this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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It is weird how overlooked nuclear is in the US. I imagine both sides could get in on it if it either had better lobbying or at least didn't have to compete with the respective oil/gas lobby on the right or the solar lobby on the left. (It's certainly a left leaning option if people weren't spooked by it).
I've been seeing people saying we should be building molten salt thorium reactors since before Obama was elected.
Not... politicians... but various physicists and economists whom apparently no one listens to.
I think that from a PR standpoint there are multiple problems:
You have to come up with soundbites to explain how Thorium reactors are not capable of Chernobyling or Three Mile Islanding.
Oil and Gas won't like this and Republicans in general hate spending money on infrastructure.
From the left and center you still have a strong number of people who think nuclear power is horrible for the environment and doesn't count as 'sustainable'.
Having to educate the general American public on anything with nuance or complexity is a massive chore. People here seriously complained that solar panels will use up all the sun's energy. This is all assuming the various oil/gas companies don't spin up propaganda at full speed to make shit up about nuclear energy.
Back in the early 2010s my home state, Maryland, was ready to go in and double our current nuclear capacity, which would have put us in a place that, by 2024, would have all but erased fossil fuels from electricity generation in the state.
We were denied by the Obama administration. For 'security concerns' over importing specialists and materials.
We were importing them from the EU.
Anti-nuclear paranoia has been deeply damaging.
It's actually a result of the Cold War. There's a lot of overlap between environmental and anti-war groups in the US, and during the 60s and 70s sentiment against nuclear weapons started picking up steam. Then after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, that sentiment entered the mainstream, expanding to also include nuclear energy in general. Since coal was still king back then, most energy companies didn't really care to try to change the new public disapproval of nuclear energy, so it's mostly persisted into the present day.
It's not overlooked it's simply not economical. If you want an energy transition towards sustainability, renewables are the way to go.
This is it. Nuclear is horrendously expensive to commission and decommission. Onshore wind is the cheapest energy there is, and solar isn't expensive either. But the fossil fuel industry can't stand the price comparison nor the reduction in demand/scarcity, so in corporate run America, it doesn't happen at scale unless some politicians who actually want to make things better get real power.