Nuclear Energy

I thank my opponent for the opportunity to discuss this important topic.

There happens to be a perfect alternative to nuclear energy, accruing all of the benefits of nuclear with none of the consequences, far older and simpler. It's called hydroelectric. It's cheaper, has less emissions, safer, and more efficient. Rather than heated water steaming via a chain reaction to drive a turbine, it simply drives a turbine by the natural motion of water going downhill. There is a very short list of 18 countries where this is impossible

This debate is fundamentally about whether competing forms of generation are better than nuclear.

Pro claimed that nuclear power is efficient. In fact in terms of energy used to create electricity per kwh, nuclear is worse than coal, so nuclear reactors aren't particularly efficient at converting input into electricity. The Hoover Dam generates about 900 megawatts of electricity, built a long time before nuclear power was even invented. And guess what? It's still more efficient than almost every nuclear reactor in the world today in terms of electricity output. More modern alternatives consistently outperform nuclear. Germany had a very windy and sunny day once which created so much power for their grid with renewables, it actually made the price of electricity negative, so power companies were actually paid to use electricity as it was such a burden. This is literally impossible with nuclear, and was one of the key reasons (along with nuclear being so amazingly expensive and the fact nobody likes it) why Germany is currently decommissioning their nuclear power systems. Efficiency is NOT one of nuclear's advantages.

Nuclear power has a very long and distinguished history of cost overruns. Around 50% of proposed nuclear plants are likely to default on loan guarantees, and that's for one very good reason: nuclear power is expensive.

In part this is because of the crazy lengths people need to go to for safety, and in part this is because the technology is inherently complex. Nuclear was originally embraced by nations such as France and the Japan as a major form of energy to reduce dependence on oil, with huge subsidies being put on their construction. But once people realized these subsidies were not going to be paying off, they bailed. Half of all first-generation plants were abandoned during construction, taking a huge financial toll.

The running costs of nuclear are high as well. Uranium is much less plentiful than coal, and harder to refine, so much more expensive - but as Pro pointed out this is completely offset by the cost. But the real costs are in waste disposal, decommissioning, insurance and security. These four costs make electricity crazy expensive: France, which relies on nuclear, pays $5,000 for just one kilowatt of electricity, the US by some estimates pays more.

Some newer nuclear reactor designs are kinda sustainable, although you still aren't going to see Hoover Dam levels of longevity. Nuclear power generation as a whole isn't.

Aside from the decidedly non-infinite amount of uranium in the world, nuclear waste (even if there isn't a lot of it with more modern tech) still can't be safely handled or used. Nuclear cooling technology for spent fuel - which you need to do before any reprocessing or storage - remains fundamentally flawed and unsafe. Then we seal this waste - some of which lasts for about 1,000,000 years - in big underground vaults and hope nothing happens in all that time. With Yucca mountain closing soon nobody has any idea what to do with the waste being made right now, and it's currently just sitting around at the plants. All the while you're dealing with uranium transportation (which of course needs to be highly secure), digging huge pits in the ground which emit tons of greenhouse gases, the refinement process which isn't exactly the most environmentally friendly thing ever, water discharges (yes you actually do need to swap out the water to cool reactors often - nuclear is the most inefficient form of power in terms of water use)... add all that together, and the environmental costs are actually massive.

No other form of generation has this kind of a scope of environmental impact. Sure coal - possibly the runner up - has greenhouse gases and mines, but little dangerous physical waste, the refinement process is simpler, and if the terrorists steal enriched coal then nobody will care much at all.