none, all the arguments are bullshit. far less people die in the operation of nuclear than any other energy industry. it also employs the least employees of any energy industry per watt, which is why capitalism doesn’t work great with it. if all of society was based on nuclear you could just unionize like 1000 guys to grind the system down.

There’s also the sourcing of the fuel, which usually comes from extractivist multinationals operating in global south countries like Niger. Though this is kind of an area where renewables aren’t amazing, either, as long as lithium is used as widely as it currently is.

What are the main historical moral arguments?

There’s some bleedover from anti-nuclear weapons but mostly it’s the fossil fuel industry hyping the danger and sabotaging its expansion

I’d also note that supply chains for uranium are kinda difficult. That stuff mostly comes from abroad (Africa, Australia, …) and that creates a political dependency.

And processing uranium without poisoning yourself with radiation in the process is also very difficult.

A nuclear reactor needs to be safe 100% of the time. Not 99.99% of the time. Shit needs to be tsunami-proof and idiot-proof and meteor-proof or you risk permanently poisoning a continent. It’s possible to do if you build it inside a mountain or something, but at this point solar is so cheap it no longer makes sense.

Western climate activists have ngo brain and must plead fealty to dirty old hippies.

The question why is China, a country run more by engineers then lawyers is relatively cool on nuclear as compared to renewables when energy security is so critical now?

I get they are reinventing le epic thorium reactors or fusion. But they are nascent. Low risk PWR Nuclear is still really shit at scaling. You need very specific sites where people know they can extract as much money out of the project in objections and protests. Projects are too big to fail which become grounds for every stakeholder to bleed funds out of project and gain political power.

Not to say geography isn’t an issue with renewables but the moral hazards you have to absorb are so much more dispersed and don’t depend on water in vast quantities.

I think catastrophic failure of nuclear plants will always be an issue, and by catastrophic failure, I don’t mean something like a nuclear meltdown, but more like a belligerent country blowing up the plant with cruise missiles or sabotage from within. It’s all well and good to say coal plants emit more radiation and are overall more polluting, but if blowing up a coal plant is less catastrophic than blowing up a nuclear plant, then that needs to be factored into the calculus as well. You can’t assume your country will always be at peace or that your country has hundreds of S-500s on standby.

There are definitely worse scenarios (blowing up dams) and I’m not even sure if a completely destroyed coal plant would be less catastrophic than a completely destroyed nuclear plant, but blowing up a bunch of windmills or solar panels isn’t exactly going to make the immediate area inhospitable for decades to come.

All arguments against nuclear energy i can think of, are arguments against capitalism, not the nuclear.

I wouldnt be supportive while we’re under a capitalist system, after that I don’t have a huge issue tbh

For me it’s that under capitalism, waste will be a problem. The government and private industry have already proven they are careless with waste and will skimp on properly containing it. You can say that they can design a plant with no waste but if that plant costs $3 more than one that does, you can bet they’ll go with the cheaper one. In the US we can’t couple a deregulation mindset that everyone in charge shares and do something that requires the utmost regulation. Can that be applied to every other form of energy generation? Yes. That’s the point. They cannot be trusted with anything. Even coal plants dump waste in rivers and natural areas that will poison it for years.

Even if you consider a non-American government like Japan and Fukushima. They were housing cleanup workers in shanties right next to waste. Workers weren’t told about the risk. They kept changing the definition of contamination so that it meant less work. They didn’t have anywhere to put waste, granted it was a black swan emergency but still. There was rampant wage theft for clean up workers. So much malice and incompetency went on during the cleanup while the world kept portraying this image of positivity. Japan is way more open to regulation than the US yet they too had so many problems.

Now put several nuclear power plants in each US state. How much planning do you really think would go into mitigating disasters and keeping waste storage above board? Do you think they’ll just let the federal government regulate it or break it up between the states? How easy is it going to be for a power company to massage those state regulations like they do already with traditional power sources?

The supposed payoff is that we no longer have to use coal, natural gas, or oil. I don’t think that would happen. The government certainly wouldn’t outlaw fossil fuels regardless of how many nuclear plants we have. At that point we would have a very dangerous timebomb of nuclear disaster and then we wouldn’t even get the reduction in fossil fuels.

Storing the waste is still tricky, hence the Yucca mountain controversy and whatnot. The technology for reprocessing depleted uranium exists, but I don’t think it’s being done in the US at the moment.

We can’t trust the industry not to cut corners when it comes to safety and waste management. We can’t trust the government to effectively regulate the industry. The consequences of disasters (however rare) are catastrophic.

They are a rusisan roulette of catastrophic disasters exasperated by climate change, geopolitical events, human error, money holes, and enshittification that inevitability follows crap-it-all-ism. The more you build, the greater the inevitability of another Fukushima or worse. Despite the rose colored glasses of them arrogantly claiming they rebuilt the unsinkable and “trust us” it won’t sink.

proliferation of the technology for enrichment is proliferation for the technology for enrichment.

It makes it harder to prevent developing material suitable for bombs.

Also note that in all current designs of reactor the spent fuel is quite suitable for weapons of terror.

Ask the Navajo.