How do people feel about nuclear energy to being a bigger part of the grid in your country
July 4, 2025
Nuclear has been taking a back seat compared to solar and wind, but it has great potential. There is a lot of fear after Chernobyl but as time passes, what are the attitudes?
32 comments
I’d welcome it. More people die in Germany from the extra airpollution since the turn down of their nuclear plants EVERY YEAR, than died directly from Chernobyl. That is insane to me. The toleration of death from solid fuels is really amazing.
It is quite popular here and all relevant political parties support the nuclear energy.
The problem about Belgium is that there are 2 nuclear plants that should both have been fully decommissioned already. They are well behind on maintenance and there is no money for upkeep or replacement.
And of course a massive case of NIMBY.
Problem with Flanders is that there are very few remote locations to place one and Wallonia has protected nature and mountainous areas. So the number of suitable locations is limited there as well.
I used to be a big Fan, but to be honest I think it is not Wörth the effort anymore. Besides safety risks, which are manageable you will always have some waste and will need foreign countries to provide the fuel, which has the same issues we just had to handle regarding fossil ones.
My only grievance is, that the Green Parties often mix nuclear fission and fusion regarding subsidies.
Bring it on! We should have started in the 60s-70s, like Sweden. It’s a disgrace.
I think people here have less of an issue with nuclear power itself, there is a much larger issue of **how** we are implementing it. Our nuclear powerplant is being expanded, and while there are all sorts of concerns of course, by far the most common one is that the government chose Russia to expand it and they made it so with shady, secretive deals inclduing shady Russian and Chinese loans, the details of all of which have been classified for 30 years.
A lot of people in Poland is all for nuclear energy. But prevailing attitude is: not in my backyard.
With the modernization of renewables and the expected jump in those technologies i think nuclear is less and less a viable or intelligent option for a country such as Portugal that even now is getting by just fine without it. Nuclear is just too expensive and to much of a hassle.
People are mostly against traditional nuclear reactors, but we are building Thorium reactors that soon will be deployed. Thorium shares some similarity’s with traditional nuclear, but also the scale is different.
Every year in summer France gets into trouble because (thanks to climate change) their nuclear power plants cant be cooled anymore without bringing the rivers to boil. That stuff is not the kind of technology that has any future in europe (on of the fastest heating regions of the planet).
Also, and this is most important, Solar, Wind, and Batteries extremely cheap by now. This is now a simple question of the free market and suprise, surprise, the market always goes for the cheapest option. Nuclear is way too expensive, even when ignoring nuclear waste and all of that.
I find it a pity that there is such a resistance against nuclear energy.
One should have used disasters like Chernobyl and approached it from a different perspective. Like, how can we make sure such a accident never happens again. Or, how can we make nuclear energy the safest form of energy on the planet?
If we would have invested more into that topic from the beginning on we would be somewhere totally else now.
Compare it to cars and airplanes. We did not ban them because people were dying in accidents in those vehicles. Instead we said, ok, what is necessary in order to make these ways of transportation safer for the humans. We should have done the same with nuclear energy back then aswell and not taken such a resistant stance.
Maybe everyone would have his little mini nuclear powerplant sitting at home now if we acted different back then 😛
Do I support the use of nuclear energy? Absolutely. Do I trust my country to build nuclear reactors that are safe and won’t break down and cause a new Chernobyl (or, considering we are prone to earthquakes, a new Fukushima)? Absolutely no. A lot should change in Greece before we try make a nuclear reactor for energy production and we should prioritise in other infrastructure first (like for example have proper railways and airports)
In Ireland, due to our incompetent government, it would take 40 years to build and cost €30bn. And I’m not joking. They are still building the worlds most expensive children’s hospital and it’s years overdue.
Nuclear power is fine, but it is very expensive and takes a very long time to build, even in ideal circumstances.
>but it has great potential
at least for the consultants in the industry.
not so sure about the rest.
