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> They are unreasonable concerns because they're not in any way grounded in reality. This is incorrect. The issues of safety, cost, waste disposal, etc are pro

> They are unreasonable concerns because they're not in any way grounded in reality. This is incorrect. The issues of safety, cost, waste disposal, etc are problems that people have spent enormous time and money trying to solve. The fact that they don't remotely outweigh the downsides of not using nuclear doesn't make them unreasonable or any less real. Also, renewable energy has been a thing since before the 70s and 80s. The rest of your post is simply an argument against the anti-nuclear movement. As I've repeatedly said, I agree with the pro-nuclear arguments. That's not the distinction I'm making.

avar 7y ago
The article we're discussing has the title "Public's Dread of Nuclear Power Limits its Deployment". Perhaps we're talking past one another. I'm commenting on how the public policy discussion in practice is talking about completely the wrong issues, leading to a conservatively estimated million deaths annually. That doesn't mean those issues can't ever be discussed, there's obviously a time and place to discuss nuclear safety. But it's important to understand that it's harmful in terms of public policy to put that at the forefront of the discussion, as tends to happen. Just like if every public public health discussion about vaccines devolved into talking about the fringe bad effects from vaccines, with the end result being that nobody would get vaccinated. Yes, renewable energy has in theory been a thing for 50 years, but in practice the countries that scaled back their nuclear deployments around that time didn't replace nuclear with renewable, they replaced nuclear with energy whose waste we're still breathing today. Look at e.g. the grid development of Germany v.s. France for a good example. The only exceptions to this are countries like Norway and Iceland who could scale up hydropower, but that doesn't work for everyone. So I'm not sympathetic to some theoretical spherical-cow-in-a-vacuum argument that the anti-nuclear dialog hasn't been massively harmful to humanity and the planet. If the guaranteed practical outcome of a certain type of public advocacy is a certain type of public policy I think it's meaningless to talk about the would-have-could-haves of it. People should be judged on the foreseeable outcomes of their actions, not their supposed good intentions.

avar 7y ago

The article we're discussing has the title "Public's Dread of Nuclear Power Limits its Deployment". Perhaps we're talking past one another. I'm commenting on how the public policy discussion in practice is talking about completely the wrong issues, leading to a conservatively estimated million deaths annually. That doesn't mean those issues can't ever be discussed, there's obviously a time and place to discuss nuclear safety. But it's important to understand that it's harmful in terms of public policy to put that at the forefront of the discussion, as tends to happen. Just like if every public public health discussion about vaccines devolved into talking about the fringe bad effects from vaccines, with the end result being that nobody would get vaccinated. Yes, renewable energy has in theory been a thing for 50 years, but in practice the countries that scaled back their nuclear deployments around that time didn't replace nuclear with renewable, they replaced nuclear with energy whose waste we're still breathing today. Look at e.g. the grid development of Germany v.s. France for a good example. The only exceptions to this are countries like Norway and Iceland who could scale up hydropower, but that doesn't work for everyone. So I'm not sympathetic to some theoretical spherical-cow-in-a-vacuum argument that the anti-nuclear dialog hasn't been massively harmful to humanity and the planet. If the guaranteed practical outcome of a certain type of public advocacy is a certain type of public policy I think it's meaningless to talk about the would-have-could-haves of it. People should be judged on the foreseeable outcomes of their actions, not their supposed good intentions.