In 2006 I would have agreed with all four of these. Today I still agree more than I disagree. (Though I didn't think "urbanization" was something environmentalists generally opposed even at the time; the energy intensity of suburban or exurban living has long been recognized as higher than urban.)
The one I've since rather soured on is nuclear power. It is quite safe enough, certainly safer than continuing to burn fossils. I also think that reactors that are already completed and operating should be used as long as possible. But the dreadful delays and cost overruns with projects to build standardized EPR and AP1000 reactors have convinced me that nuclear is not the "fast, proven, affordable" path to decarbonization that it looked like in 2006. (Inevitably somebody will blame regulations. Note that these reactors are badly behind schedule and over budget in France, Finland, the United States, and China -- everywhere they've been attempted. China has a better track record with its own domestic designs but one reactor still takes nearly 6 years from construction start to commercial operation, slower than any kind of energy project but large scale hydro.)
Renewable generation has since grown in scale and improved its price:performance ratio faster than I thought possible in 2006, solar PV in particular. The intermittency of these newer renewable sources and difficulty of seasonal energy storage means that some additional nuclear may still be required for deep decarbonization, despite its horrendous schedule and budget problems. But new nuclear really doesn't look like the first, fastest, and best way to cut emissions any more.
You'd be taking a long punt in backing a reversal on nuclear.. the excess costs built into overcoming planning opposition and compliance may make it less attractive as a mitigation compared to PV and wind and pumped hydro storage. Not that the energy density or scale matches you understand: just that inside a 15-20 year deployment timeline more people will put money into lower energy intensity paths.
It certainly doesn't seem to have panned out at all. Indeed, there are countries (eg, ie, Germany) that have moved away from nuclear; as far as I've been able to tell with the backing of the environmentalists and to the detriment of the actual environment.
I really have to hold myself back from ranting about comparisons of countries using nuclear compared to their next door neighbors who do not. I've seen precious little evidence that nuclear power is anything but a positive for the environment compared to what people actually do in practice.
But the environmental movement absolutely seems to hate it.
Four reasons, really: trust, militarisation, cost, and worst-case.
Trust: long history of people claiming this stuff was "safe" then it turned out it wasn't. All the way from radium watch paint to dumping nuclear waste at sea.
A lot of the hatred of nuclear by environmentalists is personal; remember when the French security services blew up the Rainbow Warrior for campaigning against nuclear testing?
Cost now looks unfavourable compared to renewables. It can't easily be improved without concerns over safety. The reactors also take too long to build. We can build renewables much faster and cheaper, which will fill the gap.
Worst-case: Fukushima is moderately bad and has left a big unusable zone. Chernobyl was worse and briefly contaminated most of Western Europe; it still leaves 20% of Belarus' agricultural land unusable.
Trust: true. all industry, science suffers from this. commercialization and pragmatism rule. But, nuclear suffers more than others because we chose to ignore love canal type damage and focus on radionucliotides, in weighing up the risk/reward view.
Militarisation: also true. we're having a minor resurgence of concern about neonicatinoids. That aside, people tend to downplay the risks inherent in most biocides, for this purpose. I think the limited use in the syrian war has played to this: we all know things have been used (tm) and we're all secretly breathing sighs of relief that they appear to be less useful than we thought, if just as evil and scary to suffer. The nuclear arsenal isn't going away. But, brazil has no nuke warheads. Germany, turkey, sweden.. its a bit list of people with a civilian nuclear industry and no warheads.
Personal: I think this is the killer reason actually. I think people don't feel willing to flip on this issue (I used to work casually in the FoE office in edinburgh and I attended the torness demos back in the '70s. I changed my mind)
Cost: Most of the cost inflation feels to me like opportunistic side effects of the planning delay. Nuclear reactors for the small market in strategic icbm submarines have cost overruns but I am less sure the nuclear component of their build is responsible. None the less, civilian nuclear build out is insanely expensive so in the 10-15 year spend cycle, bang-for-buck from PV/Solar is hugely big by comparison. 20-50 years, I suspect its less clear but re-capitalizing newer PV/wind would probably work over time. Shorter field life, but better RoI is undenyable. But, at a lower power intensity.
Fukushima. I tend to believe the unusable zone is shrinking but I also think it was a clusterfuck only the japanese could have come up with. Their socio-political-civilEng culture tends to do things for maximum harm. Look at Tsukiji relocation for a non-nuclear instance of insane bad planning: relocate the fish auction to .. an industrially polluted site none of the fish merchants want to occupy ... WCGW?
Graphite reactors didn't make much sense to me long term. Windscale fire.. wasn't that also graphite core?
I hate to do this, but I feel like this is bringing historical steam engine boiler explosions to the table discussing current technology. pebble bed, 4th gen are a long long way from graphite. Maybe its me but this feels like re-stating the personal-hatred thing.
I'm not so pro-nuclear I'm blind to reality. I think my original statement stands: in the 15-20 year planning cycle it looks impossibly hard to make it fly economically, socially even though in energy intensity terms, its a better long term bet.
I like PV and Wind. I think emerging battery and pumped hydro makes more sense, but we should not be blind to the damage Dams do, to the environment. PH may actually be better in that score, less stable, unmoving deep cold de-oxygenated water. Overall, I think more renewables make a damn sight more sense than burning coal, gas or wood.
I've been bullish on nuclear for as long as I can remember. It's the perfect power source. Safe and dense power generation that scales extremely well. No CO2 emissions as part of normal operation. Not dependent on external factors such as hydro, wind, solar etc...
Gradually I've been pushed away from nuclear by three factors.
1. The high level of operational excellence required to avoid accidents is difficult to maintain. Ongoing oversight is difficult in any industry. Let alone something as out of sight/mind as power generation.
2. NIMBYism and FUD create large costs to the construction and operation of nuclear that can't simply be waved away.
3. The cost trends of PV solar are very promising.
Seems like we could build the future with PV + Natural gas and get 80% of the solution that nuclear would give us without all the surrounding headaches.
The one I've since rather soured on is nuclear power. It is quite safe enough, certainly safer than continuing to burn fossils. I also think that reactors that are already completed and operating should be used as long as possible. But the dreadful delays and cost overruns with projects to build standardized EPR and AP1000 reactors have convinced me that nuclear is not the "fast, proven, affordable" path to decarbonization that it looked like in 2006. (Inevitably somebody will blame regulations. Note that these reactors are badly behind schedule and over budget in France, Finland, the United States, and China -- everywhere they've been attempted. China has a better track record with its own domestic designs but one reactor still takes nearly 6 years from construction start to commercial operation, slower than any kind of energy project but large scale hydro.)
Renewable generation has since grown in scale and improved its price:performance ratio faster than I thought possible in 2006, solar PV in particular. The intermittency of these newer renewable sources and difficulty of seasonal energy storage means that some additional nuclear may still be required for deep decarbonization, despite its horrendous schedule and budget problems. But new nuclear really doesn't look like the first, fastest, and best way to cut emissions any more.