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Our civilization is a total disaster. We face a crisis that we can never stop talking about, 'climate change'. There is a easy and simply model to follow to ma

by nickik 8y ago

Our civilization is a total disaster. We face a crisis that we can never stop talking about, 'climate change'. There is a easy and simply model to follow to make a massive impact on this problem, but somehow for reasons of pure bias, ignorance and misinformation we do not do this. Nuclear power could have and should have solved this problem by now. Nuclear power was on track to replace older energy technologies faster then any earlier energy transition. But somehow we failed, mostly because of the anti-humans, sometimes called 'environmentalists' who declared war on nuclear above even coal. They declared their goal in terms of anti-nuclear as 'increase regulation to a point where nuclear becomes unprofitable' and they have largely succeeded. Since then the environmental movement has grown, and the problem they fight have grown, but they never went back and ganged their totally flawed assumptions about nuclear and they continue to spread outright lies and misinformation about nuclear energy. I would not blame them alone, but the reality is the whole population now basically believes most of these lies, its tragic. The left often accuses the right of being anti-science but in reality most anti-GMO, anti-Nuclear people are form the left.

gldalmaso 8y ago
I don't think environmentalists are nearly as capable of throwing a wrench on nuclear energy development as you say. Seems to me like the real issue here is that if nuclear energy is pushed as the go to modern day energy source, than global politics would be that much harder for the develop nations that "rule" the others. The US has a very clear agenda of freezing the status quo in the nuclear weapons club, they are not accepting new entries at this time. If nations pursue nuclear technology for energy reasons, that is more than enough to get the stare down from the club. There is even specialized cyber weaponry designed exclusively to sabotage nuclear enrichment equipment.
- nickik 8y ago
  > I don't think environmentalists are nearly as capable of throwing a wrench on nuclear energy development as you say. Maybe in terms of their organised political power. But their lies and propaganda have essentially become common knowledge and are basically capable of always mobilizing a group of uninformed people to protest anything. > Seems to me like the real issue here is that if nuclear energy is pushed as the go to modern day energy source, than global politics would be that much harder for the develop nations that "rule" the others. Its the opposite, those nations that can produce and sell nuclear power stations can gain huge leverage one everybody else. > There is even specialized cyber weaponry designed exclusively to sabotage nuclear enrichment equipment. Yes. That is one of the larger problems, but not a show stopper.
ekr 8y ago
The core of the problem is game-theoretic in nature, a coordination problem, related in some ways to the tragedy of the commons. Unless one of the entities involved goes out of their way at personal loss to fix the issue, all agents are operating optimally and yet, we're slowly headed to a minor environmental disaster on our only inhabitable planet.
legulere 8y ago
You can find the same bias in the pro-Nuclear crowd. It seems like the reasoning is that there is science in nuclear so it must be the best thing to use. The biggest reason that nuclear didn't take over is of financial nature. Nuclear is simply too expensive in developed countries. This only gets worse as construction costs rise with the living standard of people. Just look at the financial disasters Flamanville 3, Olkiluoto 3 and Hinkley Point C. Meanwhile renewables are getting cheaper and cheaper.
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  Also look at Korean and Japanese builds that were record-breaking in terms of being on time and on budget. Nukes are hard to build the first of, but once you serialize their construction, they're quite reasonable. Especially given their unique ability to produce full-time carbon-free energy. Renewables are indeed doing great but they're in an environment where the grids can handle the variability due to high-tech natural gas turbines. As penetrations increase towards 30%-50%, this gets much harder with wind and solar's 35% and 25% capacity factors (US average). You have to overbuild like crazy and then back it up, sometimes for weeks at a time, in either methane-producing reservoirs or massive chemical batteries. These costs aren't factored into renewable's price yet so it's not quite a fair comparison.
- nickik 8y ago
  > You can find the same bias in the pro-Nuclear crowd. It seems like the reasoning is that there is science in nuclear so it must be the best thing to use. Everything is 'science' in that sense so that was not my argument. My argument is that we can measure what nuclear power is and how it works. We can measure what its effect on people are. > The biggest reason that nuclear didn't take over is of financial nature. Nuclear is simply too expensive in developed countries. This only gets worse as construction costs rise with the living standard of people. No its not. Nuclear was by far the cheapest energy source. They were building lots of nuclear plants Nuclear is like everything else, larger scale and a good workforce reduces cost. However you can't have that if you don't build new plants. > Just look at the financial disasters Flamanville 3, Olkiluoto 3 and Hinkley Point C. Meanwhile renewables are getting cheaper and cheaper. In science we don't look at examples but rather at overall data. Overall data is perfectly clear, anyplace that builds many nuclear power plants gets massively cheaper. All these western 1ofs that were built as a political compromise are of course gone be overpriced. Look at China or Korea and you will see that there is 0 reason why the west could not do the same.
matt4077 8y ago
