A wedge or a weight? Critically examining nuclear power’s viability as a low carbon energy source from an intergenerational perspective

Who are the victims of low-carbon transitions? Towards a political ecology of climate change mitigation

“…Some-a great multitude of studies, in fact-looked at the actual deployment, diffusion, or use of climate mitigation technologies and practices, such as the uptake of energy efficiency retrofits (Willand et al 2020) or the utilization of hydrogen fuel cells (Scott and Powells 2020). Some focused all the way downstream on the disposal and waste arising from climate mitigation efforts, including the recycling complexities surrounding discarded solar panels in Kenya (Cross and Murray 2018), the Towards a political ecology 33 waste streams created by electric vehicle batteries (Skeete et al 2020), or the difficulty of handling long-lived nuclear waste (Barron and Hill 2019). Truly multi-scalar approaches that examined all six scales was rare and limited to only four studies in the corpus: Burke and Stephens 2018, Sovacool et al 2019a, Sovacool et al 2019b, and Sovacool et al 2020.…”

Public Attitude towards Nuclear and Renewable Energy as a Factor of Their Development in a Circular Economy Frame: Two Case Studies

“…According to some opinions, the nuclear sector can play an important role in achieving the stated climate goal. Its development could contribute to solving the problem of switching to a low-carbon direction of energy sector development in the immediate future [25][26][27][28][29][30]. However, the governments of many countries have a negative attitude towards nuclear power enterprises due to the risks of accidents at facilities.…”

Destined for decline? Examining nuclear energy from a technological innovation systems perspective

“…Cooper [90] concludes that the lack of R&D investment for sustained support of SMRs indicates a significant future challenge, while other authors question whether policy environments will be favorable enough [94]. Moreover, SMRs would also have to confront the issues that remain with all nuclear technologies, including radioactive waste, water consumption, and thermal pollution [95,96].…”