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> says Yannick Rousselet, a Greenpeace campaign leader. Respectable publications should stop quoting Greenpeace. In my mind, Greenpeace is really close to anti

> says Yannick Rousselet, a Greenpeace campaign leader. Respectable publications should stop quoting Greenpeace. In my mind, Greenpeace is really close to anti-vaxxers through their opposition of nuclear power and especially GMO foods such as Golden Rice which would save thousands of children's lives every year. In regards to nuclear power, it it had not been for the stringent opposition to nuclear power over the years, a much larger percentage of our power generation would be carbon free. https://slate.com/technology/2013/08/golden-rice-attack-in-philippines-anti-gmo-activists-lie-about-protest-and-safety.html https://slate.com/technology/2013/08/golden-rice-attack-in-p...

Despegar 7y ago
Greenpeace was also responsible for getting Apple to remove harmful chemicals/materials from their products and supply chain. This slide in every keynote is thanks to Greenpeace's pressure: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/PTzcvBp4KMjFaBymZ_M2__JaZ0Y=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9231077/apple_iphone_2017_20170912_12114.JPG https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/PTzcvBp4KMjFaBymZ_M2__JaZ0Y=...
option 7y ago
I grew up near Chernobyl and my parents still work there. A lot of what people see in the media about nuclear is fear mongering lies. The recent “documentaries” on this topic further delays any progress on fighting global warming.
- SiempreViernes 7y ago
  Opposition to carbon tax is the real blocker to rapid progress, more nuclear power ranks in the "nice to have" list.
  - manfredo 7y ago
    Opposition to a carbon tax is much more down to earth. The people who will mostly be paying carbon taxes are rural people who rely on automobiles for transport, and need more energy to deliver power, plumbing, and goods over longer distances. There's a reason why urban people favor carbon taxes and the rest do not: the former won't be paying nearly as much. And since rural people tend to be poorer this makes a carbon tax highly regressive. Offering tax credits for reducing carbon emissions is fundamentally the same thing, but people oppose it because many times the people earnings these credits still use fossil fuels but are switching from coal to gas. Many oppose any development of fossil fuel power, even if it reduces emissions.
    - SiempreViernes 7y ago
      The reasoning for the opposition is largely irrelevant to the question of which blocking actions harms our survival chances the most.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - dragonwriter 7y ago
        > The reasoning for the opposition is largely irrelevant to the question of which blocking actions harms our survival chances the most. It's not at all, because the reason for opposition is directly relevant to the question of which failures to address the reasons for opposition are, in fact, “blocking actions” that harm our survival the most. Perhaps more importantly, it's relevant to the fix instead of blame issue of which approached to address opposition are likely to be most fruitful in improving our survival chances. Which is, to me, the more important question: I'd rather human civilization survive than be able to efficiently place the blame for it's collapse.
        SiempreViernes 7y ago
        Sure, but that was not the context of my statement and not a discussion I'm interested in having here. Also, (and this is the real reason for this reply) that was some pretty bad use of italics. You just made your text harder to read mate, and honestly I just skimmed it.
      - manfredo 7y ago
        It is highly relevant. Failure to understand the reasoning of the opposition makes it hard for those that do want to reduce emissions to gain office, which drastically reduces the ability to introduce changes to limit climate change.
  - option 7y ago
    carbon tax is a great idea. But we still need to get clean energy from somewhere. Reducing (energy) consumption is not a long term answer
    - SiempreViernes 7y ago
      The sun is a more logical source if you talk long term, the sun is likely to destroy the earth before it stops being a viable source of energy. Meanwhile nuclear uses up finite stores of fuel and exotic materials for the containment and control systems.
      - ars 7y ago
        It's not quite that simple, to harvest the sun you need machines, and those machines take a lot of resources to built. You need to calculate the trade-offs of those resources vs resources used for other types of energy. The "sun" part of the question is the least interesting part.
        fyfy18 7y ago
        The CO2 in the production, transport and installation of solar panels leads to an equivalent CO2 output of 50g per kWh. This compares to 975g per kWh for coal. Solar still wins. https://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/how-much-co2-does-one-solar-panel-create https://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/ho... I'm currently building a house quite north at 55N. I plan to install a solar PV system that will make the house a net-zero energy consumer (everything is electric, no fossil fuels). It should pay for itself in around 10 years and then continue producing electricity for another 15 before warranties run out. After that the electrical equipment may need to be replaced, but the panels themselves should be fine. If it makes sense here, it can make sense almost anywhere.
        ars 7y ago
        > leads to an equivalent CO2 output of 50g per kWh Like I said, it's not so simple, nuclear is 66 g/kWh, and does not have intermittency issues. > that will make the house a net-zero energy consumer (everything is electric, no fossil fuels). Are you heating with electricity as well? Because that's really bad for the environment, even with PV. (Because if you heated with natural gas, you could send your PV electricity to another grid consumer and avoid more hydrocarbon fuel being burned.) If yes, are you at least using a ground-source heat pump? (Although even there natural gas is better - install a "gas absorption heat pump" if you really want to minimize your emissions.) > If it makes sense here, it can make sense almost anywhere. In small quantities yes, but if everyone did that you need something to generate electricity at night. To me nuclear wins easily.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    Opposition to carbon tax is also doing more to negatively impact nuclear adoption than any documentary; a carbon tax is, effectively, a subsidy to any carbon neutral generation method, including nuclear.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- option 7y ago