It’s funny how the HN crowd’s infatuation with nuclear persists, long after economics alone, ignoring outright any safety arguments, have rendered the technology obsolete. It was the environmental crowd you hate, by the way, plus the often maligned political class, who long ago had the foresight to push for the policies that are now enabling renewables to be competitive with fossil fuels. It’s quite embarrassing for tec people, at least the slice of the community I observe. Just let it go.
- jabl 8y ago
  > It’s funny how the HN crowd’s infatuation with nuclear persists Perhaps that a generally technically literate crowd sees nuclear, given the alternatives, in a positive light tells something.. :) > long after economics alone, Nuclear is under severe economic pressure mainly in the USA, but largely due to dirt cheap natural gas, not renewables. So if you're hoping for even more usage of fossil fuels, go ahead, keep hoping for nuclear to die out. > ignoring outright any safety arguments As we should. In terms of deaths/kWh, nuclear is about the safest energy source we have. > It was the environmental crowd you hate, by the way, plus the often maligned political class, who long ago had the foresight to push for the policies that are now enabling renewables to be competitive with fossil fuels. I'm a fan of renewables (to a point and where appropriate!), but lets use them to replace fossil fuels and not nuclear like Germany, m'kay? I count myself as an environmentalist, and I think the environmental movement has done a lot of good things. But the mainstream environmentalist campaigning against nuclear (and GMO's), is just horribly, disastrously dumb.
- nickik 8y ago
  Do you have any data to back up your drivel? Because any study of nuclear security ever done by anybody will show that nuclear is the safest form of energy. > It was the environmental crowd you hate, by the way, plus the often maligned political class, who long ago had the foresight to push for the policies that are now enabling renewables to be competitive with fossil fuels. Statements like this, make my literally want to shoot myself. If you only read history like a 3 year old to confirm your bias then what you said is reasonable. It is the absolute idiocy of the environmentalist and the liberals that stopped any form of new advanced nuclear technology. The same president who spent some money on making solar better also slashed research into the most promising nuclear technologies. You do realize that solar and wind are not even close to the task they set out to accomplished and we are widely missing every target? That the whole third world couldn't give a shit about solar and COAL is the massively growing globally. That is the legacy of these polices, failure and mass death. Ironically because coal contains so much nuclear material its actually more radioactive then a nuclear plant itself. In fact a coal plant would not even be allowed to exists if it had to meet the same standards as a nuclear plant. If not for the anti-humans and their political cronies we would have had highly advanced nuclear technology far, far earlier. We might not even know what climate change because it is so irrelevant. But thank god for those smart liberal presidents who helped us make 5% improvement on the solar panel.
tcbawo 8y ago
Just like funding NASA isn't purely about discovery, perhaps the collateral knowledge acquired for weapon building was reason enough to invest in nuclear energy. But, now that we are (hopefully) committed to non-proliferation, maybe the federal government is less interested in fission-based energy.
- nickik 8y ago
  What kind of argument is that? Why should anybody be against fission based energy?
  - tcbawo 8y ago
    It's not an argument against it. Its a theory why the federal government isn't pushing it anymore -- the carryover military benefits are not needed.
api 8y ago
I see quite a bit of anti-science / anti-fact / irrational stuff on all political sides. For the vast majority of people beliefs are not about being right but about belonging to a group. We believe to belong. When a part of our belief system is threatened, even by fact, we perceive that as a threat to the integrity of our group and fight that threat as if it were an invading army. I say "we" because I see zero evidence that any group of humans is above this. Take HN for example. Certain things can't be discussed here, and I'm not just talking about the usual SJW/anti-SJW/whatever or race/IQ flame bait. Try bringing up deep critiques of Silicon Valley culture or business models, or anything that might be superficially classified as "woo" or any non-dismissive discussion of the culture that surrounds it. Sites based on the Reddit model of upvote/downvote are popular because they give us an easy way to LARP our intellectual herding behaviors online. Individually humans are quite weak, but in even small groups we become dramatically stronger. We're a highly social species that evolved to prioritize group membership over most other things because it's critical to survival. Historically being right but alone could be a death sentence while a socially popular complete loon would be fine. This is still true to a great extent. People who believe utter lunacy but are popular in some group are often healthier, happier, and wealthier. For most of human history intellectual herding behavior didn't have much impact because most of what we believed was legend and myth, not fact, and fact and logic had little bearing on our existence beyond immediate activities like farming, hunting, etc. We evolved in a setting of small tribal groups that lived off the land and the most important thing that helped us survive was group membership. Legend and myth are not devoid of information by any means. They encode moral and ethical ideas, social norms, and psychological coping mechanisms. The factual claims they make are wrong (if taken literally) but they're claims about things that ancient people had no real knowledge of anyway (creation, things long ago, the cosmos, etc.). Unfortunately as we went down the path of science and industry we went down a path where fact, reason, and logic are increasingly critical to