> And the West is also largely not keen on producing new humans... And seems to think it can just import people from other, far, away places.

Shoving immigration diatribes randomly into unrelated discussions is really tiresome. Sir, this is a comment thread about nuclear power.

> And the West is also largely not keen on producing new humans (time and costs as much as anything else).

> And seems to think it can just import people from other, far, away places.

That seems fundamentally OK? The #1 problem leading to humans not having enough to live comfortably is that we have an enormous number of humans and limited resources. We can't unlimit resources. There isn't a very nice way to force people to stop having children. The remarkably low birthrate is an amazing outcome of a superficially intractable problem.

If the Africans catch up with everyone else and stop having too many children, the only thing that needs to happen is better education and the situation is actually good. We're on a reasonable trend with AI and robots. People are choosing not to have kids. That's workable.

Renewables and storage are cheaper and faster.

I agree that Europe needs to be energy independent. And population decline is a global problem.

Nuclear was the correct solution in the 90s. It's not now. Arguably you need to keep a small amount going to maintain a nuclear deterrent and subsidise it for that purpose, but that doesn't need to be any more than the current level of production.

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> And the West is also largely not keen on producing new humans (time and costs as much as anything else).

In my state the immediate costs to parents for raising a kid up to the age of 18 are around eight median gross incomes with the opportunity costs usually estimated about as high. This means having a kid loses parents around one quarter to one third of their total lifetime income. That's before even considering environmental factors. I don't think there's a decision an average person can make that's more ecologically destructive than having a child.

Having kids is a financial and ecological disaster. As an outside observer it's remarkable to me people are still having any kids at all, which speaks to the strong subjective factors overpowering whatever objective considerations one might have about it.

Humankind should depopulate, we cannot sustain infinite growth and are already destroying our planet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation