kinda flip-flop every few years) is that nuclear lost and it's economically infeasible to try again. Change my mind?
