The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson is on my reading list, and the next book I'm reading after I finish Death's End by Cixin Liu (not solarpunk, but hard scifi).

Agreed, this is just nonsense.

The question was whether or not nuclear is clean or green. To which my answer is "no", but "better than fossil fuels". If we were to shut down all the nuclear power plants in the world today, much of the world would switch to burning more fossil fuels because in much of the world it's still the most cheapest form of energy. Someone else in this thread already mentioned it, but fossil fuel energy facilities/sources should be decommissioned first before nuclear.

Uranium can and does get recycled from one facility to the next, however there comes a point when it can't be reused anymore to gain any meaningful amount of energy and it still has radioactivity and ultimately buried somewhere. Though arguably still better than fossil fuels, that's an obvious and major drawback to nuclear.

NIMBY is also another factor that delays new nuclear plants. That said, safety is another big concern here. Although not at an nuclear energy facility, there was that incident recently at Los Alamos National Laboratory researching nuclear weapons where they placed 8 rods of plutonium next to each other that could have triggered a disaster. Very high safety standards are required, and humans are known for making stupid decisions.

Agree with you here. Fossil fuel energy sources need to be phased out before nuclear energy.

Not sure if this is possible on Lemmy, but on HN, users don't get the ability to downvote until (I think) their account is aged somewhat or their account receives a certain amount of points.

I see nuclear as a transitory source of energy. It doesn't emit any greenhouse gases and FAR better than fossil fuels. We could easily transition to it faster and more cheaply than solar, wind, etc currently. Deaths associated with fossil fuel energy greatly exceed those associate with nuclear energy.

Burning fossil fuels needs to stop and we need to bring down carbon levels to what they were 20+ years ago. Ideally, transitioning to nuclear would be cheap/fast while we build out solar and wind infrastructure, and research how to make these sources of energy more effective.

However, I'm not a policy nor energy expert by any means. I'm just some random person on the internet.

I watched the video the day it came out. Kris De Decker was on The Great Simplification a while back and that was actually how I discovered the show and Nate Hagens. Both are interesting people with insightful views. Kris's site https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/ is worth a deep dive, I know I've found spending a couple hours reading through the content.