Nuclear as in, state of the art Nuclear reactors and fuel rod recycling (only 10% of fuel is truly spent in a decommissioned rod)? Bring it on!
Nuclear as in, extending the life of a reactor that should have been decommissioned decades ago because we failed to provide a feasible alternative? That’s a big no for me.
Nah, it’s incredibly expensive (unlike renewables), a bad partner for renewables (since you can’t quickly change output like with has or stored hydroelectric, which is much more helpful for coupling with pv and wind than a “baseload”) and has trouble during summer due to heating up the rivers used for cooling it. It had its time and I’m not saying turn off all nuclear plants today(well, we don’t have them, but talking about other EU countries) , but building new ones is purely ideological and not based in reality
The only ones who seriously want nuclear power in Germany are NIMBYs who are against renewable energy. Nuclear power is not needed in Germany, as it is uneconomical and unreliable compared to renewables.
It’s unpopular. Austria built a nuclear power plant and then held a vote that narrowly defeated the commissioning of the plant. The regions closest to the plant would have been in favor, but the region furthest away was against it. The reason for this was anti-nuclear sentiment due to Swiss plans to build a nuclear power plant right on the border directly next to the local Austrian population center. After the Chernobyl disaster, which massively affected most of Austria due to weather conditions, Austria’s anti-nuclear policy became entrenched and was a long-standing point of conflict with neighboring countries, particularly the Czech Republic (Temelin) and Slovakia (Mochovce), as Austria feared massive contamination in the event of an accident, as was the case with Chernobyl.
Today, the construction of a power plant of this type is politically completely unrealistic, but of course, “nuclear power” also flows to Austria as part of energy imports. But it’s hardly an issue anymore.
Definite pro nuclear, also, a lot of people I am meeting are pro.
Nuclear power is useful as a way to guarantee power during off hours from renewables (sun is down and no wind), but it tends to be very expensive due to the required safety precautions. There’s a reason new initiatives have a hard time getting funded and becoming profitable. It seems like it only works if governments take an active role in setting up and guaranteeing it’s functioning long-term. Small modular reactors seem like a great way to mediate the risks involved in those projects. Smaller upfront investment and smaller safety concerns (so also less nimby).
Better than coal and other fossil fuels (when done with modern technology and approaches).
But I think we should improve resilience of the electrical grid by not depending so much on a couple big power plants and hundreds of kilometres of wires between power plants and end users.
There should be smaller power plants (currently easiest with PV, wind + batteries) that could serve smaller “islands” as emergency / backup power suppliers in case the main power lines are damaged.
These “islands” could be solar panels on the building providing power only for that building or (currently) solar / wind farms that can support between a couple of hundreds to a couple of thousand residents. In the future, we should find additional sources of power for small power plants like that (nuclear or something else, just cleaner than fossil fuels).
We still need spinning mass to keep the grid frequency stable and for black starts.
Honestly, I find it really stupid — especially what happened when there were plans to build one in Peniche. The local population came out en masse protesting it out of fear…
Luckily, Portugal invested a lot in renewable energy, and thanks to that, we’ve somewhat offset the damage of not having nuclear power
Not sure about my own country, but the country where I live is the world leader in nuclear energy production which oscillates between 65 and 70% and I think that’s great. They have upgrades to existing reactors underway, with new centrals planned and some already being built. And to that I say GOOD. The more the better.
Nuclear plants pose a great risk in case of heatwaves. In France, we’ve had to shut down some reactors because we could not cool them. I’d say, let’s not expand nuclear energy while securing it what we currently have and instead invest in renewable energy that are less risky and pose no threat to ecosystems (i.e, let’s not be China and drown our lands with dams for hydropower)
idk how people are scared of an nuclear accident in europe.
1. chernobyl – a soviet made reactor built during the cold war, built not according to any modern safety regulations, overheated due to very bad design flaws and incompetent test being done.