our survival even as they pertain to things that are very far from our individual experience. In this mode of existence our tendency to prioritize group membership over these things might be our biggest weakness. Things like "is accumulating atmospheric CO2 dangerous?" or "are GMOs dangerous?" have become cultural signifiers and thus indicators of group membership. Believing the wrong thing in a given group can lead to ostracism. If we do experience some kind of global tragedy of the commons I will cite this as one of two primary causes. The other primary cause (mentioned elsewhere in this thread) is game theory and the difficulty of coordinating all-cooperate responses to wide scale problems where defection has potentially high short term value. Even more unfortunately I see it getting worse as we deploy science (psychology, machine learning) to learn to exploit these tendencies to manipulate one another as part of a larger global war between nations, corporations, and pressure groups. To criticize Silicon Valley in a way that's sometimes unpopular here -- I'd say anyone working in social media today is guilty of building systems deliberately designed to weaponize these tendencies against their fellow human beings. We're building systems designed to make ourselves collectively more irrational because it makes people click ads (or support political causes and candidates).
pjc50 8y ago
Declaring a bunch of people to be "anti-human" because you don't agree with them is insulting. The backlash against nuclear comes from four points and a meta-point: 1) Weapons proliferation. The standard fission cycle is just too convenient for this (after all, that's why it was developed) and so an international infrastructure needs to be developed around restricting this. See Iran for example. This also prompted a lot of opposition from people who didn't want to live under the threat of their cities being nuked. This also turned into lethal fights with the environmental movement (the French government sank Greenpeace's ship Rainbow Warrior with a terrorist bombing that killed a photographer, over the question of nuclear weapons testing). A difficult bit of bad blood to bury. 2) Huge scale and persistence of accidents. Chernobyl affected agriculture in the whole of Western Europe, and took decades for an adequate final containment to be built. Bhopal was bad - and possibly worse in effects! - but at least the area isn't a permanent wasteland. Pebble bed reactors were deemed the promising future, until one of them jammed. It's now unfixable and practically impossible to decomission: (wikipedia) "There exists currently no dismantling method for the AVR vessel, but it is planned to develop some procedure during the next 60 years and to start with vessel dismantling at the end of the century." 3) Waste disposal. A forever problem. I'm old enough to remember Greenpeace fighting it being dumped at sea, but the problem of where we put it remains. 4) Cost overruns. A systematic problem in the industry. Doesn't affect renewables to anything like the same extent. 5) The meta-point: systematic lying about the effects of all of the above. That this happens to overlap with the era of discovering that all sorts of previous advances (CFCs, tetraethyl lead, DDT, asbestos) had nasty side-effects which were also lied about or minimised is not a coincidence. Nuclear advocates take the arrogant position that they don't need to win trust.
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  The anti-human sentiment in this context is generally referring to environmentalists who thought large amounts of clean nuclear energy would cause population growth beyond the carrying capacity of Earth wrt other resources. I doubt it's meant to be insulting. 1) Just because the fission chain reaction can be used as a weapon does not mean you should be anti-nuclear reactors. We've seen that lots of people can make nuclear bombs without having any reactors at all (just need some centrifuges) so why are we avoiding making clean nuclear energy (which has positive clean-energy attributes that mirror the destructive side) for a misplaced fear of weapons? 2) Temporary evacuations should happen in events like Fukushima and then people should be given the data on the dose rates at their home compared to scientific studies showing the likelihood of a dose rate causing them harm relative to other risks. I guarantee lots of people would choose to move home much sooner than they are if they had this information. Chernobyl is kind of another story because there was no containment on those reactors. Reactors should either have containments or be inherently stable designs. Chernobyl was neither. Still, climate change has the potential to cause much more damage than these accidents. 3) Waste disposal has several known responsible and appropriate technical solutions. We just need people to stop blanket-stating that it's a forever unsolvable problem so we can move forward like the Finns are doing [1]. Then there's deep-borehole disposal which is not developed but very promising. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo... 4) This is what the parent is talking about; the industry has been regulated and delayed by professional anti-nuclear intervenors for decades and then they always say: "Ha! Nuclear is bad because it's expensive and always has delays!" The industry itself could certainly do better (the Japanese and Koreans had/have been building plants in record time and on budget and are shocked when they hear US contractors sue each other on a construction site), but the cost overruns are not inherent to nuclear energy. That's a social thing. 5) Nuclear advocates definitely need to win trust; the carbon-free, super-safe energy source is currently less popular than straight-up burning oil. Anti-nuclear people need to catch up on some of the latest low-dose health effect studies if we want to talk about lying. The linear no-threshold model is what we've been operating on since inception and it's very conservative. As we've gathered more data, it makes sense to re-visit such models and see where the waste is in regulation and design.

