8 ms·

> The environment group Greenpeace, which bitterly opposed the opening of Thorp, is enthusiastic about decommissioning. I feel like the Greenpeace position is

> The environment group Greenpeace, which bitterly opposed the opening of Thorp, is enthusiastic about decommissioning. I feel like the Greenpeace position is anachronistic and still on the wrong side of common sense. They might have missed an opportunity to slow climate change. We've had nuclear generation for 64 years now and harm to the environment is minimal. Three major (to us) accidents and a bunch of lesser material releases have had minimal impact to the earth in the big scheme of things. Of far greater harm is our extraction and burning of fossil. The California methane leak, all of the various oil spills, and now shale drilling all have substantial, long term harm we can measure in the climate and the local ecologies. Obviously we'd prefer greener power if possible, but nuclear power appears by far the lesser evil than all the fossil activity.

UweSchmidt 8y ago
Just because the adoption of greener power is coming along only now, a few decades late, doesn't mean that it is an either-or between nuclear and fossil. I assume Greenpeace and other environmentalists would have prefered a much faster transition.
guitarbill 8y ago
The conversation on nuclear power has never been a rational one. This has some interesting effects. Because it's so hard to get funding on anything, not that much research has been done on how to decontaminate radioactive waste. You might disagree about doing it in the first place, but still support research to clean up. Because it's so hard to get permission to build new reactors, older reactors were used for longer. But we've learned a lot about safety and fail-safes since the 80s. There's a very shabby strip club directly outside Amazon's meeting centre in Seattle for a similar reason. I'm told the owner wouldn't mind renovating or moving, but zoning laws make those difficult. So because the policy making is driven by morality and not rationality, you end up with weird (side)effects.
- sailfast 8y ago
  Are you sure it's not there because it is finding high net worth clients across the street? As for nuclear power and research on cleanup - it appears this industry will be worth a lot of money post Fukushima which does appear to be spurring the requisite R&D, which should be good news for this kind of tech. Granted, probably not what is required to really make this decontamination jump to the level that it becomes "easy" but at least it is something better than "Oh sure eventually we'll put them on a train and stick them in the ground, you know, as long as the earth doesn't destroy those plans first with an earthquake, hurricane, etc"
- lispm 8y ago
  > The conversation on nuclear power has never been a rational one Like in Japan. Full support for nuclear from government and industry. Society not interested and not opposed. The mechanism at play were then 'greed', 'corruption' and no sufficient safety culture. And this is not surprise: the so-called Japanese 'nuclear village' was well known. There was nothing 'rational' about NOT increasing tsunami safety at Fukushima. It was about calculating a risk (probability and impact) and then making a decision about what to do. That's not rational - that's in the end a political decision. No energy politics is rational. It's also not possible to be rational. There are vast commercial and other interests involved. > Because it's so hard to get permission to build new reactors, older reactors were used for longer Because it was much easier and cost effective, older reactor lifetimes were extended. We are talking about billions of investments. > But we've learned a lot about safety and fail-safes since the 80s Which then has priced nuclear out of the market - if there is a market - France for example has only a very limited electricity market - EDF is government owned. https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/dedicated-sections/finance/financial-information/the-edf-share/shareholding-structure https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/dedicated-sections/finan... Areva/Orena is government owned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orano
  - guitarbill 8y ago
    > It was about calculating a risk (probability and impact) and then making a decision about what to do. That's not rational - that's in the end a political decision. Wait, what? How else are rational decisions made? Fukushima was commissioned in 1970s, and was negligent. As were DuPont's actions with PFOA, the Exxon Valdez, Deepwater Horizon. Nuclear is not special in that regard, it's just an easier target for fear-mongering. Look, I'd be happy if all (non-medial) nuclear reactors were replaced by renewables and turned off. But compared to fossil fuels, nuclear power is not the worst idea humans have had.
    - lispm 8y ago
      >> It was about calculating a risk (probability and impact) and then making a decision about what to do. That's not rational - that's in the end a political decision. > Wait, what? How else are rational decisions made? For example by actually dealing with underlying bias - which the (nuclear) industry does not. Example: if the profitability of a company is at stake, then costly decisions are out of scope. But 'rational decisions' probably don't exist and there is no method which can be applied to complex situations often found in energy politics. If somebody claims to know how to make 'rational decisions', then this would be a sign to me that this person does not understand its problems and limitations. > and was negligent there is nothing rational about 'negligent'
- JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
  Amazon execs make a lot of money, maybe there are other reasons the strip club is still there
- 7952 8y ago
  Of course you are going to use your expensive asset to generate income for as long as possible. But new investment has to be compared to other opportunities in the market, and government sets the market.
Diederich 8y ago
> They might have missed an opportunity to slow climate change. 35 years ago, I was a pretty ardent and sometimes locally active environmentalist, primarily in and around the high mountains of California. And, of course, a member of Greenpeace. Once the true threat of CO2 and friends became apparent to me, I started raising hell about it at local meetings. Pollution does not matter if global average temperature goes up many degrees F. So because of their inability to have a wider, more global outlook, I parted ways with Greenpeace around 1990. I don't dislike the organization, for the most part. But they've been unable to focus on the big picture threats. This is understandable; it's relatively easy to be passionate about the things Greenpeace is into. Things you can 'touch' and directly see. Had they, as an organization, tried to switch their focus to climate change, they'd probably have lost most of their internal energy.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  The bigger problem I have with Greenpeace is that they started campaigning against renewables here. Lots of dis-information about windmill parks and how solar wasn't feasible anyway. The whole thing turned into a self-perpetuating funding circus with relatively little real world impact.
  - radicalbyte 8y ago
    They were doing that in The Netherlands? Idiots. Time to cancel my membership.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      They came around eventually and are now 100% on board but for a while there was some kind of internal struggle there between the 'statists' who wanted everything to remain as it was or to simply reduce energy consumption and the 'realists' who figured if they were going to be against windmills they were indirectly pro-nuclear. The amount of noise around 'horizonvervuiling' (horizon pollution, I'm not making this up) and reflections from solar panels as well as bird strike stats that were not even close to realistic turned a whole pile of people off from wind energy and solar. But nowadays Greenpeace can't see enough windmill parks so all is good and your contributions are going towards something positive again, though, in all fairness I think Greenpeace really is more of a self-perpetrating PR machine and lobby group than an activist platform. The days of the Rainbow Warrior #1 are long behind us. The interaction between 'Groenlinks' (a political party here) and Greenpeace led to some pretty weird results, I'm sure the coal, oil and natural gas lobbies were having a great old time with the green groups helping them.
lispm 8y ago
> wrong side of common sense I fear such a complex issue such as energy production for billions of people is not really something which can be rated by 'common sense'. > nuclear generation for 64 years now and still no path for insurance/storage/reprocessing etc. Sellafield is one of the prime examples what can go wrong even in industrialized countries: it's a toxic and costly mix of military and commercial nuclear industry waste. In the Western countries nuclear is mostly dead and investments are allocated only mostly for longer lifetimes of existing reactors. And this is not because of 'Greenpeace'. You need to find an answer why there is so little acceptance, why the industry is in such bad shape (examples: lack of reactor safety culture in the Japanese nuclear industry, lack of financial health in the French nuclear industry, Sellafield, ...) and why its only thriving with full-government support/finance (see China with its authoritarian structure or smaller countries who are keen to get nuclear technology to then also build up nuclear weapon technology/material like Iran).
- michaelt 8y ago
  You need to find an answer why there is so little acceptance, why the industry is in such bad shape Do you have any sources for info about this with a firm basis in fact? Reason being I've heard at least 4 completely different explanations of why the nuclear industry performs so poorly, and I'm not really sure how to tell which is the right one - would be nice to know more.
  - lispm 8y ago
    I don't think there is a single explanation, since the current state of nuclear is so diverse: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/20180902wnisr2018-hr.pdf https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/20180902wnisr2018...
- graeme 8y ago
  >and still no path for insurance/storage/reprocessing etc. Exactly the same argument applies to carbon waste. Every closed nuclear plant or nuclear plant not built means there is more carbon waste. Edit: Can someone explain the downvotes? By carbon waste I mean CO2 emissions. We look set to destroy our civilization in the next few decades due to their elevated level. Nuclear waste is tangible, CO2 is abstract, but other than that I don't see the difference between them. No one has insurance for the damage caused by excess CO2, we don't have good ways of storing most of it, and we have only limited, tentative efforts to reprocess it from the atmosphere. Instead of nuclear waste, we chose carbon waste by building more power sources that use carbon.
rangersanger 8y ago
I read the article as: 1) We're decommissioning a recycling plant because no one wants to recycle rods. 2) We don't know where on earth we're going to put the waste from the decommissioning. 3) We don't know how we're going to do this quite yet, the technology doesn't exist. 4) It's going to take 100 years. 5) The entire endeavor was massively expensive (who's paying for this, btw?) Given that, I'm not sure I can accept that Greenpeace is or was on the wrong side of common sense. They may not have seen the entire playing field, they may not have have have proposed the best solution when they started out, but given what they knew at the time of their inception, and how they've grown, I think they are on the right side of common sense. I don't have a timeline of their stance on renewables, nor of coal/oil/gas, but they currently advocate for 100% renewables. And after reading that article, I think that's the only common sense position.
- imglorp 8y ago
  I guess my observation was about where they're spending their limited lobbying and PR resources would be most effective: there would be some tangible benefit to hammering the climate/carbon issue. The opposing side, the Old Fossil-funded climate deniers etc, is well funded and casting plenty of FUD.
  - rangersanger 8y ago
    >Obviously we'd prefer greener power if possible, but nuclear power appears by far the lesser evil than all the fossil activity. Fair enough, but at this point, it seems like they can, should, and do skip over nuclear and focus on 100% renewable. Their messaging may not be as effective as "clean coal" but that feels like a different debate.
dmix 8y ago
Not to mention the significant ancillary losses from no longer being a leader in nuclear energy (in terms of expertise, exporting, technology, etc) which would otherwise easily bring in billions of dollars into the UK economy and tax system. Which could then be used to further their social causes, provide high quality jobs, and raise the standard of living. It's not just destroying a potentially clean stopgap energy source but destroying an entire advanced-technology industry in which the UK was once a leader. Those green R&D projects aren't going to fund themselves.
freeflight 8y ago
> We've had nuclear generation for 64 years now and harm to the environment is minimal. Has it been? I'm not really convinced that's actually the case because even if something nasty happens, the usual reaction seems to be to just pretend "everything is okay" and then raise the threshold levels for radiation exposure because that's pretty much the only thing that can be done. Case in point: Fukushima is still sitting on loads of contaminated dirt and water, with no clue what to do with it [0]. On a global level that might be "minimal" but I doubt the local population cares very much about that distinction. Imho this is quite similar to the naivety with which the US conducted their nuclear tests. Back then they also assumed "It's far enough away from population centers, there's no danger for anybody". Decades later, the statistics speak another language [1]. Which is a common problem with nuclear: Direct attribution is pretty much impossible and the long-term epidemiological studies required to recognize these effects are not only very complex but also extremely expensive. Leading to a situation that down the road we might have repeated the same mistakes like previous generations before us did: Leaving the actual problems, and it's solutions, to following generations, who gonna curse us for our naivety and hubris. There's also the factor that nuclear requires massive cooling, this last summer already has seen several plants, all over the globe, shut down/throttled down due to rivers running too hot for cooling [2]. If the trend of increasing average temperatures keeps on going, this will become a much more common issue. [0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3058303/look-at-the-millions-of-bags-of-radioactive-dirt-that-japan-has-no-plan-for https://www.fastcompany.com/3058303/look-at-the-millions-of-... [1] https://qz.com/1163140/us-nuclear-tests-killed-american-civilians-on-a-scale-comparable-to-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/ https://qz.com/1163140/us-nuclear-tests-killed-american-civi... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/07/weatherwatch-nuclear-power-plants-feel-the-heat https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/07/weatherwatch-nu...
- jschwartzi 8y ago
  >Leading to a situation that down the road we might have repeated the same mistakes like previous generations before us did: Leaving the actual problems, and it's solutions, to following generations, who gonna curse us for our naivety and hubris. This is also the case if we do nothing. Consider that the alternative to Nuclear is baseload generation with coal, oil and gas, which we know for a fact are destroying our environment by raising global temperatures. And they're ruining our air. They're not going away any time soon, either.
xorcist 8y ago
Every conversation around nuclear starts and ends with "but Greenpeace!". That's ascribing Greenpeace not just a little more influence than is realistic. The reason why we see less and less investment in new nuclear has more to do with the economics of it all, and that large scale public spending is a bit more problematic than half a century ago. I don't know about Greenpeace specifically, but the environmental movement as a whole has been pretty consistent through this whole time in their criticism of fossil fuels. You may or may not agree with criticisms around nuclear power, but that doesn't make it a double standard.

UweSchmidt 8y ago

Just because the adoption of greener power is coming along only now, a few decades late, doesn't mean that it is an either-or between nuclear and fossil. I assume Greenpeace and other environmentalists would have prefered a much faster transition.

guitarbill 8y ago

The conversation on nuclear power has never been a rational one. This has some interesting effects. Because it's so hard to get funding on anything, not that much research has been done on how to decontaminate radioactive waste. You might disagree about doing it in the first place, but still support research to clean up. Because it's so hard to get permission to build new reactors, older reactors were used for longer. But we've learned a lot about safety and fail-safes since the 80s. There's a very shabby strip club directly outside Amazon's meeting centre in Seattle for a similar reason. I'm told the owner wouldn't mind renovating or moving, but zoning laws make those difficult. So because the policy making is driven by morality and not rationality, you end up with weird (side)effects.

sailfast 8y ago
Are you sure it's not there because it is finding high net worth clients across the street? As for nuclear power and research on cleanup - it appears this industry will be worth a lot of money post Fukushima which does appear to be spurring the requisite R&D, which should be good news for this kind of tech. Granted, probably not what is required to really make this decontamination jump to the level that it becomes "easy" but at least it is something better than "Oh sure eventually we'll put them on a train and stick them in the ground, you know, as long as the earth doesn't destroy those plans first with an earthquake, hurricane, etc"
lispm 8y ago
> The conversation on nuclear power has never been a rational one Like in Japan. Full support for nuclear from government and industry. Society not interested and not opposed. The mechanism at play were then 'greed', 'corruption' and no sufficient safety culture. And this is not surprise: the so-called Japanese 'nuclear village' was well known. There was nothing 'rational' about NOT increasing tsunami safety at Fukushima. It was about calculating a risk (probability and impact) and then making a decision about what to do. That's not rational - that's in the end a political decision. No energy politics is rational. It's also not possible to be rational. There are vast commercial and other interests involved. > Because it's so hard to get permission to build new reactors, older reactors were used for longer Because it was much easier and cost effective, older reactor lifetimes were extended. We are talking about billions of investments. > But we've learned a lot about safety and fail-safes since the 80s Which then has priced nuclear out of the market - if there is a market - France for example has only a very limited electricity market - EDF is government owned. https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/dedicated-sections/finance/financial-information/the-edf-share/shareholding-structure https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/dedicated-sections/finan... Areva/Orena is government owned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orano
- guitarbill 8y ago
  > It was about calculating a risk (probability and impact) and then making a decision about what to do. That's not rational - that's in the end a political decision. Wait, what? How else are rational decisions made? Fukushima was commissioned in 1970s, and was negligent. As were DuPont's actions with PFOA, the Exxon Valdez, Deepwater Horizon. Nuclear is not special in that regard, it's just an easier target for fear-mongering. Look, I'd be happy if all (non-medial) nuclear reactors were replaced by renewables and turned off. But compared to fossil fuels, nuclear power is not the worst idea humans have had.
  - lispm 8y ago
    >> It was about calculating a risk (probability and impact) and then making a decision about what to do. That's not rational - that's in the end a political decision. > Wait, what? How else are rational decisions made? For example by actually dealing with underlying bias - which the (nuclear) industry does not. Example: if the profitability of a company is at stake, then costly decisions are out of scope. But 'rational decisions' probably don't exist and there is no method which can be applied to complex situations often found in energy politics. If somebody claims to know how to make 'rational decisions', then this would be a sign to me that this person does not understand its problems and limitations. > and was negligent there is nothing rational about 'negligent'
JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
Amazon execs make a lot of money, maybe there are other reasons the strip club is still there
7952 8y ago
Of course you are going to use your expensive asset to generate income for as long as possible. But new investment has to be compared to other opportunities in the market, and government sets the market.

Diederich 8y ago

> They might have missed an opportunity to slow climate change. 35 years ago, I was a pretty ardent and sometimes locally active environmentalist, primarily in and around the high mountains of California. And, of course, a member of Greenpeace. Once the true threat of CO2 and friends became apparent to me, I started raising hell about it at local meetings. Pollution does not matter if global average temperature goes up many degrees F. So because of their inability to have a wider, more global outlook, I parted ways with Greenpeace around 1990. I don't dislike the organization, for the most part. But they've been unable to focus on the big picture threats. This is understandable; it's relatively easy to be passionate about the things Greenpeace is into. Things you can 'touch' and directly see. Had they, as an organization, tried to switch their focus to climate change, they'd probably have lost most of their internal energy.

jacquesm 8y ago
The bigger problem I have with Greenpeace is that they started campaigning against renewables here. Lots of dis-information about windmill parks and how solar wasn't feasible anyway. The whole thing turned into a self-perpetuating funding circus with relatively little real world impact.
- radicalbyte 8y ago
  They were doing that in The Netherlands? Idiots. Time to cancel my membership.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    They came around eventually and are now 100% on board but for a while there was some kind of internal struggle there between the 'statists' who wanted everything to remain as it was or to simply reduce energy consumption and the 'realists' who figured if they were going to be against windmills they were indirectly pro-nuclear. The amount of noise around 'horizonvervuiling' (horizon pollution, I'm not making this up) and reflections from solar panels as well as bird strike stats that were not even close to realistic turned a whole pile of people off from wind energy and solar. But nowadays Greenpeace can't see enough windmill parks so all is good and your contributions are going towards something positive again, though, in all fairness I think Greenpeace really is more of a self-perpetrating PR machine and lobby group than an activist platform. The days of the Rainbow Warrior #1 are long behind us. The interaction between 'Groenlinks' (a political party here) and Greenpeace led to some pretty weird results, I'm sure the coal, oil and natural gas lobbies were having a great old time with the green groups helping them.

lispm 8y ago

> wrong side of common sense I fear such a complex issue such as energy production for billions of people is not really something which can be rated by 'common sense'. > nuclear generation for 64 years now and still no path for insurance/storage/reprocessing etc. Sellafield is one of the prime examples what can go wrong even in industrialized countries: it's a toxic and costly mix of military and commercial nuclear industry waste. In the Western countries nuclear is mostly dead and investments are allocated only mostly for longer lifetimes of existing reactors. And this is not because of 'Greenpeace'. You need to find an answer why there is so little acceptance, why the industry is in such bad shape (examples: lack of reactor safety culture in the Japanese nuclear industry, lack of financial health in the French nuclear industry, Sellafield, ...) and why its only thriving with full-government support/finance (see China with its authoritarian structure or smaller countries who are keen to get nuclear technology to then also build up nuclear weapon technology/material like Iran).

michaelt 8y ago
You need to find an answer why there is so little acceptance, why the industry is in such bad shape Do you have any sources for info about this with a firm basis in fact? Reason being I've heard at least 4 completely different explanations of why the nuclear industry performs so poorly, and I'm not really sure how to tell which is the right one - would be nice to know more.
- lispm 8y ago
  I don't think there is a single explanation, since the current state of nuclear is so diverse: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/20180902wnisr2018-hr.pdf https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/20180902wnisr2018...
graeme 8y ago
>and still no path for insurance/storage/reprocessing etc. Exactly the same argument applies to carbon waste. Every closed nuclear plant or nuclear plant not built means there is more carbon waste. Edit: Can someone explain the downvotes? By carbon waste I mean CO2 emissions. We look set to destroy our civilization in the next few decades due to their elevated level. Nuclear waste is tangible, CO2 is abstract, but other than that I don't see the difference between them. No one has insurance for the damage caused by excess CO2, we don't have good ways of storing most of it, and we have only limited, tentative efforts to reprocess it from the atmosphere. Instead of nuclear waste, we chose carbon waste by building more power sources that use carbon.

rangersanger 8y ago

I read the article as: 1) We're decommissioning a recycling plant because no one wants to recycle rods. 2) We don't know where on earth we're going to put the waste from the decommissioning. 3) We don't know how we're going to do this quite yet, the technology doesn't exist. 4) It's going to take 100 years. 5) The entire endeavor was massively expensive (who's paying for this, btw?) Given that, I'm not sure I can accept that Greenpeace is or was on the wrong side of common sense. They may not have seen the entire playing field, they may not have have have proposed the best solution when they started out, but given what they knew at the time of their inception, and how they've grown, I think they are on the right side of common sense. I don't have a timeline of their stance on renewables, nor of coal/oil/gas, but they currently advocate for 100% renewables. And after reading that article, I think that's the only common sense position.

imglorp 8y ago
I guess my observation was about where they're spending their limited lobbying and PR resources would be most effective: there would be some tangible benefit to hammering the climate/carbon issue. The opposing side, the Old Fossil-funded climate deniers etc, is well funded and casting plenty of FUD.
- rangersanger 8y ago
  >Obviously we'd prefer greener power if possible, but nuclear power appears by far the lesser evil than all the fossil activity. Fair enough, but at this point, it seems like they can, should, and do skip over nuclear and focus on 100% renewable. Their messaging may not be as effective as "clean coal" but that feels like a different debate.

dmix 8y ago

Not to mention the significant ancillary losses from no longer being a leader in nuclear energy (in terms of expertise, exporting, technology, etc) which would otherwise easily bring in billions of dollars into the UK economy and tax system. Which could then be used to further their social causes, provide high quality jobs, and raise the standard of living. It's not just destroying a potentially clean stopgap energy source but destroying an entire advanced-technology industry in which the UK was once a leader. Those green R&D projects aren't going to fund themselves.

freeflight 8y ago

> We've had nuclear generation for 64 years now and harm to the environment is minimal. Has it been? I'm not really convinced that's actually the case because even if something nasty happens, the usual reaction seems to be to just pretend "everything is okay" and then raise the threshold levels for radiation exposure because that's pretty much the only thing that can be done. Case in point: Fukushima is still sitting on loads of contaminated dirt and water, with no clue what to do with it [0]. On a global level that might be "minimal" but I doubt the local population cares very much about that distinction. Imho this is quite similar to the naivety with which the US conducted their nuclear tests. Back then they also assumed "It's far enough away from population centers, there's no danger for anybody". Decades later, the statistics speak another language [1]. Which is a common problem with nuclear: Direct attribution is pretty much impossible and the long-term epidemiological studies required to recognize these effects are not only very complex but also extremely expensive. Leading to a situation that down the road we might have repeated the same mistakes like previous generations before us did: Leaving the actual problems, and it's solutions, to following generations, who gonna curse us for our naivety and hubris. There's also the factor that nuclear requires massive cooling, this last summer already has seen several plants, all over the globe, shut down/throttled down due to rivers running too hot for cooling [2]. If the trend of increasing average temperatures keeps on going, this will become a much more common issue. [0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3058303/look-at-the-millions-of-bags-of-radioactive-dirt-that-japan-has-no-plan-for https://www.fastcompany.com/3058303/look-at-the-millions-of-... [1] https://qz.com/1163140/us-nuclear-tests-killed-american-civilians-on-a-scale-comparable-to-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/ https://qz.com/1163140/us-nuclear-tests-killed-american-civi... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/07/weatherwatch-nuclear-power-plants-feel-the-heat https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/07/weatherwatch-nu...

jschwartzi 8y ago
>Leading to a situation that down the road we might have repeated the same mistakes like previous generations before us did: Leaving the actual problems, and it's solutions, to following generations, who gonna curse us for our naivety and hubris. This is also the case if we do nothing. Consider that the alternative to Nuclear is baseload generation with coal, oil and gas, which we know for a fact are destroying our environment by raising global temperatures. And they're ruining our air. They're not going away any time soon, either.

xorcist 8y ago

Every conversation around nuclear starts and ends with "but Greenpeace!". That's ascribing Greenpeace not just a little more influence than is realistic. The reason why we see less and less investment in new nuclear has more to do with the economics of it all, and that large scale public spending is a bit more problematic than half a century ago. I don't know about Greenpeace specifically, but the environmental movement as a whole has been pretty consistent through this whole time in their criticism of fossil fuels. You may or may not agree with criticisms around nuclear power, but that doesn't make it a double standard.