2. fukushima – destroyed by a fucking tsunami+earthquake, which dont happen in europe.
nuclear is extremely safe and it pisses me off chernobyl still scares people away from it
The right wing in Sweden are really trying to make new nuclear happen. They are obviously trying to get “the market” to build it, but they are not interested, so they are adding subsidiaries, government loans with great terms, and a set, high, minimum price for electricity for at least 40 years. Still hard to get a company to build it since they have been financial disasters anywhere they have tried building in “the west”. The one thing they will not do is negotiate with the other side, even though that’s what the companies are demanding since any deals that are out after the next election is worthless.
The debate among the public is ongoing. A lot of right wing voters want the stability of nuclear, even if it means higher prices overall and much higher prices for a couple of decades as they build out and the companies stop building renewables. The left wing is pretty much against any nuclear power for both historical and financial reasons.
Personally I see the advantages nuclear brings, but I also see that Sweden could handle our demands much cheaper (and less taxing for the environment) by building renewables instead, and that’s also what the investigations ordered by the government says, but they don’t want to hear that so they don’t listen. Finland, our closest neighbor to the east, built a reactor pretty recently, it went over budget by a factor of about four, and took like fifteen years longer than planned, and nothing indicates that we’d do better.
Also the tech seems to be near (-ish at least) some breakthroughs, and to me that means it’s a pretty bad time to invest in something that takes decades to build, costs hundreds of millions and needs to give value for many decades just to make up the cost.
Negative if it’s publicly funded or subsidised. Neutral if it’s privately funded.
Nuclear is so expensive compared to renewables like land-wind, solar or hydroelectric. But if people want to invest their own money and compete on the market, they should be allowed to do so.
I feel like the discussion about nuclear is so memey here. People barely talk about tried and true tech, but thorium plants and SMRs. Norwegian nuclear supporters often don’t seem to be aware that hydroelectric reservoirs work as storage for variable energy.
As an Italian i feel like we, as usual, missed the train when it was time to build them in the 90s/early 2000s,following the fear-mongering enacted by politicians and others with vested interests in keeping things as they were after Chernobyl.
I think that we should’ve (and still should) built reactors back in the day, cause the main argument that detractors had and still have of “what if we have another Chernobyl? We don’t want it here in Italy!” was and still is defeated by the fact that we have many reactors in bordering countries (some right next to the border) anyway.
BUT, do I trust our current government to build them correctly? Fuck NO!
Knowing the way these things happen in Italy, it would take another 20 years of planning,starting and stopping the projects, to then have after those 20 years already old and subpar reactors, realistically built like shit cause of mafia infiltration in the companies building them and various subjects lining their pockets by falsifying building records and skimping on materials and safety.
I don’t even care about the potential dangers
Nuclear is really goddamn expensive and you have to get the uranium from somewhere too. Renewables are just cheaper
I would be against it. Not because I’m anti-nuclear, but because we have many rivers that we can dam and enough geothermal that we can utilize.
We also dont have the necessary man power i.e. people with the education that’s needed for a nuclear power plant, and the money, and the money for maintenance
We are building wind farms, something that I’m kind of against, but it’s mostly about end of life for the wind mills, rather than some birds that might be killed
Finland would likely be building another new reactor at Hanhikivi by now, were it not for the unfortunate decision to partner with the Russian company Rosatom. (Alternatively, if the Olkiluoto 3 EPR hadn’t been delayed so extensively – TVO originally planned to build a second unit but let the building permits lapse once schedules began to slip too far.)
Public support for additional nuclear power remains strong, but the financial incentives are lacking: electricity prices in Finland are already among the lowest in Europe, and as a sparsely populated country, Finland could be covered with cheaper wind turbines – if only there were enough demand for the electricity.
Municipal district heating companies are also exploring the construction of small, heating-only nuclear reactors in hopes of eliminating the need to burn peat and other biomass. Heating-only reactors would allow for much simpler and safer designs.
32 comments
I’d welcome it. More people die in Germany from the extra airpollution since the turn down of their nuclear plants EVERY YEAR, than died directly from Chernobyl. That is insane to me. The toleration of death from solid fuels is really amazing.
