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Sure - me. I support some left wing policies but my stance on climate activism has little to do with those, and I'm not a communist (I'm open about my political ideology - distributism). Though in the interests of full disclosure, I think that many of the current sources of climate pollution are terrible for everyone involved and should be stopped, but for some of those cases concerns about the climate aren't the only factor. The Iraq War had a massive carbon footprint, but I'm not going to lie and claim that my opposition to it revolved around environmental concerns.
If that's not good enough, there's a local political party which takes the climate seriously and isn't interested in simply applying left-wing policies (notably being against massive amounts of immigration) - the Sustainable Australia party. I'd throw John Michael Greer onto the list as a conservative, but he isn't really a climate change activist - he thinks that it is already baked into the cake and the only thing that people can really do is make better and more sustainable choices in their personal lives.
Would you accept a rollback on trans issues, gun control, immigration, and other right-wing issues in order to get allies against climate change? Because that's the problem. Climate change is urgent when it comes to "you have to give up something" but is suddenly not so urgent when it comes to "we have to give up something".
I said that I support some leftist policies, not that I actually am left-wing. The specific issues you listed are ones that I don't actually care about - trans issues are just not something I think are particularly relevant, but I support gun rights and I'm also against immigration (because it damages labour and the environment both). So you're essentially asking me to agree to a bunch of policies I actually support - in which case the answer is hell yes.
This is actually one of the main reasons that the climate change movement failed - people saw that a lot of the most prominent activists wanted to preserve their own carbon consumption habits while shoving the costs onto others (especially people in the wage class). I personally walk my talk and do my best to minimise my own carbon footprint, and there's no way I could look someone in the eyes and tell them it was important if I wasn't willing to make my own sacrifices.
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Can you name public figures? It seems like there's some mostly-not-environmentalist figures who have concern about climate change, but no environmentalists who support nuclear power, hydropower, other reasonable carbon solutions.
I'm going to have a tough time naming public figures because the forces (in the non-conspiratorial sense) that make figures public aren't actually big fans of people who are talking seriously about these issues - public cognitive bandwidth is reserved for more important figures like Baby Gronk, The Rizzler and the Hawk Tuah girl. I've seen a lot of environmentalists and green activists support things like hydro, geothermal and wind as well - but those power sources have limits which mean they can't be scaled up to the level required to support modern first world lifestyles. There's nothing wrong with hydropower per se, but there are only so many places you can actually build a dam and get a decent return on your investment. Geothermal, if appropriately developed, might even be able to supply 10% of our energy needs in the future - which is great, but not an actual answer to the dilemma we're facing.
But that said, you have several large obstacles in the way of convincing environmentalists to support nuclear. Nuclear power as it is currently available to us does not provide enough energy returned on energy invested for it to be a viable option even without the costs of dealing with waste. France's nuclear power system was only viable because they bought Uranium at a 97% discount due to their exploitation of Africa, and even their system has had to be nationalised due to going bankrupt. Hypothetical nuclear reactors which generate electricity too cheap to meter have been 20 years in the future since the 1960s, but are still yet to materialise. When they do appear and generate enough electricity to pay for their own creation without a galaxy of government subsidies, I will be extremely happy and advocate building them all over the globe as soon as possible - but they haven't appeared, despite people promising that they will for half a century.
Compared to what? As far as I know it easily beats under reasonable operating assumptions almost everything except for fossil fuels. Are you talking about energy return on investment or financial return on investment? The cost of uranium that France paid has nothing to do with EROI. But in any case, the cost of uranium is, at this time, a miniscule cost of nuclear plant operation. The current high cost of nuclear plant operation has much more to do with deliberate regulatory sabotage than the inherent cost of the technology. There are, as we speak, newer, safer, more efficient reactors that have been designed and even passed through the arduous DOE approval process such as the AP1000 - not hypothetical in the least - but the high cost of legal construction delays and regulatory uncertainty makes commitment to construction very difficult and until very recently the DOE has been extremely reluctant to approve almost any experimental or prototype reactors, often on the grounds that the technology was not proven and so the risks could not be quantified - an obviously self-fulfilling state of affairs. They are being deployed in other more pragmatic countries. That said, I personally thing the prevailing LWR uranium cycle is terribly inefficient and a technological dead end, but it still generates an incredible amount of power.
That has started to change and in addition to the small modular reactors that are nearing market availability, serious followup to the molten salt reactor research that was done in the 1960's may finally be moving forward. However, I don't anticipate this will change many peoples' minds about whether they oppose nuclear power - it will just change the reasons. And sadly, the U.S. is playing from far behind other countries, especially China, in terms of building and testing experimental and prototype reactors. I don't doubt that many other countries will be deploying Chinese reactors, which we will of course refuse to do out of sheer pig-headedness and because we still have lots of fossil fuels to consume, and all the while people will be claiming that nuclear power just isn't practical enough.
