Back during the late Bush or early Obama era I remember reading a lot of articles about how the hydrogen fuel cell was going to replace the internal combustion engine and usher in a grand new era of cars that emitted water instead of carbon dioxide. Even at the time I knew enough to ask where the hydrogen was coming from. If it was electrolysis then where was the electricity coming from? I assumed I must be missing something. Now we have electric vehicles and I know I wasn't. We are currently facing down the choice of continuing to emit carbon or investing a trillion dollars of engineering and industrial effort into creating a fully renewable and intermittency capable grid. If only there was a time tested carbon neutral option for continuous electricity production.
It's nuclear power. I'm talking about nuclear power. Nuclear power fits that description. We have had the answer for sixty years and we refuse to grasp it. One of my biggest criticisms of contemporary society with all of its inefficiencies and injustices is that we don't use nuclear fission as our primary source of electricity. I have listened to the arguments against nuclear and found three main themes: waste, safety, and proliferation. I am going to dedicate a paragraph each to why I don't find any of those persuasive.
First is waste. Nuclear reactors create radioactive waste and it remains so for tens of thousands of years. Critics typically cite this as a major concern and I contend that it is not. Coal burning plants add not only CO2 but heavy metals to the atmosphere. Solar panels contain lead and cadmium and while efforts have been made to isolate the environment from these elements it's an open question how successful this will be. All heavy metals remain toxic forever and while we can expect them to sink into the lower stratum of the crust over time they never stop being toxic. Nuclear waste will stop being radioactive at some point but before that it will be containable. The default container for transporting nuclear waste is layers of glass, ceramic, steel, and concrete designed to survive direct impact from a locomotive. From there we can bury the waste and its container in geologically stable regions if we really want to though I would argue that that is overkill for the simple reason that those are rare isotopes that we may find uses for in the next ten thousand years and I don't want to have to dig them up again. How much waste are we talking about? According to my calculations the average American is going to use about one million kilowatt hours over the course of an eighty year lifespan at current rates and this means that the average person will need twenty-two kilograms of uranium per person over the course of a lifetime. There is more than just uranium in fuel rods but on a whole I think it is reasonable to think that a persons lifetime power usage will weigh less than they do. Even if the amount is significantly more it won't matter because this is a solved problem.
The second major concern raised is accident safety. This is an engineering issue. I start with that argument because it is easy to assume that meltdowns are an intrinsic concern with nuclear reactors and I don't think that is actually true. Pebble bed reactors are designed to be melt down proof. Molten salt reactors literally have melted fuel as a feature. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima have informed design improvements and most reactor designs have never experienced major failures which is not for lack of operation hours. According to Wikipedia there are over four hundred reactors operating at present. Ukraine and France are presently receiving more than half of their electricity from it despite the former being the site of Chernobyl. Nuclear power is a proven technology. None of this changes that the proliferation of reactors brings up the odds of an accident but that has to be weighed against the costs of continued fossil fuel use and/or the transition to massive levels of power storage to address the intermittency of wind and solar.
The third issue is weapon grade isotope proliferation. Plutonium is not naturally occurring and comes from reactors as a byproduct of their operation. This means that any country hosting a reactor has a supply of weapons grade fissile material by default and that the proliferation of reactors implies the proliferation of nuclear weapons. A few years ago I would have considered this an inevitable outcome and a significant objection to the universal adoption of atomic energy but now I think this is just another engineering or logistics problem and one that's already been solved. Small modular reactors are a mature technology which puts an entire reactor in a moveable container and allows it to be transported and deployed at a location. By mass manufacturing reactors with the intention that they be swapped out when one of them runs out of fuel the manufacturer can track all nuclear fuel usage and detect the theft of any of it. So long as the manufacturer is in a preexisting nuclear power and subject to that country's third party oversight it is vanishingly unlikely that any bad actor could collect weapons grade isotopes without detection.
If you want to learn more there are dozens of people building careers off of promoting nuclear power with much more detailed breakdowns of my points. Mass manufactured small modular reactors seems to be the front runner option since they are projected to be significantly cheaper per unit cost. I've attempted to give a broad but shallow overview of the state of nuclear power and why I think it is the obvious way forward. If you are reading this and you still have miss givings about nuclear energy I implore you to study the topic because I'm confident that any serious engagement with the evidence will persuade the average person. If you can't find it in yourself to support it at least don't oppose it in your region. It is a reliable, scalable, economic source of power that can decarbonize the electrical grid faster and at a lower cost than any alternative.