It is quite popular here and all relevant political parties support the nuclear energy.
The problem about Belgium is that there are 2 nuclear plants that should both have been fully decommissioned already. They are well behind on maintenance and there is no money for upkeep or replacement.
And of course a massive case of NIMBY.
Problem with Flanders is that there are very few remote locations to place one and Wallonia has protected nature and mountainous areas. So the number of suitable locations is limited there as well.
I used to be a big Fan, but to be honest I think it is not Wörth the effort anymore. Besides safety risks, which are manageable you will always have some waste and will need foreign countries to provide the fuel, which has the same issues we just had to handle regarding fossil ones.
My only grievance is, that the Green Parties often mix nuclear fission and fusion regarding subsidies.
Bring it on! We should have started in the 60s-70s, like Sweden. It’s a disgrace.
I think people here have less of an issue with nuclear power itself, there is a much larger issue of **how** we are implementing it. Our nuclear powerplant is being expanded, and while there are all sorts of concerns of course, by far the most common one is that the government chose Russia to expand it and they made it so with shady, secretive deals inclduing shady Russian and Chinese loans, the details of all of which have been classified for 30 years.
A lot of people in Poland is all for nuclear energy. But prevailing attitude is: not in my backyard.
With the modernization of renewables and the expected jump in those technologies i think nuclear is less and less a viable or intelligent option for a country such as Portugal that even now is getting by just fine without it. Nuclear is just too expensive and to much of a hassle.
People are mostly against traditional nuclear reactors, but we are building Thorium reactors that soon will be deployed. Thorium shares some similarity’s with traditional nuclear, but also the scale is different.
You can learn more about Thorium here:
[https://youtu.be/bz4aTO6M4Ho?si=GjNndZjR9mBYCYQk](https://youtu.be/bz4aTO6M4Ho?si=GjNndZjR9mBYCYQk)
Copenhagen Atomics:
[https://youtu.be/HMv5c32XXoE?si=HCbpWsvFGlNNzIB-](https://youtu.be/HMv5c32XXoE?si=HCbpWsvFGlNNzIB-)
Every year in summer France gets into trouble because (thanks to climate change) their nuclear power plants cant be cooled anymore without bringing the rivers to boil. That stuff is not the kind of technology that has any future in europe (on of the fastest heating regions of the planet).
Also, and this is most important, Solar, Wind, and Batteries extremely cheap by now. This is now a simple question of the free market and suprise, surprise, the market always goes for the cheapest option. Nuclear is way too expensive, even when ignoring nuclear waste and all of that.
I find it a pity that there is such a resistance against nuclear energy.
One should have used disasters like Chernobyl and approached it from a different perspective. Like, how can we make sure such a accident never happens again. Or, how can we make nuclear energy the safest form of energy on the planet?
If we would have invested more into that topic from the beginning on we would be somewhere totally else now.
Compare it to cars and airplanes. We did not ban them because people were dying in accidents in those vehicles. Instead we said, ok, what is necessary in order to make these ways of transportation safer for the humans. We should have done the same with nuclear energy back then aswell and not taken such a resistant stance.
Maybe everyone would have his little mini nuclear powerplant sitting at home now if we acted different back then 😛
Do I support the use of nuclear energy? Absolutely. Do I trust my country to build nuclear reactors that are safe and won’t break down and cause a new Chernobyl (or, considering we are prone to earthquakes, a new Fukushima)? Absolutely no. A lot should change in Greece before we try make a nuclear reactor for energy production and we should prioritise in other infrastructure first (like for example have proper railways and airports)
In Ireland, due to our incompetent government, it would take 40 years to build and cost €30bn. And I’m not joking. They are still building the worlds most expensive children’s hospital and it’s years overdue.
Nuclear power is fine, but it is very expensive and takes a very long time to build, even in ideal circumstances.
>but it has great potential
at least for the consultants in the industry.
not so sure about the rest.
