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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

Ask the Navajo.

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.

I’ve also never understood why.

As best as I can tell, and if someone has evidence this is not the case then I’m happy to look, it’s a residual stance from I want to say ~1990s. Maybe the hysteria (somewhat justified but also definitely still hysteria) around Chernobyl and the nothingburger at Three Mile Island (in the US) drove people to forever go “the optics of supporting nuclear power is untenable.”

That’s my best guess anyway because the weapons thing is a red herring. Nuclear fuel used for energy plants is not compatible with creating weapons as far as I know. It requires a much higher percent of enriched uranium. Even if it was… it just sounds like some BS neocon talking point. Not anything for activists to actually hold up as “real.”

Waste disposal and storage it a legitimate issue but for a country like the US, Russia, China, any large nation basically, this seems to me like something which can be fairly easily handled. People seem to say a lot of hyperbolic stuff implying like “drums irradiated water will spill off trucks into your local river!” Yeah, maybe that can happen. Or maybe we can make that not happen. I know that sounds flippant but seriously incredibly dangerous and hazardous materials are transported daily all over the world including nuclear weapons and materials. Accidents can and will happen, but that’s why safety protocols need to exist. Regulations and proper punishments for those who break rules, etc.

I’m pretty sure China has recently built a bunch of nuclear power in their ongoing effort to move away from fossil fuels 100%. To me that seems like such common sense that it’s insane the US, Europe, every where aren’t already doing it decades ago. Well, they were… then they stopped. France famously built a bunch of nuclear plants then just sorta said “oh, just kidding, we love oil.” And shutdown then destroyed the plants (to my knowledge). That seems insane to me especially post-2000 where climate change was known to be a looming but solvable issue.

I can also suspect that our good ol’ boys like Chevron, Exxon, BP, etc. all said “nice nuclear power plants you got there. It’d be a real shame if something happened to undermine your government… unless you suddenly decided you actually want to burn oil and gas for power.” Who am I kidding? That’s probably the entire fucking reason for the shift.