Compared to the energy needs of continuing current western lifestyles and patterns of consumption into the future, which is the only comparison that actually matters. Current nuclear technology, even with rosy assumptions, isn't capable of doing it. I would love to be proven wrong, with an example of a profitable nuclear power system with an EROEI that can support a modern first world economy, but I don't think that can happen. The reason I bring up profitability and cost is that they are ultimately a reflection of viability, and probably our most accurate one (which is why France's cheap uranium is relevant). I'll also freely grant that nuclear power does have some use-cases - it is fantastic for submarines and aircraft carriers for one, but it has yet to be demonstrated that it can be a viable energy base for a modern first-world economy. I can believe that regulatory burdens contribute to making nuclear power less productive, but I think at least some of those regulatory burdens are actually good (your nuclear plant should not be dumping radioactive waste in the local primary school playground etc), and I don't believe they are enough of a burden that removing them would make nuclear that much better of an option.
I'll believe it when I see it. This is explicitly what I was talking about when I mentioned hypothetical reactors. They have been "nearing" market availability for several decades now, and I can remember being excited for those liquid molten salt reactors ten years ago myself. Maybe you're right and this time is different, but I'll need a bit more evidence than the same claims of imminent cheap and sustainable energy that have been made for longer than I have been alive. That said, if you're right and those future nuclear reactors actually do just solve all the energy problems we're facing then I'll be extremely happy and update my flair on here to reflect that I was wrong (and keep it that way forever).
Specifically regarding EROI, this makes it sounds like you're calling for continuing to use fossil fuels.
I disagree, the politics are too fucked and the regulatory environment too insane for cost to be a reliable predictor of viability. As I said, the price of uranium is practically a rounding error in plant operation, so France's uranium deal, whatever it was, is basically irrelevant. Actual fuel, including all the expensive processing and assembly which is unaffected by raw uranium prices, still only accounts for something like 20% of a plant's costs. Obviously I am not arguing for having no regulations, just that there might be a rational middle ground between "dumping radioactive waste in the local primary school playground" and the current status quo of "store all of it in the least efficient possible way." We actually created a facility specifically for this, and then just decided not to use for essentially no good reason.
However the recent regulations definitely strangled the industry. The lack of any clarity as to permitting, approvals, and timelines made capital investment impossible. It just isn't possible to underwrite a billion dollar project without some assurance that it won't be litigated for multiple decades, or ultimately rejected halfway into construction. As has been discussed in other contexts, allowing indefinite project blockers is usually sufficient to make it a soft rejection. There is no scientific or practical reason that the law needs to be so ambiguous and burdensome. As I said, it has recently improved and some of the first new reactors since the 1970's have finally started to come online.
However, it's unlikely new reactors will "solve all the energy problems we're facing"* because fossil fuels still exist and will still be cheaper.
Actually, the opposite - continuing to use fossil fuels is impossible, because there's a finite amount of them and you eventually run out. But worse, because humans tend to extract the easiest, best resources first, the energy return and economic viability of them will go down well before we actually run out.
And if fossil fuels are the only energy source capable of powering modern civilisations, then when you remove that energy source without replacing it with something better/equivalent you end up without modern civilisations - there's no inherent law of the universe which says that modern western lifestyles are a permanent fixture of reality. You don't end up in Mad Max land (we had civilisation before we had fossil fuels after all) but you do end up with a society very different to the one we have now.
I will believe that this problem has been solved when those reactors are functioning and supplying us with electricity - but people have been saying similar things for the past decade, and nothing has happened. Again, these advanced reactors have been on the verge of solving the energy crisis for the last 50 years, so I'm not exactly holding my breath.
Climate change is going to cause vast amounts of economic damage as extreme weather events increase and climate belts slowly head north. These changes are going to encourage much more energy usage precisely at a time when that energy usage makes the problem worse - and the source of that energy is starting to run dry. The transition from fossil fuels to a new mixture of energy is going to cause lots and lots of economic pain on top of having to deal with massive amounts of pollution and changes due to global warming. There are going to be climate refugees as water systems change location, good farming land moves around (Siberians are probably going to be pretty happy though) and some places simply become unliveable. We need to find a viable alternative to fossil fuels, and in order to have a gentle transition to a society that uses that alternative we need to find it several years ago - which means that we aren't going to have a gentle transition even if we do manage to find something.
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Whores have been around forever? Like being a sexy lady for money doesn't require much explanation. It's called 'the oldest profession' for a reason.
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