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Nuclear power presents the perfect storm for negative public image: - Environmental movement went anti-nuclear in the '70s for no particular reason. - Fear Se

Nuclear power presents the perfect storm for negative public image: - Environmental movement went anti-nuclear in the '70s for no particular reason. - Fear Sells in the media. Nothing strikes fear like the invisible killer of radiation. Nuclear disasters get media attention like nothing else. - Nuclear weapons are scary, and rightfully so. And they share a word in common with "nuclear power," so there you go. Being tightly regulated and controlled by government makes an industry ripe for "corruption and greed" since it takes political connection and maneuvering to get things done. It really is amazing, though, how much public image and politics can completely stall forward progress on a power source with so much promise.

davidgay 7y ago
> Nuclear weapons are scary, and rightfully so. And they share a word in common with "nuclear power," so there you go. Now you're being specious. They share rather more than a word, they are based on the same physical process.
- arethuza 7y ago
  Yes, but the design of a nuclear power reactor and a nuclear weapon are pretty different - for a start the really nasty bit of most nuclear weapons is the fission of the secondary tamper by neutrons from the fusion component of the secondary. Nothing like that happens in a nuclear power station.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Nuclear weapons require the reactors, and a number were built for plutonium production e.g. Windscale/Sellafield. There are plenty of countries that probably shouldn't be allowed unsupervised reactors for this reason.
capitol_ 7y ago
"no particular reason" is quite a misrepresentation. If you mean that you don't agree with their reasons or think they are incorrect it would be more honest to state that.
nickelcitymario 7y ago
> for no particular reason I don't think that's quite accurate. It may be more accurate to say they were misinformed or miscalculated. The reasons were that they believed, and many people still do, that nuclear was bad for the environment because: 1) It required mining to extract the resources necessary, and mining isn't exactly a green activity. 2) Nuclear disasters are unquestionably bad for the environment, and bad in an immediately visible way. (Compared to carbon, which takes many decades for the effects to take hold.) 3) There's a general sense that we don't know what to do with the nuclear waste. To be clear, I 100% support nuclear power as the most pragmatic and environmentally friendly solution to our energy needs. But if we're going to tackle the political problem, we have to be honest about why that problem exists.
- cglace 7y ago
  It there any sources of energy that doesnt depend on mining at some point?
  - nickelcitymario 7y ago
    No, not if we look at the entire supply chain and the construction of the power plant (whatever the source of power may be). But people don't get as emotional about the resources required to build windmills (so long as it's not in my backyard) as they do about nuclear. And once a windmill or a dam or a solar farm has been built, there's a belief that there's no ongoing environmental damage. Whereas nuclear (and coal and gas) require ongoing resource extraction. Again, I'm not the one making these arguments. I'm saying this is public perception. (Or at least my perception of public perception.) I happen to think the only environmentally responsible way to supply all the energy we need for 7 billion people (and growing), especially when more and more of those people are industrializing, is to go nuclear. Every other option seems like a guaranteed way to kill ourselves in the long run.
    - rayiner 7y ago
      > But people don't get as emotional about the resources required to build windmills (so long as it's not in my backyard) as they do about nuclear. And once a windmill or a dam or a solar farm has been built, there's a belief that there's no ongoing environmental damage. Whereas nuclear (and coal and gas) require ongoing resource extraction. But you need massive amounts of battery storage to actually power a grid with windmills and solar plants (unless you have a bunch of coal and nuclear providing baseload power anyway). And batteries are consumables which require intensive mining.
metric10 7y ago
I suspect the Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima Daiichi incidents also had a part to play in public perception.
- mturmon 7y ago
  And in particular, Three Mile Island happened in 1979 and crystallized a lot of US opposition to nuclear power. One of the problems it exposed is a too-friendly connection between the NRC and the nuclear power industry. According to a recent book [1], this problem still exists. [1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6424/237 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6424/237
  - js2 7y ago
    I saw The China Syndrome as a kid and let’s just say I still think about it sometimes, living six miles from a Westinghouse PWR.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    At the same time the NRC is too cozy with the industry it has kept all nuclear projects in the US tied up in red tape for literally decades.
    - bjourne 7y ago
      Citation needed! From what I've read the US government has been incredibly supportive of the nuclear industry. For example, both Obama and Trump have secured federal funding for the Vogtle 3 and 4 plants. US public opinion has also been heavily in favor of nuclear power, even after Fukushima. The "red tape is causing all our problems!" seem, to me, to be just a myth spread by the nuclear lobby. https://news.gallup.com/poll/153452/americans-favor-nuclear-power-year-fukushima.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/153452/americans-favor-nuclear-...
      - loeg 7y ago
        > US public opinion has also been heavily in favor of nuclear power, even after Fukushima. Can you source that claim? My personal experience is that people I encounter in the US are pretty nuclear-hostile, but that's just anecdotal.
bilbo0s 7y ago
In fairness, nuclear is also just incredibly expensive. Witness Vogtie. Take away all taxes and regulations, then compare the price of, say, Iowa, building a nuclear plant instead of just slapping up windmills wherever they want. (Remember, we're assuming zero regulations. So while slapping up windmills would normally be incredibly illegal, we're able to do that under the conditions that our thought experiment postulates.) There's just no way to make nuclear compete. Which is why when you drive through Iowa, all you see are windmills everywhere. It's cheap. Much cheaper than nuclear. If people want nuclear, the government has to provide the lion's share of the assistance to make it happen. Even then, there are no guarantees you'll be in love with what that looks like. At Vogtie for instance, the government has taken the unprecedented step of prohibiting future users of Vogtie power from ever switching to cheaper wind or coal alternatives. And that's on top of the government agreeing to pay over half of the initial construction costs. So you basically have government paying the lion's share of the tab, and mandating that everyone use it, and it's still over budget, late, and more expensive than wind and coal alternatives. Too many analyses of nuclear power ignore the financial realities. Iowans choose wind, because it's cheaper than nuclear, solar, and coal. So they slap up windmills, and they have the old coal plants to fill in the gaps. Now Iowa was not trying to put its nuclear plants out of business, but as a consumer if you can choose an electricity bill at 2 cents per kWh, wouldn't you? Or would you continue to pay the minimum 8x 2 cents per kWh for nuclear? That's why nuclear is on the ropes in the US, if you give people a choice, they tend to vote with their wallets.
- rayiner 7y ago
  Your first paragraph misses the mark, because, unlike a nuclear plant, a windmill or solar plant isn't a standalone power source. To have reliable baseload power with renewables, you need massive battery storage. Right now, you don't factor in the (very high) cost of building battery storage into the cost of wind power because you still have all those coal, gas, and nuclear plants providing baseload power. But the cost of all that baseload capacity that's increasingly sitting around not being used (but has to be there to ensure grid stability) can't be ignored.
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
michaelcampbell 7y ago
> Environmental movement went anti-nuclear in the '70s for no particular reason. NO particular reason? > Nothing strikes fear like the invisible killer of radiation. Nuclear disasters get media attention like nothing else. Other than that, maybe.
- nickik 7y ago
  People wildly overestimate how dangerous radiation is and how dangerous civilian nuclear power is.
pjc50 7y ago
The environmental movement went anti-nuclear over two very real things: the dumping of waste at sea, and nuclear testing - both because of the threat and the waste products ending up in the atmosphere. This was the era of direct action, culminating in the French government carrying out a state-sponsored terrorist attack that sunk the Rainbow Warrior and killed a photographer who was on board.
- freeflight 7y ago
  Decades later, it turns out those concerns were not completely unfounded [0]. [0] 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...
wnewman 7y ago
"For no particular reason" may not be quite right. One candidate for a particular reason is the same grouchiness about orthodox[] technology that shows up in many double standards. E.g., chemicals that fail the Ames Test are alarmingly sinister if they are synthetic pesticides, vs. so perfectly fine that only a pedant would ever consider the issue if they are pesticidal toxins present at elevated levels in pest-resistant breeds of crops. Any given number of people killed in a coal mine or nuclear accident is a very big deal compared to the same number killed by bacterial infection related to organic farming. Low-tech paintlike or gluelike goo and gunk is not generally subject to witch hunt standards for sinister toxicity when used to caulk or paint charming fishing boats, but is fair game when used in fracking a formation which contains oil. Microquakes are so irrelevant that only a pedant would ask about them when the facility in question is geothermal, but scary as hell for an oil fracking facility. Bird kills are absolutely intolerable ecological atrocities for oil spills, irrelevant pedantry for wind farms. [] I don't know a word for the distinction I'm trying to get at here with "orthodox". I mean the way that various important technological niches seem to get a pass: e.g. optics (eyeglasses, cameras), and selective breeding of crop species. It's hard for me to imagine persistent enthusiasm for rumors that eyeglasses cause brain cancer in the way that rumors about low-intensity low-frequency EM radiation (from power lines to cell phones) persist. The distinction seems to be roughly "stuff descended from the early Industrial Revolution, the Scottish Enlightenment, and/or sufficiently hardcore scientific method that the Royal Society would be respectfully impressed."
bliblah 7y ago
To add another rebuttal to this comment. I think Nuclear energy also represent situations that are both hyper rewarding and hyper risky. An oil tanker can spill millions of gallons off the coast but that can be cleaned up and the damage will repair. Meanwhile Chernobyl and Fukushima are still abandoned and under constant surveillance and there are still no firm dates for when it will be "safe" to live there. People who study Nuclear Engineering tend to be targets of assassination / surveillance by sovereign nations (The US and Irael has an active history of eliminating Iranian Nuclear Engineers for example [1]) in an effort to avoid the creation of nuclear weapons or require levels of security and bureaucracy that you don't see elsewhere in the energy industry, scaring off potential candidates. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Iranian_nuclear_scientists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Iranian_nucle...
- saagarjha 7y ago
  I'm no ecologist, but as far as I was aware the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is actually quite vibrant due to lack of human interference, while oil spills have extreme consequences for local wildlife.

davidgay 7y ago

> Nuclear weapons are scary, and rightfully so. And they share a word in common with "nuclear power," so there you go. Now you're being specious. They share rather more than a word, they are based on the same physical process.

arethuza 7y ago
Yes, but the design of a nuclear power reactor and a nuclear weapon are pretty different - for a start the really nasty bit of most nuclear weapons is the fission of the secondary tamper by neutrons from the fusion component of the secondary. Nothing like that happens in a nuclear power station.
- pjc50 7y ago
  Nuclear weapons require the reactors, and a number were built for plutonium production e.g. Windscale/Sellafield. There are plenty of countries that probably shouldn't be allowed unsupervised reactors for this reason.

capitol_ 7y ago

"no particular reason" is quite a misrepresentation. If you mean that you don't agree with their reasons or think they are incorrect it would be more honest to state that.

nickelcitymario 7y ago

> for no particular reason I don't think that's quite accurate. It may be more accurate to say they were misinformed or miscalculated. The reasons were that they believed, and many people still do, that nuclear was bad for the environment because: 1) It required mining to extract the resources necessary, and mining isn't exactly a green activity. 2) Nuclear disasters are unquestionably bad for the environment, and bad in an immediately visible way. (Compared to carbon, which takes many decades for the effects to take hold.) 3) There's a general sense that we don't know what to do with the nuclear waste. To be clear, I 100% support nuclear power as the most pragmatic and environmentally friendly solution to our energy needs. But if we're going to tackle the political problem, we have to be honest about why that problem exists.

