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Nuclear is a heated topic and thought of informing myself more about it in order to have an opinion. I'm still in this process and the more I learn, the more I tend to see it as the wrong path.

Briefly the main issues of nuclear I can think of right now, are (btw most are mentioned in other comments): too expensive & too time consuming to build and to decommission old ones, their lifespam, as well as the waste problem. I didn't mention the danger of an accident because I believe there is a lot of misinformation about it. For example here is a post I made about Thyroid cancer and Fukushima in the Medicine community that I believe highlights some relevant issues. For Fukushima specifically I could suggest also this video for details on what happened and this recent paper titled Fukushima Contaminated Water Risk Factor: Global Implications.

A few article links:

• The shared history of oil and nuclear energy - The Maastricht University History Department Blog

• NuScale ends Utah project, in blow to US nuclear power ambitions - Reuters

• EU Scientists and Politicians Clash Over Gas and Nuclear as ‘Sustainable’ Investments - desmog

• A Closer Look at Two Operational Small Modular Reactor Designs

For videos, I could suggest:

• This video from Real Engineering talks about Why Germany Hates Nuclear Power and also talks about France.

• This free video course is quite understandable for people that do not have a science background, at least as far as I have gone through it.: Nuclear Energy: Science, Systems and Society - MIT

In the US context, it is nice that we already have a lot of nukes operational. They provide like 30% of our energy and it is cleaner energy than fossil fuels.

But nukes are uneconomical when compared to wind and solar. They are slow to build and they tend to cost way more than projections. Wind and solar deployments are predictable and don’t have overruns.

So keep the nukes we have, but invest in more solar and wind

I think a nuclear future is definitely greener than our gas, oil and coal based present. But wouldn't a renewable energy future be much, much better than either?

I've heard the argument that nuclear can provide a consistent base, which I suppose is true. But you need a way to flex the remaining renewables you have still, since nuclear can't turn up and down as easily as fossil fuels. Which to me says, nuclear + renewables requires the energy-flexing mechanisms that would also make pure renewable possible.

So my take is, I think it might help reduce warming somewhat, but really we should be aiming for 100% renewables.

It mostly lags behind because building it out is a deeply drawn out process that requires the type of consistent unsexy foresight governments don't exactly thrive in expressing.

its really expensive and really slow to build, so of you want to keep burning fossil fuels, its great for delay/distraction.

https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Electricity-transition/GenCost

edit: better chart screen cap

Nuclear was the correct answer, when climate change entered the scientific community in the 50s, it was the correct answer when it allowed France to nearly hit net zero for energy in the 70s, and it was the correct answer when the UN agreed we were all going to die unless we stopped burning all fossil fuels in the 90s.

The problem is that ever since the 2010s it’s been outpaced by improvements in wind and especially solar. Not coincidentally this is about the time that oil and gas companies stoped campaigning against Nuclear and suddenly started insisting that it was the only possible alternative.

It makes sense to keep what we have running and do some refurbishments, but in a world where the primary limit on the amount of solar and wind we can build is funding its high cost alone means going nuclear means far less clean energy, to say nothing of the decades more CO2 output from the coal and gas plants running in the years it would take to build such plants compared to the months it takes for a new solar or wind farm.

It will help in that it produces a million times less waste than coal. That is so much less it's less radioactive. And the waste dump is smaller.

Bonus: the only emission is water so it doesn't slowly make the planet uninhabitable.

Unfortunately current politicians would rather make murder machines

Nuclear is much more green than any fossil fuel based energy. It's also much more stable than renewables because it does not rely on the sun, wind, tides, etc. Renewables need more development around grid-scale storage. This is where nuclear can be a good transitional stop to an all-renewable energy future.

There are drawbacks to nuclear, of course, storage of waste material is chief among them.

Nuclear power plants are expensive to build, maintain, and operate. It makes me wonder how many sodium ion backup batteries that money could buy.