by nickik 8y ago

gldalmaso 8y ago

I don't think environmentalists are nearly as capable of throwing a wrench on nuclear energy development as you say. Seems to me like the real issue here is that if nuclear energy is pushed as the go to modern day energy source, than global politics would be that much harder for the develop nations that "rule" the others. The US has a very clear agenda of freezing the status quo in the nuclear weapons club, they are not accepting new entries at this time. If nations pursue nuclear technology for energy reasons, that is more than enough to get the stare down from the club. There is even specialized cyber weaponry designed exclusively to sabotage nuclear enrichment equipment.

nickik 8y ago
> I don't think environmentalists are nearly as capable of throwing a wrench on nuclear energy development as you say. Maybe in terms of their organised political power. But their lies and propaganda have essentially become common knowledge and are basically capable of always mobilizing a group of uninformed people to protest anything. > Seems to me like the real issue here is that if nuclear energy is pushed as the go to modern day energy source, than global politics would be that much harder for the develop nations that "rule" the others. Its the opposite, those nations that can produce and sell nuclear power stations can gain huge leverage one everybody else. > There is even specialized cyber weaponry designed exclusively to sabotage nuclear enrichment equipment. Yes. That is one of the larger problems, but not a show stopper.

ekr 8y ago

The core of the problem is game-theoretic in nature, a coordination problem, related in some ways to the tragedy of the commons. Unless one of the entities involved goes out of their way at personal loss to fix the issue, all agents are operating optimally and yet, we're slowly headed to a minor environmental disaster on our only inhabitable planet.

legulere 8y ago

You can find the same bias in the pro-Nuclear crowd. It seems like the reasoning is that there is science in nuclear so it must be the best thing to use. The biggest reason that nuclear didn't take over is of financial nature. Nuclear is simply too expensive in developed countries. This only gets worse as construction costs rise with the living standard of people. Just look at the financial disasters Flamanville 3, Olkiluoto 3 and Hinkley Point C. Meanwhile renewables are getting cheaper and cheaper.

acidburnNSA 8y ago
Also look at Korean and Japanese builds that were record-breaking in terms of being on time and on budget. Nukes are hard to build the first of, but once you serialize their construction, they're quite reasonable. Especially given their unique ability to produce full-time carbon-free energy. Renewables are indeed doing great but they're in an environment where the grids can handle the variability due to high-tech natural gas turbines. As penetrations increase towards 30%-50%, this gets much harder with wind and solar's 35% and 25% capacity factors (US average). You have to overbuild like crazy and then back it up, sometimes for weeks at a time, in either methane-producing reservoirs or massive chemical batteries. These costs aren't factored into renewable's price yet so it's not quite a fair comparison.
nickik 8y ago
> You can find the same bias in the pro-Nuclear crowd. It seems like the reasoning is that there is science in nuclear so it must be the best thing to use. Everything is 'science' in that sense so that was not my argument. My argument is that we can measure what nuclear power is and how it works. We can measure what its effect on people are. > The biggest reason that nuclear didn't take over is of financial nature. Nuclear is simply too expensive in developed countries. This only gets worse as construction costs rise with the living standard of people. No its not. Nuclear was by far the cheapest energy source. They were building lots of nuclear plants Nuclear is like everything else, larger scale and a good workforce reduces cost. However you can't have that if you don't build new plants. > Just look at the financial disasters Flamanville 3, Olkiluoto 3 and Hinkley Point C. Meanwhile renewables are getting cheaper and cheaper. In science we don't look at examples but rather at overall data. Overall data is perfectly clear, anyplace that builds many nuclear power plants gets massively cheaper. All these western 1ofs that were built as a political compromise are of course gone be overpriced. Look at China or Korea and you will see that there is 0 reason why the west could not do the same.

matt4077 8y ago

It’s funny how the HN crowd’s infatuation with nuclear persists, long after economics alone, ignoring outright any safety arguments, have rendered the technology obsolete. It was the environmental crowd you hate, by the way, plus the often maligned political class, who long ago had the foresight to push for the policies that are now enabling renewables to be competitive with fossil fuels. It’s quite embarrassing for tec people, at least the slice of the community I observe. Just let it go.

jabl 8y ago
> It’s funny how the HN crowd’s infatuation with nuclear persists Perhaps that a generally technically literate crowd sees nuclear, given the alternatives, in a positive light tells something.. :) > long after economics alone, Nuclear is under severe economic pressure mainly in the USA, but largely due to dirt cheap natural gas, not renewables. So if you're hoping for even more usage of fossil fuels, go ahead, keep hoping for nuclear to die out. > ignoring outright any safety arguments As we should. In terms of deaths/kWh, nuclear is about the safest energy source we have. > It was the environmental crowd you hate, by the way, plus the often maligned political class, who long ago had the foresight to push for the policies that are now enabling renewables to be competitive with fossil fuels. I'm a fan of renewables (to a point and where appropriate!), but lets use them to replace fossil fuels and not nuclear like Germany, m'kay? I count myself as an environmentalist, and I think the environmental movement has done a lot of good things. But the mainstream environmentalist campaigning against nuclear (and GMO's), is just horribly, disastrously dumb.
nickik 8y ago
Do you have any data to back up your drivel? Because any study of nuclear security ever done by anybody will show that nuclear is the safest form of energy. > It was the environmental crowd you hate, by the way, plus the often maligned political class, who long ago had the foresight to push for the policies that are now enabling renewables to be competitive with fossil fuels. Statements like this, make my literally want to shoot myself. If you only read history like a 3 year old to confirm your bias then what you said is reasonable. It is the absolute idiocy of the environmentalist and the liberals that stopped any form of new advanced nuclear technology. The same president who spent some money on making solar better also slashed research into the most promising nuclear technologies. You do realize that solar and wind are not even close to the task they set out to accomplished and we are widely missing every target? That the whole third world couldn't give a shit about solar and COAL is the massively growing globally. That is the legacy of these polices, failure and mass death. Ironically because coal contains so much nuclear material its actually more radioactive then a nuclear plant itself. In fact a coal plant would not even be allowed to exists if it had to meet the same standards as a nuclear plant. If not for the anti-humans and their political cronies we would have had highly advanced nuclear technology far, far earlier. We might not even know what climate change because it is so irrelevant. But thank god for those smart liberal presidents who helped us make 5% improvement on the solar panel.