cglace 7y ago
It there any sources of energy that doesnt depend on mining at some point?
- nickelcitymario 7y ago
  No, not if we look at the entire supply chain and the construction of the power plant (whatever the source of power may be). But people don't get as emotional about the resources required to build windmills (so long as it's not in my backyard) as they do about nuclear. And once a windmill or a dam or a solar farm has been built, there's a belief that there's no ongoing environmental damage. Whereas nuclear (and coal and gas) require ongoing resource extraction. Again, I'm not the one making these arguments. I'm saying this is public perception. (Or at least my perception of public perception.) I happen to think the only environmentally responsible way to supply all the energy we need for 7 billion people (and growing), especially when more and more of those people are industrializing, is to go nuclear. Every other option seems like a guaranteed way to kill ourselves in the long run.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    > But people don't get as emotional about the resources required to build windmills (so long as it's not in my backyard) as they do about nuclear. And once a windmill or a dam or a solar farm has been built, there's a belief that there's no ongoing environmental damage. Whereas nuclear (and coal and gas) require ongoing resource extraction. But you need massive amounts of battery storage to actually power a grid with windmills and solar plants (unless you have a bunch of coal and nuclear providing baseload power anyway). And batteries are consumables which require intensive mining.

metric10 7y ago

I suspect the Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima Daiichi incidents also had a part to play in public perception.

mturmon 7y ago
And in particular, Three Mile Island happened in 1979 and crystallized a lot of US opposition to nuclear power. One of the problems it exposed is a too-friendly connection between the NRC and the nuclear power industry. According to a recent book [1], this problem still exists. [1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6424/237 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6424/237
- js2 7y ago
  I saw The China Syndrome as a kid and let’s just say I still think about it sometimes, living six miles from a Westinghouse PWR.
- jandrese 7y ago
  At the same time the NRC is too cozy with the industry it has kept all nuclear projects in the US tied up in red tape for literally decades.
  - bjourne 7y ago
    Citation needed! From what I've read the US government has been incredibly supportive of the nuclear industry. For example, both Obama and Trump have secured federal funding for the Vogtle 3 and 4 plants. US public opinion has also been heavily in favor of nuclear power, even after Fukushima. The "red tape is causing all our problems!" seem, to me, to be just a myth spread by the nuclear lobby. https://news.gallup.com/poll/153452/americans-favor-nuclear-power-year-fukushima.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/153452/americans-favor-nuclear-...
    - loeg 7y ago
      > US public opinion has also been heavily in favor of nuclear power, even after Fukushima. Can you source that claim? My personal experience is that people I encounter in the US are pretty nuclear-hostile, but that's just anecdotal.

bilbo0s 7y ago

In fairness, nuclear is also just incredibly expensive. Witness Vogtie. Take away all taxes and regulations, then compare the price of, say, Iowa, building a nuclear plant instead of just slapping up windmills wherever they want. (Remember, we're assuming zero regulations. So while slapping up windmills would normally be incredibly illegal, we're able to do that under the conditions that our thought experiment postulates.) There's just no way to make nuclear compete. Which is why when you drive through Iowa, all you see are windmills everywhere. It's cheap. Much cheaper than nuclear. If people want nuclear, the government has to provide the lion's share of the assistance to make it happen. Even then, there are no guarantees you'll be in love with what that looks like. At Vogtie for instance, the government has taken the unprecedented step of prohibiting future users of Vogtie power from ever switching to cheaper wind or coal alternatives. And that's on top of the government agreeing to pay over half of the initial construction costs. So you basically have government paying the lion's share of the tab, and mandating that everyone use it, and it's still over budget, late, and more expensive than wind and coal alternatives. Too many analyses of nuclear power ignore the financial realities. Iowans choose wind, because it's cheaper than nuclear, solar, and coal. So they slap up windmills, and they have the old coal plants to fill in the gaps. Now Iowa was not trying to put its nuclear plants out of business, but as a consumer if you can choose an electricity bill at 2 cents per kWh, wouldn't you? Or would you continue to pay the minimum 8x 2 cents per kWh for nuclear? That's why nuclear is on the ropes in the US, if you give people a choice, they tend to vote with their wallets.

