The first major problem with nuclear is that the type of energy produced is just not right. I know it hurts, but from a technical perspective the current crop of nuclear reactors are nothing but giant water boilers. Heavy, cumbersome, intricately complex, expensive kettles, providing steam for a steam engine, not a new magical form of energy.
This statement is equally true for traditional pressurized water, molten salt, modular and even fusion reactors. Their primary form of energy output is heat, which is then turned into steam spinning turbines and generating electricity. That’s all to it.
Nuclear reactors provide low to medium heat only, which is OK if you want to use it to generate electricity or to make pulp for paper production, but not nearly enough to maintain a complex technologically advanced civilization.
None of the current or proposed reactors (1) can produce the high heat needed to turn iron ore into steel, sand into molten glass, or limestone, clay and fly ash into cement. Without these materials, on the other hand, it would be impossible to build modern roads, bridges, dams, tunnels, high rise buildings and yes, new nuclear reactors. Believing that nuclear can somehow magically replace coal and natural gas in these essential high heat applications anytime soon is like thinking we could bake bread in an electric kettle. (I mean you can try, but then don’t tell me that you failed.)
Advocates of nuclear energy tend to forget how utterly dependent this civilization is on the wide-scale availability of cheap fossil fuels. The amount of heat energy provided every day by carbon rich fuels is multiples greater than all of the energy the grid delivers in the form of electricity.
As of today fossil fuels still generate 82% of all the energy consumed (mostly in the form of high heat) with only a fraction of that heat being turned into electric power. The share of electricity in final energy consumption, on the other hand, remains a mere 20%. And while it’s technically possible to use nuclear energy in Hydrogen electrolysis (a proposed replacement fuel for those high heat applications) the low end-to-end energy return on investment prohibits H2's use in a relevant scale.
Converting electricity to hydrogen eats up as much as half of the energy invested, while compression, piping and storage also comes with their associated losses. Hence the lack of evidence for a “hydrogen economy” emerging, despite the fact that it was proposed more than thirty years ago already.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/the-nuclear-non-solution