PROS:
Nuclear power plants create electricity without greenhouse gas emissions or air pollution.
Nuclear energy is one of two technologies that have been proven to lower carbon emissions from making electricity at scale.
Nuclear energy has the lowest life cycle mineral and metal requirements out of all clean energy technologies, which means we don’t need to mine as much.
Because uranium is so dense, we only need a small amount of it to make a lot of electricity.
Nuclear power plants make a lot of electricity using a small footprint, which means we get to keep more land untouched, unlike large solar and wind farms.
Nuclear power plants can give people stable, high paying jobs for up to 80 years.
Nuclear power plants produce carbon-free electricity 24/7, contrary to renewables, which only produce electricity when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing.
Nuclear power is as safe as other forms of clean energy.
Nuclear power can reduce our dependence on fossil fuels!
CONS
Nuclear power is expensive (in the US). Building new nuclear power plants has proven challenging and very expensive in the past few decades. For example, Vogtle in Georgia, the only nuclear power plant being built in the United States, is set to cost $30 Billion dollars (more than double the original $14B estimated cost).
It takes at least 7 years to build a new nuclear power plant, and in some cases, it can take over 10 years (as in the case of Vogtle, which started construction in 2012).
We don’t have a permanent solution to nuclear waste in the US (click here to learn more about the waste).
There is still strong opposition to nuclear power, which makes it challenging to build new reactors.