  As a thought experiment - by delaying the adoption of nuclear power, the creators of recent HBO series are probably going to be implicitly responsible for more deaths and habitat destruction than CHNPP explosion was. EDIT: their work isn’t simply journalism. They intentionally dramatized and lied about things - radiation being contagious, radiation bringing down helicopter, etc.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > As a thought experiment - by delaying the adoption of nuclear power, the creators of recent HBO series are probably going to be implicitly responsible for more deaths and habitat destruction than CHNPP explosion was. That's not a thought experiment, that's just an unsupported claim. Further, it's not like there was a rush to adopt nuclear power that was abandoned as a result of public response to the Chernobyl miniseries. Even further, it is not even the case that the miniseries implicated nuclear power in the accident, which it went out of its way to lay at the foot of corner-cutting by the Soviet bureaucracy causing an accident for which all the knowledge needed to prevent it absolutely existed within the system, it was just (in the narrative of the miniseries) not acted on and actively walled off from the people actually involved.
    - autokad 7y ago
      I disagree with his hypothesis but: "A thought experiment considers a hypothesis, theory, or principle for the purpose of thinking through its consequences."
      - option 7y ago
        care to elaborate why you disagree? Suppose that show delayed/reduced nuclear usage by 1%. Than that capacity is filled by coal or oil (sun and wind can’t fill for nuclear - nuclear should fill for them when they arent available). The coal and oil is responsible for a lot of deaths due to the pollution, multiply that by 1% and you’ll get a lot of deaths
  - dmix 7y ago
- cowmoo728 7y ago
  There has been a little bit of an update on views of chernobyl. Despite being considered the worst nuclear accident of all time, the actual death and damage toll from chernobyl is minimal compared to more boring things like coal dust and air pollution. This is a self-professed anti-nuclear hippy giving a talk about how rationally looking at chernobyl and fukushima made him a nuclear power advocate. https://youtu.be/ciStnd9Y2ak https://youtu.be/ciStnd9Y2ak
RobertRoberts 7y ago
Nuclear waste storage. I'd rather have brown outs until solar power and alternatives get better than have that stuffed stored within 100 miles of my family. People who claim it can be safely stored, don't understand it's the lowest bidder who gets the contract, and the lowest paid workers to guard (from theft, yes) and maintain (from leaks) the storage system. These systems are all ticking time bombs. We can't even maintain our bridges. Look up the stats on how many bridges are at the catastrophic failing points due to over due maintenance, and we can't even fix these. (last I looked it's over 50,000 bridges) No way in hell I want more toxic waste that last thousands of years endlessly piling up somewhere. Nuclear power is _not_ the answer. Maybe fusion is, but not uranium in it's current form. Edit: I have a relative in a state legislature discuss this topic with me. He inspected the storage sites in our state.
- johnisgood 7y ago
  From https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html: > If all the electricity use of the USA was distributed evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be 39.5 grams. That’s the weight of seven U. S. quarters of waste, per year! A detailed description of this result can be found here[1]. If we got all our electricity from coal and natural gas, expect to have over 10,000 kilograms of CO2/yr attributed to each person, not to mention other poisonous emissions directly to the biosphere (based on EIA emissions data[2]). If you want raw numbers: in 2018, there were just over 80,000 metric tonnes of high-level waste in the USA. Between 1971 and 2018, nuclear reactors in the USA generated 17.3 GW-years of electricity to make this waste. For another perspective, each average US home using 10,000 kWh/year of nuclear electricity would generate 5 grams of waste per year. This is astoundingly low, again, thanks to the near magical energy density of the atom. > As mentioned previously, nuclear waste is over 90% uranium. Thus, the spent fuel (waste) still contains 90% usable fuel! It can be chemically processed and placed in advanced fast reactors (which have not been deployed on any major scale yet) to close the fuel cycle. A closed fuel cycle means much less nuclear waste and much more energy extracted from the raw ore. [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/assets/waste_per_person.pdf https://whatisnuclear.com/assets/waste_per_person.pdf [2] https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/ghg_report/ghg_carbon.php https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/ghg_report/ghg_car... --- Let us not forget about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power#Possible_benefits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power#Po... > There is much less nuclear waste—up to two orders of magnitude less, state Moir and Teller, eliminating the need for large-scale or long-term storage; "Chinese scientists claim that hazardous waste will be a thousand times less than with uranium." The radioactivity of the resulting waste also drops down to safe levels after just a one or a few hundred years, compared to tens of thousands of years needed for current nuclear waste to cool off. > Thorium fuel cycle is a potential way to produce long term nuclear energy with low radio-toxicity waste. > Summarizing some of the potential benefits, Martin offers his general opinion: "Thorium could provide a clean and effectively limitless source of power while allaying all public concern—weapons proliferation, radioactive pollution, toxic waste, and fuel that is both costly and complicated to process. --- Worth reading as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor --- The technology definitely exists. Storage is not an issue. Building or sticking to older, shittier designs that are horrible even in theory or on paper is the issue.