rayiner 7y ago
Your first paragraph misses the mark, because, unlike a nuclear plant, a windmill or solar plant isn't a standalone power source. To have reliable baseload power with renewables, you need massive battery storage. Right now, you don't factor in the (very high) cost of building battery storage into the cost of wind power because you still have all those coal, gas, and nuclear plants providing baseload power. But the cost of all that baseload capacity that's increasingly sitting around not being used (but has to be there to ensure grid stability) can't be ignored.
- bilbo0s 7y ago

michaelcampbell 7y ago

> Environmental movement went anti-nuclear in the '70s for no particular reason. NO particular reason? > Nothing strikes fear like the invisible killer of radiation. Nuclear disasters get media attention like nothing else. Other than that, maybe.

nickik 7y ago
People wildly overestimate how dangerous radiation is and how dangerous civilian nuclear power is.

pjc50 7y ago

The environmental movement went anti-nuclear over two very real things: the dumping of waste at sea, and nuclear testing - both because of the threat and the waste products ending up in the atmosphere. This was the era of direct action, culminating in the French government carrying out a state-sponsored terrorist attack that sunk the Rainbow Warrior and killed a photographer who was on board.

freeflight 7y ago
Decades later, it turns out those concerns were not completely unfounded [0]. [0] 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...

wnewman 7y ago

"For no particular reason" may not be quite right. One candidate for a particular reason is the same grouchiness about orthodox[] technology that shows up in many double standards. E.g., chemicals that fail the Ames Test are alarmingly sinister if they are synthetic pesticides, vs. so perfectly fine that only a pedant would ever consider the issue if they are pesticidal toxins present at elevated levels in pest-resistant breeds of crops. Any given number of people killed in a coal mine or nuclear accident is a very big deal compared to the same number killed by bacterial infection related to organic farming. Low-tech paintlike or gluelike goo and gunk is not generally subject to witch hunt standards for sinister toxicity when used to caulk or paint charming fishing boats, but is fair game when used in fracking a formation which contains oil. Microquakes are so irrelevant that only a pedant would ask about them when the facility in question is geothermal, but scary as hell for an oil fracking facility. Bird kills are absolutely intolerable ecological atrocities for oil spills, irrelevant pedantry for wind farms. [] I don't know a word for the distinction I'm trying to get at here with "orthodox". I mean the way that various important technological niches seem to get a pass: e.g. optics (eyeglasses, cameras), and selective breeding of crop species. It's hard for me to imagine persistent enthusiasm for rumors that eyeglasses cause brain cancer in the way that rumors about low-intensity low-frequency EM radiation (from power lines to cell phones) persist. The distinction seems to be roughly "stuff descended from the early Industrial Revolution, the Scottish Enlightenment, and/or sufficiently hardcore scientific method that the Royal Society would be respectfully impressed."

bliblah 7y ago

To add another rebuttal to this comment. I think Nuclear energy also represent situations that are both hyper rewarding and hyper risky. An oil tanker can spill millions of gallons off the coast but that can be cleaned up and the damage will repair. Meanwhile Chernobyl and Fukushima are still abandoned and under constant surveillance and there are still no firm dates for when it will be "safe" to live there. People who study Nuclear Engineering tend to be targets of assassination / surveillance by sovereign nations (The US and Irael has an active history of eliminating Iranian Nuclear Engineers for example [1]) in an effort to avoid the creation of nuclear weapons or require levels of security and bureaucracy that you don't see elsewhere in the energy industry, scaring off potential candidates. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Iranian_nuclear_scientists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Iranian_nucle...

saagarjha 7y ago
I'm no ecologist, but as far as I was aware the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is actually quite vibrant due to lack of human interference, while oil spills have extreme consequences for local wildlife.