tcbawo 8y ago

Just like funding NASA isn't purely about discovery, perhaps the collateral knowledge acquired for weapon building was reason enough to invest in nuclear energy. But, now that we are (hopefully) committed to non-proliferation, maybe the federal government is less interested in fission-based energy.

nickik 8y ago
What kind of argument is that? Why should anybody be against fission based energy?
- tcbawo 8y ago
  It's not an argument against it. Its a theory why the federal government isn't pushing it anymore -- the carryover military benefits are not needed.

api 8y ago

I see quite a bit of anti-science / anti-fact / irrational stuff on all political sides. For the vast majority of people beliefs are not about being right but about belonging to a group. We believe to belong. When a part of our belief system is threatened, even by fact, we perceive that as a threat to the integrity of our group and fight that threat as if it were an invading army. I say "we" because I see zero evidence that any group of humans is above this. Take HN for example. Certain things can't be discussed here, and I'm not just talking about the usual SJW/anti-SJW/whatever or race/IQ flame bait. Try bringing up deep critiques of Silicon Valley culture or business models, or anything that might be superficially classified as "woo" or any non-dismissive discussion of the culture that surrounds it. Sites based on the Reddit model of upvote/downvote are popular because they give us an easy way to LARP our intellectual herding behaviors online. Individually humans are quite weak, but in even small groups we become dramatically stronger. We're a highly social species that evolved to prioritize group membership over most other things because it's critical to survival. Historically being right but alone could be a death sentence while a socially popular complete loon would be fine. This is still true to a great extent. People who believe utter lunacy but are popular in some group are often healthier, happier, and wealthier. For most of human history intellectual herding behavior didn't have much impact because most of what we believed was legend and myth, not fact, and fact and logic had little bearing on our existence beyond immediate activities like farming, hunting, etc. We evolved in a setting of small tribal groups that lived off the land and the most important thing that helped us survive was group membership. Legend and myth are not devoid of information by any means. They encode moral and ethical ideas, social norms, and psychological coping mechanisms. The factual claims they make are wrong (if taken literally) but they're claims about things that ancient people had no real knowledge of anyway (creation, things long ago, the cosmos, etc.). Unfortunately as we went down the path of science and industry we went down a path where fact, reason, and logic are increasingly critical to our survival even as they pertain to things that are very far from our individual experience. In this mode of existence our tendency to prioritize group membership over these things might be our biggest weakness. Things like "is accumulating atmospheric CO2 dangerous?" or "are GMOs dangerous?" have become cultural signifiers and thus indicators of group membership. Believing the wrong thing in a given group can lead to ostracism. If we do experience some kind of global tragedy of the commons I will cite this as one of two primary causes. The other primary cause (mentioned elsewhere in this thread) is game theory and the difficulty of coordinating all-cooperate responses to wide scale problems where defection has potentially high short term value. Even more unfortunately I see it getting worse as we deploy science (psychology, machine learning) to learn to exploit these tendencies to manipulate one another as part of a larger global war between nations, corporations, and pressure groups. To criticize Silicon Valley in a way that's sometimes unpopular here -- I'd say anyone working in social media today is guilty of building systems deliberately designed to weaponize these tendencies against their fellow human beings. We're building systems designed to make ourselves collectively more irrational because it makes people click ads (or support political causes and candidates).