Despegar 7y ago

Greenpeace was also responsible for getting Apple to remove harmful chemicals/materials from their products and supply chain. This slide in every keynote is thanks to Greenpeace's pressure: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/PTzcvBp4KMjFaBymZ_M2__JaZ0Y=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9231077/apple_iphone_2017_20170912_12114.JPG https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/PTzcvBp4KMjFaBymZ_M2__JaZ0Y=...

option 7y ago

I grew up near Chernobyl and my parents still work there. A lot of what people see in the media about nuclear is fear mongering lies. The recent “documentaries” on this topic further delays any progress on fighting global warming.

SiempreViernes 7y ago
Opposition to carbon tax is the real blocker to rapid progress, more nuclear power ranks in the "nice to have" list.
- manfredo 7y ago
  Opposition to a carbon tax is much more down to earth. The people who will mostly be paying carbon taxes are rural people who rely on automobiles for transport, and need more energy to deliver power, plumbing, and goods over longer distances. There's a reason why urban people favor carbon taxes and the rest do not: the former won't be paying nearly as much. And since rural people tend to be poorer this makes a carbon tax highly regressive. Offering tax credits for reducing carbon emissions is fundamentally the same thing, but people oppose it because many times the people earnings these credits still use fossil fuels but are switching from coal to gas. Many oppose any development of fossil fuel power, even if it reduces emissions.
  - SiempreViernes 7y ago
    The reasoning for the opposition is largely irrelevant to the question of which blocking actions harms our survival chances the most.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > The reasoning for the opposition is largely irrelevant to the question of which blocking actions harms our survival chances the most. It's not at all, because the reason for opposition is directly relevant to the question of which failures to address the reasons for opposition are, in fact, “blocking actions” that harm our survival the most. Perhaps more importantly, it's relevant to the fix instead of blame issue of which approached to address opposition are likely to be most fruitful in improving our survival chances. Which is, to me, the more important question: I'd rather human civilization survive than be able to efficiently place the blame for it's collapse.
      - SiempreViernes 7y ago
        Sure, but that was not the context of my statement and not a discussion I'm interested in having here. Also, (and this is the real reason for this reply) that was some pretty bad use of italics. You just made your text harder to read mate, and honestly I just skimmed it.
    - manfredo 7y ago
      It is highly relevant. Failure to understand the reasoning of the opposition makes it hard for those that do want to reduce emissions to gain office, which drastically reduces the ability to introduce changes to limit climate change.
- option 7y ago
  carbon tax is a great idea. But we still need to get clean energy from somewhere. Reducing (energy) consumption is not a long term answer
  - SiempreViernes 7y ago
    The sun is a more logical source if you talk long term, the sun is likely to destroy the earth before it stops being a viable source of energy. Meanwhile nuclear uses up finite stores of fuel and exotic materials for the containment and control systems.
    - ars 7y ago
      It's not quite that simple, to harvest the sun you need machines, and those machines take a lot of resources to built. You need to calculate the trade-offs of those resources vs resources used for other types of energy. The "sun" part of the question is the least interesting part.
      - fyfy18 7y ago