Nuclear as in, state of the art Nuclear reactors and fuel rod recycling (only 10% of fuel is truly spent in a decommissioned rod)? Bring it on!
Nuclear as in, extending the life of a reactor that should have been decommissioned decades ago because we failed to provide a feasible alternative? That’s a big no for me.
Nah, it’s incredibly expensive (unlike renewables), a bad partner for renewables (since you can’t quickly change output like with has or stored hydroelectric, which is much more helpful for coupling with pv and wind than a “baseload”) and has trouble during summer due to heating up the rivers used for cooling it. It had its time and I’m not saying turn off all nuclear plants today(well, we don’t have them, but talking about other EU countries) , but building new ones is purely ideological and not based in reality
The only ones who seriously want nuclear power in Germany are NIMBYs who are against renewable energy. Nuclear power is not needed in Germany, as it is uneconomical and unreliable compared to renewables.
It’s unpopular. Austria built a nuclear power plant and then held a vote that narrowly defeated the commissioning of the plant. The regions closest to the plant would have been in favor, but the region furthest away was against it. The reason for this was anti-nuclear sentiment due to Swiss plans to build a nuclear power plant right on the border directly next to the local Austrian population center. After the Chernobyl disaster, which massively affected most of Austria due to weather conditions, Austria’s anti-nuclear policy became entrenched and was a long-standing point of conflict with neighboring countries, particularly the Czech Republic (Temelin) and Slovakia (Mochovce), as Austria feared massive contamination in the event of an accident, as was the case with Chernobyl.
Today, the construction of a power plant of this type is politically completely unrealistic, but of course, “nuclear power” also flows to Austria as part of energy imports. But it’s hardly an issue anymore.
Definite pro nuclear, also, a lot of people I am meeting are pro.
Nuclear power is useful as a way to guarantee power during off hours from renewables (sun is down and no wind), but it tends to be very expensive due to the required safety precautions. There’s a reason new initiatives have a hard time getting funded and becoming profitable. It seems like it only works if governments take an active role in setting up and guaranteeing it’s functioning long-term. Small modular reactors seem like a great way to mediate the risks involved in those projects. Smaller upfront investment and smaller safety concerns (so also less nimby).
Better than coal and other fossil fuels (when done with modern technology and approaches).
But I think we should improve resilience of the electrical grid by not depending so much on a couple big power plants and hundreds of kilometres of wires between power plants and end users.
There should be smaller power plants (currently easiest with PV, wind + batteries) that could serve smaller “islands” as emergency / backup power suppliers in case the main power lines are damaged.
These “islands” could be solar panels on the building providing power only for that building or (currently) solar / wind farms that can support between a couple of hundreds to a couple of thousand residents. In the future, we should find additional sources of power for small power plants like that (nuclear or something else, just cleaner than fossil fuels).
We still need spinning mass to keep the grid frequency stable and for black starts.
Honestly, I find it really stupid — especially what happened when there were plans to build one in Peniche. The local population came out en masse protesting it out of fear…
You can find more info about the whole thing here: https://ejatlas.org/print/nuclear-power-station-in-ferrel-peniche-portugal
Luckily, Portugal invested a lot in renewable energy, and thanks to that, we’ve somewhat offset the damage of not having nuclear power
Not sure about my own country, but the country where I live is the world leader in nuclear energy production which oscillates between 65 and 70% and I think that’s great. They have upgrades to existing reactors underway, with new centrals planned and some already being built. And to that I say GOOD. The more the better.
Nuclear plants pose a great risk in case of heatwaves. In France, we’ve had to shut down some reactors because we could not cool them. I’d say, let’s not expand nuclear energy while securing it what we currently have and instead invest in renewable energy that are less risky and pose no threat to ecosystems (i.e, let’s not be China and drown our lands with dams for hydropower)
idk how people are scared of an nuclear accident in europe.
1. chernobyl – a soviet made reactor built during the cold war, built not according to any modern safety regulations, overheated due to very bad design flaws and incompetent test being done.
