Of course, that's ultimately it. I was just attempting to explain why this is and why there is a market failure. Because carbon externalities are not fully internalized.
The problem though is inherent in clean energy forms given that most of them are not really going to provide us with anything even close go the energy density and dual use as especially oil(ex plastic) but also to some extent coal an nuclear.
I have been trying to find things to invest in in this area and its not really positive what Ive realized. We made most of the big discoveries and breakthroughs with fossil fuels and nuclear and there just isnt that many other opportunities out there to do anything with the density of ex coal which makes it hard to compete with since both ex sun and wind would need backup of either coal or nuclear which at the moments isnt factored into the price of sun and wind.
Fuell cells is also far far away for now which leaves fusion but that require ex magnetic force that can contain plasma.
In other words at the end of the day if we want to continue to live modern lives with all its benefits, if we want other countries to improve their lives too, its time to be honest and realize that fossil fuels and nuclear is going to be our primary source of energy for a long long time.
I would love to be proven wrong and would invest right away but i fear we will have to accept whatever the climate will throw at us and adopt as we have for thousands of years.
Nuclear is clean energy, so more nuclear and less fossil fuel is already a win. Investments are needed here, though I can't say whether they're good from investor's POV.
This is quite literally a non-problem. Next-gen plants will happily burn this waste, but even without them, I don't think you realize how little of that waste is generated per gigawatt hour - on the order of 150 grams. It's dangerous, sure (just like a lot of other chemical waste we produce on industrial scale), but we know how to store it well, and there's so little of it. If you reprocess the waste (take out the parts that can be used again as fuel), you end up with a nasty chemical sludge with half-life on the order of only 40 years, which is not that much. Storing that waste over centuries is a difficult problem, but is a really nice problem to have compared to making the planet uninhabitable and/or shutting down civilization.
There's plenty to worry about not leaking in solar too; nothing high-tech is truly clean, especially if you consider manufacturing.
Anyways, despite being near-synonymous with "renewable", I always understood "clean" in "clean energy" to mean "doesn't pollute the atmosphere". Nuclear doesn't pollute the atmosphere, so it qualifies. Even if you extend it to "doesn't pollute the environment", nuclear generally doesn't, as the little waste that's produced is stored as a part of the process - as opposed to waste products of traditional fossil fuel plants. Some new reactor designs allow you to further burn the waste, making it almost truly non-polluting in the general sense.
In all honesty, like many pro-nuclear people, I do emphasize calling nuclear "clean energy" on purpose, precisely to counter people like 'ThomPete upthread who lump together nuclear with fossil fuels. While still having some (and admittedly dangerous if mishandled) waste, in terms of cleanness, nuclear is really much much closer to solar & wind than it is to coal and gas - it is an ecological source, and grouping it together with fossil sources makes people dismiss one of the more effective ways at generating power in climate-protecting way.
> and grouping it together with fossil sources makes people dismiss one of the more effective ways at generating power in climate-protecting way.
To play devil's advocate, there's a good reason to group nuclear together with fossil fuel sources: both are thermal power plants, they only differ in the source of the heat. In terms of power generation, nuclear is much closer to coal and gas than it is to solar and wind.
That's fair, but if you want to go this way, you'll end up grouping them together with wind, hydro and concentrated solar, as they're all based on spinning coils around magnets (or the other way around). While this categorization may be useful for some specialized engineering discussions, it's useless when talking about environmental issues. When talking climate, we care about pollution and emissions - both of which put nuclear in the same group as renewables.
(The one potential environmental aspect where "thermal plants" as a category is useful is that thermal plants need a heat sink to operate, which usually means a river or a pond. On the scale of climate issues, however, this is a negligible point that I haven't even seen brought up once by anyone.)
Money can move politics. Also, while large plants are definitely not popular right now, small reactors just might. There's been some work done in miniaturizing nuclear reactors; it may be worth looking into.
Nuclear reactors are already miniaturized. That's what we use on nuclear powered ships and subs. They're also safer than utility scale. SMRs can be mass produced under strict QA, transported and assembled on site and offer important safety guarantees.
