Carbon reduction is a global challenge, hence reengineered power generation is too. Normalizing nuclear means deploying plants in potentially under-developed or faltering societies around the world. While "London-sized" mistakes are increasingly less likely with newer technologies, the potential dirty-bomb weaponization of the fuel remains troubling.
The unforeseen consequences of nuke plants in places like Syria, Somalia, Lebanon, et al seem pretty bad.
(disclosure: I am a proponent of nuclear power overall)
Argument that hasn't been mentioned: Even though nuclear weapons and nuclear energy are different technologies they are still sufficiently close that betting on nuclear energy will probably diffuse more know-how on how to build nuclear weapons.
Sabine Hossenfelder's assessment (quickly) summarized (and possibly somewhat distorted by that):
World reserves are estimated to be 8M tons.
That does not count uranium in seawater. While we currently can't mine it at the same cost from seawater as we can mine it elsewhere, we can mine from seawater.
https://cen.acs.org/materials/Fishing-uranium-ocean-spider-silk/97/web/2019/07 suggests that currently, the price for uranium from seawater is six times as expensive as other sources. The price of uranium is not very important for the price of nuclear energy and paying six times as much for it wouldn't be a problem.
As a supporter of the claim, 'in the long run, more nuclear power generation is a good thing', my best argument for why to not build nuclear power plants now is that I think we'd be better of first investing (a lot!) in more research on safety, reliability, efficiency. Commit to building beginning in 10 years after spending about 2 trillion dollars a year for those 10 years on research.
Nuclear power plants need to be a pretty specific distance from water, which hurts their use as a solution to a problem that causes rising water levels
Economics of nuclear reactors aren't particularly great due to regulatory costs and (at least in most western countries) low build rates/talent shortage. This can be improved by massively scaling nuclear energy up (including training more talent), but there isn't any political will to do that
Nuclear power has the highest chance of The People suddenly demanding it be turned off twenty years later for no good reason. Baseload shouldn't be hostage to popular whim.
I read somewhere about the higher risks related to cooling the power plant because of the increasing commonness of droughts. Not sure of the magnitude of the problem but considering the worsening climate for the next 30 years it does seem to be in good faith.
They may not be completely passively safe?
I noticed that all your examples compare nuclear power to solar/wind, which seems like a red herring to me. We should be replacing fossil fuels by both nuclear and solar/wind technologies; either of them is an improvement, so we should be building both at the same time.
(Unless you did that on purpose, of course, as a part of seeking the best arguments against nuclear.)
You're right, the comparison is on purpose. Let's assume that the cost of a new nuclear power plant is $1 bln. Why should one spend $1 bln on a nuclear plant instead of a solar / wind / storage factory?
In some situations, nuclear is likely the best option. E.g. settlements beyond the polar circle, or on Mars. Aside from that, I'm not sure if nuclear is a useful addition to the solar / wind / storage mix.
I don't have a strong opinion on the issue, and the topic is new to me.
This is a technical question way beyond my knowledge.
For example, you don't mention whether spending the same amount of money on nuclear or on solar/wind would produce the same amount of energy. Maybe we should choose the cheaper thing, per unit of energy produced. Also, I don't know whether e.g. solar panels do not require some scarce ingredient, so if you try to build too many of them, their price goes up.
Point 2 is very related to point 3. Nuclear plants have catastrophic failure modes. They're not likely, and are mitigable to a great degree, but if something goes wrong ENOUGH, it's very very bad. Which leads to a reasonable preference that they be built away from where I want to be. And a reasonable perception that if they build one near you, it's because you're low-status and expendable (or at least don't have the power to get the project moved away).
Solar and wind power plants can be fully controlled and owned by individuals and small communities, with zero intervention from the gov.
But solar and wind power alone doesn't give you 365/24/7 electricity. If you would make it a standard that people store the amounts of hydrogen needed to have energy in winter you get problems with proliferating the ability to blow things up as well. Some of that hydrogen storage likely would also blow up accidentally.
But in democratic societies, it may be a better idea to build new solar / wind / energy storage factories instead.
Energy storage facilities alone are not enough. Battery-type storage can store energy economically for interday demand differences but would need two orders of magnitude cheaper to be similarly used for storing energy from the summer to be used in the winter.
If you store hydrogen or synthetic gas, you need a way to burn that for energy as well.
But in the systems that can go horribly wrong unless properly maintained, the past performance is not a good indicator of the future performance.
Out of past problems we learned a lot about how to construct nuclear power plants in a way that's safer.
It seems there is a consensus in the EA community that building new nuclear power plants is a net positive for the world. For example, this video by Kurzgesagt summarizes some arguments in support of nuclear power as a tool to mitigate the global warming.
I wonder if the consensus is premature.
So far, I've encountered the following counterarguments worth pondering about:
Some other reasonable counterarguments?