Reddit reviews Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future

Your post sounds smart, but it poses a false dilemma: it implies that we either use nuclear power or get climate change.

There are literally thousands of other alternatives. We can invest more in renewables, which scale up quicker than nuclear, cost less, don't pose the same catastrophic risks, and don't rely heavily on centralized state action. Baseload power is not a big problem for renewables if you ramp up battery storage (already happening) and improve the grid so that energy can be produced where it's windy or sunny and delivered where needed.

We can also simply get more efficient with our energy use in the first place. Economizing energy use should be our first priority, because all sources of energy have serious environmental drawbacks. (Even nuclear would have comparable emissions to oil and gas if scaled globally, because we'd have to dig into far less efficient uranium ores.) It can be as simple as making it easier for people to insulate their houses or planting more vegetation around their houses. (A few good trees can lower ambient temperature by 9F over other forms of shade, because trees evapotranspirate as part of their metabolism, and the phase change from liquid to gaseous water sucks up a lot of heat energy.) . It can also involve more forward-thinking measures, like ending the absurd 20th-century-style subsidies for automotive transport (like dumb zoning laws, parking requirements, federal outlays on auto infrastructure boondoggles, etc. -- these amount to literally trillions of dollars a year).

These are all great alternatives to nuclear power, which creates deadly waste that lasts for hundreds of thousands of years. We still don't know the full effects of Chernobyl, given that the Soviet government repressed Ukrainian and Belarusian public health research in the aftermath of the disaster. (MIT historian Kate Brown makes an interesting case that the international nuclear community, including U.S. nuclear interests, aided in this coverup.) The National Cancer Institute found that radionuclides from weapons testing in Nevada were responsible for 40,000-200,000 cases of thyroid cancer in the American West around the 1960s. We can expect more of that if nuclear accidents become relatively commonplace.

We can do a lot better than letting powerful incumbents lobby our government to keep propping up nuclear power.