pjc50 8y ago

Declaring a bunch of people to be "anti-human" because you don't agree with them is insulting. The backlash against nuclear comes from four points and a meta-point: 1) Weapons proliferation. The standard fission cycle is just too convenient for this (after all, that's why it was developed) and so an international infrastructure needs to be developed around restricting this. See Iran for example. This also prompted a lot of opposition from people who didn't want to live under the threat of their cities being nuked. This also turned into lethal fights with the environmental movement (the French government sank Greenpeace's ship Rainbow Warrior with a terrorist bombing that killed a photographer, over the question of nuclear weapons testing). A difficult bit of bad blood to bury. 2) Huge scale and persistence of accidents. Chernobyl affected agriculture in the whole of Western Europe, and took decades for an adequate final containment to be built. Bhopal was bad - and possibly worse in effects! - but at least the area isn't a permanent wasteland. Pebble bed reactors were deemed the promising future, until one of them jammed. It's now unfixable and practically impossible to decomission: (wikipedia) "There exists currently no dismantling method for the AVR vessel, but it is planned to develop some procedure during the next 60 years and to start with vessel dismantling at the end of the century." 3) Waste disposal. A forever problem. I'm old enough to remember Greenpeace fighting it being dumped at sea, but the problem of where we put it remains. 4) Cost overruns. A systematic problem in the industry. Doesn't affect renewables to anything like the same extent. 5) The meta-point: systematic lying about the effects of all of the above. That this happens to overlap with the era of discovering that all sorts of previous advances (CFCs, tetraethyl lead, DDT, asbestos) had nasty side-effects which were also lied about or minimised is not a coincidence. Nuclear advocates take the arrogant position that they don't need to win trust.

acidburnNSA 8y ago
The anti-human sentiment in this context is generally referring to environmentalists who thought large amounts of clean nuclear energy would cause population growth beyond the carrying capacity of Earth wrt other resources. I doubt it's meant to be insulting. 1) Just because the fission chain reaction can be used as a weapon does not mean you should be anti-nuclear reactors. We've seen that lots of people can make nuclear bombs without having any reactors at all (just need some centrifuges) so why are we avoiding making clean nuclear energy (which has positive clean-energy attributes that mirror the destructive side) for a misplaced fear of weapons? 2) Temporary evacuations should happen in events like Fukushima and then people should be given the data on the dose rates at their home compared to scientific studies showing the likelihood of a dose rate causing them harm relative to other risks. I guarantee lots of people would choose to move home much sooner than they are if they had this information. Chernobyl is kind of another story because there was no containment on those reactors. Reactors should either have containments or be inherently stable designs. Chernobyl was neither. Still, climate change has the potential to cause much more damage than these accidents. 3) Waste disposal has several known responsible and appropriate technical solutions. We just need people to stop blanket-stating that it's a forever unsolvable problem so we can move forward like the Finns are doing [1]. Then there's deep-borehole disposal which is not developed but very promising. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo... 4) This is what the parent is talking about; the industry has been regulated and delayed by professional anti-nuclear intervenors for decades and then they always say: "Ha! Nuclear is bad because it's expensive and always has delays!" The industry itself could certainly do better (the Japanese and Koreans had/have been building plants in record time and on budget and are shocked when they hear US contractors sue each other on a construction site), but the cost overruns are not inherent to nuclear energy. That's a social thing. 5) Nuclear advocates definitely need to win trust; the carbon-free, super-safe energy source is currently less popular than straight-up burning oil. Anti-nuclear people need to catch up on some of the latest low-dose health effect studies if we want to talk about lying. The linear no-threshold model is what we've been operating on since inception and it's very conservative. As we've gathered more data, it makes sense to re-visit such models and see where the waste is in regulation and design.