        The CO2 in the production, transport and installation of solar panels leads to an equivalent CO2 output of 50g per kWh. This compares to 975g per kWh for coal. Solar still wins. https://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/how-much-co2-does-one-solar-panel-create https://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/ho... I'm currently building a house quite north at 55N. I plan to install a solar PV system that will make the house a net-zero energy consumer (everything is electric, no fossil fuels). It should pay for itself in around 10 years and then continue producing electricity for another 15 before warranties run out. After that the electrical equipment may need to be replaced, but the panels themselves should be fine. If it makes sense here, it can make sense almost anywhere.
        ars 7y ago
        > leads to an equivalent CO2 output of 50g per kWh Like I said, it's not so simple, nuclear is 66 g/kWh, and does not have intermittency issues. > that will make the house a net-zero energy consumer (everything is electric, no fossil fuels). Are you heating with electricity as well? Because that's really bad for the environment, even with PV. (Because if you heated with natural gas, you could send your PV electricity to another grid consumer and avoid more hydrocarbon fuel being burned.) If yes, are you at least using a ground-source heat pump? (Although even there natural gas is better - install a "gas absorption heat pump" if you really want to minimize your emissions.) > If it makes sense here, it can make sense almost anywhere. In small quantities yes, but if everyone did that you need something to generate electricity at night. To me nuclear wins easily.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  Opposition to carbon tax is also doing more to negatively impact nuclear adoption than any documentary; a carbon tax is, effectively, a subsidy to any carbon neutral generation method, including nuclear.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
option 7y ago
As a thought experiment - by delaying the adoption of nuclear power, the creators of recent HBO series are probably going to be implicitly responsible for more deaths and habitat destruction than CHNPP explosion was. EDIT: their work isn’t simply journalism. They intentionally dramatized and lied about things - radiation being contagious, radiation bringing down helicopter, etc.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > As a thought experiment - by delaying the adoption of nuclear power, the creators of recent HBO series are probably going to be implicitly responsible for more deaths and habitat destruction than CHNPP explosion was. That's not a thought experiment, that's just an unsupported claim. Further, it's not like there was a rush to adopt nuclear power that was abandoned as a result of public response to the Chernobyl miniseries. Even further, it is not even the case that the miniseries implicated nuclear power in the accident, which it went out of its way to lay at the foot of corner-cutting by the Soviet bureaucracy causing an accident for which all the knowledge needed to prevent it absolutely existed within the system, it was just (in the narrative of the miniseries) not acted on and actively walled off from the people actually involved.
  - autokad 7y ago
    I disagree with his hypothesis but: "A thought experiment considers a hypothesis, theory, or principle for the purpose of thinking through its consequences."
    - option 7y ago
      care to elaborate why you disagree? Suppose that show delayed/reduced nuclear usage by 1%. Than that capacity is filled by coal or oil (sun and wind can’t fill for nuclear - nuclear should fill for them when they arent available). The coal and oil is responsible for a lot of deaths due to the pollution, multiply that by 1% and you’ll get a lot of deaths
- dmix 7y ago
cowmoo728 7y ago
There has been a little bit of an update on views of chernobyl. Despite being considered the worst nuclear accident of all time, the actual death and damage toll from chernobyl is minimal compared to more boring things like coal dust and air pollution. This is a self-professed anti-nuclear hippy giving a talk about how rationally looking at chernobyl and fukushima made him a nuclear power advocate. https://youtu.be/ciStnd9Y2ak https://youtu.be/ciStnd9Y2ak

