Nuclear plants don't live forever. Refusing new nuclear is tantamount to eliminating nuclear.
Also, there are certainly green activists against ALL nuclear. I don't have a formal survey handy, but based purely on the opinions of those that I know, far more are anti-nuclear than are neutral on the matter.
Similar opinions are expressed by a number of Green political groups around the world, and I've also struggled to reconcile their commitment to slowing global climate change with their rejection of nuclear power.
Ignoring the typical arguments against nuclear, I think a main point from them specifically is that investment in energy is zero-sum, and state resources directed towards nuclear energy are resources not going towards renewable energies. Furthermore, heating and transport make up a large proportion of carbon emissions, and these generally aren't powered by nuclear energy. So nuclear places the focus of energy transformation in the wrong place, and allows governments to believe they are solving the problem when much larger investment in renewables is required.
I'm not qualified enough in the area to agree or disagree with the implicit tradeoffs there, it's just the argument I've heard.
Maybe this is just my Silicon Valley-centric, rarefied group, but I have genuinely never met a rabid environmentalist hell-bent on shutting down nuclear power.
I know many environmentalists, including career activists. The worst they could be accused of is not making nuclear power their number one priority. But, abstractly at least, they all support increased nuclear power in principle.
I know many people against nuclear power. They, however, don't have many political or scientific beliefs, and their intelligences lie elsewhere than scientific or conceptual thinking. None would identify as green or environmentalist.
The biggest problems with nuclear power seems to be (a) the inertia of leftover regulations and bad vibes from the 60s-80s and (b) nuclear power is really, really expensive and requires a great deal of capital outlay and time to build and even to recover the energy costs of building it. People are also more sensitive to the worst case failure modes of a nuclear plant (which has happened like once in history) than they are to the failure modes of coal power (which are when they function like they're designed to).
I hear people say this but I also almost never meet environmentalists who are super against nuclear power. Most will say they of course prefer something extra clean like solar or geothermal but nuclear is usually the sort of middle of the road option in those circles. And many of the less idealistic I have met also think it is our only real solution.
In any case, I think nuclear is pretty much dead. It's just cheaper to spam windmills and solar panels. I think it will stay there for a while (in some countries, that have the history and the expertise), but it will not gain significantly in the future.
I think most environmentalist are just very anti-growth and just want to solve environmental issues by reducing any resource consumption. By saying no to nuclear they are fulfilling their anti-growth strategy, but leaving a large resource gap that gets filled by more polluting, less dramatic energy sources.
Gotta love the nuclear supporters in renewable energy discussions. My response is always the same: I'm totally with ya as long as the nuclear reactor is in your backyard.
Because we know about economies of scale and mass production. I think greens only think about their own pet projects. I don't know a single proponent of nuclear power who is against supplementing it with solar, wind, etc.
It's the sad truth that people seem very for nuclear, but no one wants to live near it. Of course, I've seen articles regarding people who don't want to live near wind turbines, so maybe people are just far to fickle.
Environmentalists have pretty much zero impact on the ability of nuclear plants to be started and demonstrate feasibility.
In the US, Georgia and South Carolina started building with nary a peep. France started building again without any environmental objections.
Yet these builds are all catastrophic failures, to the point that any other financial backer is scared away from even touching nuclear. The decision makers are those with the dollars to invest, not the environmentalists.
The problem with nuclear power in the US is that it's unbelievably expensive to construct and you will not get the NRC to approve it. Renewables are cheap; he has a consistent theme of supporting them because of this.
Also, solar and wind farms don't destroy the environment under them or anything; solar can make land more habitable by adding shade. What it does do is make the land harder to sell, which is a problem if you're a land banker pretending to be a farmer, a common situation in the US.
Conversely, we tend to see massive wind and solar farms built far away from the people most adamantly insisting they are the only green future...
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