Its a type of energy that gets more expensive

We choose to make it so. Constantly adding security features and not financing research. It could have gone done has well if we had pushed for small reactors, helped the EPR more, not shut down the research into plutonium as a fuel…

Trash is not solved

It is inert and a lot of it has the potential to be a future fuel. “Put it in a hole below the water table” is pretty close to a solution.

A minor error can have a huge environmental impact, especially in densly populated areas like Europe

It will be hard to be as impactful as coal or thermal engines, which are considered to be responsible for about 48 000 premature deaths yearly here in France. If nuclear energy allowed a country to decarbonate, it could “afford” a Chernobyl per year and still save lives.

Plants need cooling, most use rivers and that does not mix well with rising temperatures, and have to be shut down in summer

That’s simply not true. Every year journalists fall for it but here is a breakdown:

• Every year some plants undergo planned maintenance in summer, not because it is too hot but because there is less consumption (winter heating is when the peak is)
• Some plants do lower their outputs, the most they had to do it so far was by 0.2% of the total output of the country because of environmental regulations that basically forbid any heating of the water above certain temperatures.
• It only touches plants that don’t have the iconic cooling towers. Plants with cooling towers do not warm rivers, in some case they may even cool them down.

As long as there are liquid rivers, plants will be able to cool down. We will have much more serious problems before this becomes an issue.

Nuclear plants are not flexible and can’t react to energy availability

It can. As I am writing that, it is 1pm here, we are at 33GW of nuclear production, mostly because there is a lot of solar power and Germany is flooding us with electricity with negative energy. At 4am, we were at 42GW of nuclear. Image

Most fuel is produced by less reliable states.

Minerals are fungible, therefore consumers go for the cheapest. It usually means countries where semi-slavery is the norm and environmental regulations are not a thing. They do tend to be shitty countries yes. Non-fossil mineral resources however are found pretty uniformly over the globe (having mountains helps). There are uranium mines in France that we shut down because of labor cost.

No public backing

That’s the main problem. The above lies have been repeated ad nauseam and local opposition means that opening new nuclear plants is basically impossible. This is a policy and opinion problem mostly.

I am bitter about it. The sane plan was to go full nuclear in the 90s, double the electricity production, get rid of coal and thermal vehicles that way and slowly transition over 40 years into solar as we either get batteries costs down or develop space based solar power.

Now we are getting the transition but it was oil-fueled instead of nuclear-fueled and this choice was made by people misled into believing they defended the environment by fighting nuclear power.

Yes, wind/solar + batteries is the future (though I don’t think these are cost competitive with nuclear yet. Solar alone is, batteries not) but opting out of nuclear was a very costly option for the climate.