RobertRoberts 7y ago

Nuclear waste storage. I'd rather have brown outs until solar power and alternatives get better than have that stuffed stored within 100 miles of my family. People who claim it can be safely stored, don't understand it's the lowest bidder who gets the contract, and the lowest paid workers to guard (from theft, yes) and maintain (from leaks) the storage system. These systems are all ticking time bombs. We can't even maintain our bridges. Look up the stats on how many bridges are at the catastrophic failing points due to over due maintenance, and we can't even fix these. (last I looked it's over 50,000 bridges) No way in hell I want more toxic waste that last thousands of years endlessly piling up somewhere. Nuclear power is _not_ the answer. Maybe fusion is, but not uranium in it's current form. Edit: I have a relative in a state legislature discuss this topic with me. He inspected the storage sites in our state.

johnisgood 7y ago
From https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html: > If all the electricity use of the USA was distributed evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be 39.5 grams. That’s the weight of seven U. S. quarters of waste, per year! A detailed description of this result can be found here[1]. If we got all our electricity from coal and natural gas, expect to have over 10,000 kilograms of CO2/yr attributed to each person, not to mention other poisonous emissions directly to the biosphere (based on EIA emissions data[2]). If you want raw numbers: in 2018, there were just over 80,000 metric tonnes of high-level waste in the USA. Between 1971 and 2018, nuclear reactors in the USA generated 17.3 GW-years of electricity to make this waste. For another perspective, each average US home using 10,000 kWh/year of nuclear electricity would generate 5 grams of waste per year. This is astoundingly low, again, thanks to the near magical energy density of the atom. > As mentioned previously, nuclear waste is over 90% uranium. Thus, the spent fuel (waste) still contains 90% usable fuel! It can be chemically processed and placed in advanced fast reactors (which have not been deployed on any major scale yet) to close the fuel cycle. A closed fuel cycle means much less nuclear waste and much more energy extracted from the raw ore. [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/assets/waste_per_person.pdf https://whatisnuclear.com/assets/waste_per_person.pdf [2] https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/ghg_report/ghg_carbon.php https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/ghg_report/ghg_car... --- Let us not forget about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power#Possible_benefits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power#Po... > There is much less nuclear waste—up to two orders of magnitude less, state Moir and Teller, eliminating the need for large-scale or long-term storage; "Chinese scientists claim that hazardous waste will be a thousand times less than with uranium." The radioactivity of the resulting waste also drops down to safe levels after just a one or a few hundred years, compared to tens of thousands of years needed for current nuclear waste to cool off. > Thorium fuel cycle is a potential way to produce long term nuclear energy with low radio-toxicity waste. > Summarizing some of the potential benefits, Martin offers his general opinion: "Thorium could provide a clean and effectively limitless source of power while allaying all public concern—weapons proliferation, radioactive pollution, toxic waste, and fuel that is both costly and complicated to process. --- Worth reading as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor --- The technology definitely exists. Storage is not an issue. Building or sticking to older, shittier designs that are horrible even in theory or on paper is the issue.