2. fukushima – destroyed by a fucking tsunami+earthquake, which dont happen in europe.
nuclear is extremely safe and it pisses me off chernobyl still scares people away from it
The right wing in Sweden are really trying to make new nuclear happen. They are obviously trying to get “the market” to build it, but they are not interested, so they are adding subsidiaries, government loans with great terms, and a set, high, minimum price for electricity for at least 40 years. Still hard to get a company to build it since they have been financial disasters anywhere they have tried building in “the west”. The one thing they will not do is negotiate with the other side, even though that’s what the companies are demanding since any deals that are out after the next election is worthless.
The debate among the public is ongoing. A lot of right wing voters want the stability of nuclear, even if it means higher prices overall and much higher prices for a couple of decades as they build out and the companies stop building renewables. The left wing is pretty much against any nuclear power for both historical and financial reasons.
Personally I see the advantages nuclear brings, but I also see that Sweden could handle our demands much cheaper (and less taxing for the environment) by building renewables instead, and that’s also what the investigations ordered by the government says, but they don’t want to hear that so they don’t listen. Finland, our closest neighbor to the east, built a reactor pretty recently, it went over budget by a factor of about four, and took like fifteen years longer than planned, and nothing indicates that we’d do better.
Also the tech seems to be near (-ish at least) some breakthroughs, and to me that means it’s a pretty bad time to invest in something that takes decades to build, costs hundreds of millions and needs to give value for many decades just to make up the cost.
Negative if it’s publicly funded or subsidised. Neutral if it’s privately funded.
Nuclear is so expensive compared to renewables like land-wind, solar or hydroelectric. But if people want to invest their own money and compete on the market, they should be allowed to do so.
I feel like the discussion about nuclear is so memey here. People barely talk about tried and true tech, but thorium plants and SMRs. Norwegian nuclear supporters often don’t seem to be aware that hydroelectric reservoirs work as storage for variable energy.
As an Italian i feel like we, as usual, missed the train when it was time to build them in the 90s/early 2000s,following the fear-mongering enacted by politicians and others with vested interests in keeping things as they were after Chernobyl.
I think that we should’ve (and still should) built reactors back in the day, cause the main argument that detractors had and still have of “what if we have another Chernobyl? We don’t want it here in Italy!” was and still is defeated by the fact that we have many reactors in bordering countries (some right next to the border) anyway.
BUT, do I trust our current government to build them correctly? Fuck NO!
Knowing the way these things happen in Italy, it would take another 20 years of planning,starting and stopping the projects, to then have after those 20 years already old and subpar reactors, realistically built like shit cause of mafia infiltration in the companies building them and various subjects lining their pockets by falsifying building records and skimping on materials and safety.
I don’t even care about the potential dangers
Nuclear is really goddamn expensive and you have to get the uranium from somewhere too. Renewables are just cheaper
I would be against it. Not because I’m anti-nuclear, but because we have many rivers that we can dam and enough geothermal that we can utilize.
We also dont have the necessary man power i.e. people with the education that’s needed for a nuclear power plant, and the money, and the money for maintenance
We are building wind farms, something that I’m kind of against, but it’s mostly about end of life for the wind mills, rather than some birds that might be killed
Finland would likely be building another new reactor at Hanhikivi by now, were it not for the unfortunate decision to partner with the Russian company Rosatom. (Alternatively, if the Olkiluoto 3 EPR hadn’t been delayed so extensively – TVO originally planned to build a second unit but let the building permits lapse once schedules began to slip too far.)
Public support for additional nuclear power remains strong, but the financial incentives are lacking: electricity prices in Finland are already among the lowest in Europe, and as a sparsely populated country, Finland could be covered with cheaper wind turbines – if only there were enough demand for the electricity.
Municipal district heating companies are also exploring the construction of small, heating-only nuclear reactors in hopes of eliminating the need to burn peat and other biomass. Heating-only reactors would allow for much simpler and safer designs.