Cav's Place

Not that there was any need for further reasons why nuclear energy is a bad idea and even the existing plants must be phased out as soon as possible, but when you see the very real concerns that Russia’s current tactics in Ukraine may lead to a nuclear disaster and the way in which they play on those fears to blackmail the world and even openly threaten other nuclear plants, can anyone still support nuclear energy? As you see, the spent fuel, which is the main problem even when the plants themselves operate flawlessly, is actually the biggest problem in this situation as well, but in a war you can’t rule out the risk of even more catastrophic scenarios. Not that you can rule it out even without a war, or even a threat of a terrorist attack or sabotage, but under these circumstances the probability of disaster increases dramatically and no other form of energy generation is capable of producing a disaster of such magnitude. In fact, few other things are, with the exception of actual nuclear and likely also the worst biological and chemical weapons, but I just mean to focus on energy generation here.
It is true that nuclear power plants, and the actual reactors in particular, tend to be well protected and designed to withstand many forms of attacks, along with errors and malfunctions, which is not true for many other kinds of power plants, and of those that need to be exposed to the elements in particular, such as solar panels or wind turbines. However, in case of an attack, sabotage or even some particularly bad human error, those would simply be destroyed, no longer producing energy and requiring more resources in order to be rebuilt but not having the potential of any sort of widespread disaster. Even plants that use fossil fuels, as terrible as they are for the environment, can harm in a much more limited way if they are destroyed, mainly as a result of the toxic smoke filling the surrounding area until the fire will be put out. Hydroelectric dams may actually pose more of a risk in case they’re destroyed or fail catastrophically, but even in that case the impact will be much more limited, plus that the affected area is usually predictable, and dams are a huge environmental problem anyway and at least new ones shouldn’t be built anymore for that reason.
In case of nuclear plants, however, and even in case of those small reactors that are now being developed and are supposed to start being installed in various places, obviously with far weaker protections and safeguards than the actual plants have, the threat is extreme, real and constant. Maybe nothing will happen now. Maybe nothing will happen in the vast majority of cases, the vast majority of the time. But something only needs to happen once. One catastrophic failure, one successful attack, and there will be no turning back, the effects of the disaster being felt for decades or even centuries to come. Again, not that this should even be necessary as an argument, considering the problems caused by the radioactive waste, but such a risk should never be acceptable even in theory… And, as we saw more than once over the course of history, it’s far from just a theory.