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> Ardern went on to say she absolutely believed climate change was the "biggest challenge of our time" and the "nuclear moment" for this generation. I find it
by RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
> Ardern went on to say she absolutely believed climate change was the "biggest challenge of our time" and the "nuclear moment" for this generation.
I find it ironic the prime minister is using “nuclear” as a pejorative when it was the left’s irrational opposition to nuclear power that resulted in much of the world's electricity being produced by fossil fuels.
If we had embraced nuclear power 2 decades ago, we would have been in much better shape with respect to CO2 than we are in now.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Guest42 7y agoDo you have sources regarding the "left's irrational opposition to nuclear power"?
- AmericanChopper 7y agoThe left in New Zealand literally banned all forms of nuclear energy, going as far as prohibiting essentially all US Navy vessels from entering its waters just in case they had fissile material on board.
- zknz 7y agoThis is a mainstream political position in NZ, not one of the "left".
- AmericanChopper 7y agoIt’s actually a very controversial position, implemented by a left wing government.
- CamouflagedKiwi 7y agoIt's not a controversial stance within NZ these days, nor seen as particularly partisan there. Other countries (especially the US given what it meant for ANZUS) might find it more so.
- AmericanChopper 7y agoIt was controversial at the time, resulting in the US kicking NZ out of their security alliance (something that was of no detriment to the US), and continues to be controversial every time the topic of a US ship coming to NZ is brought up. The fact that the only outcome this policy has ever achieved is the prevention of allied navy visiting NZ is a very consistent source of controversy in NZ. To claim otherwise is simply rewriting history.
- crummy 7y agoI thought it was more that NZ banned nuclear weapons and the US didn't want to confirm or deny the presence of such weapons on board any ships so they weren't able to visit. I guess it's a manner of perspective.
- AmericanChopper 7y agoThe ban applies to nuclear propulsion too. Excluding a large amount of Navy vessels off the bat. The rest being excluded because Navies tend not to advertise which ships are nuclear armed. The great irony of that being that those same ships protect a lot of water that NZ exporters rely on for shipping.
- phs318u 7y agoYou may be unaware that this position was enshrined in legislation that has remained untouched in the last 3 decades including by conservative governments. A couple of interesting facts: 1) the galvanising moment for this was the “Rainbow Warrior affair” in which French intelligence agents were caught after having sunk the Greenpeace vessel of the same name; 2) the nuclear-free zone act does not prohibit use of nuclear generation in NZ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_nuclear-free_zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_nuclear-free_zone
- AmericanChopper 7y agoI am aware of all these things. It is a law that will likely stay in place forever, as it is such a divisive and controversial issue, yet has barely any impact on anything in NZ, no politician will ever have a motive to take political risks required to change it. The only thing it’s ever achieved is straining the relationships NZ has with some of its closest allies. Specifically it doesn’t prohibit all power generation, but it does prohibit nuclear propulsion. Which again has no impact outside of irritating allies, as NZ never has had and never will have a use case for commercial nuclear power production. It’s a very small country, and 80% of its electricity is already renewable.
- phs318u 7y agoYou’re contradicting yourself. Your earlier post says “they banned all forms of nuclear energy” while now you claim to be aware that they didn’t. Given that this whole article is about energy policy (as opposed to the narrow scope regarding the existing NZ ban on nuclear armed vessels in their waters), what is your point? If 80% of its electricity is already renewable, why the drama over taking that from 80% to 100% over the next 30 years? Doesn’t sound like a huge stretch frankly.
- alannallama 7y agoI agree with your frustration about the green movement's knee-jerk rejection of nuclear power, but in NZ anti-nuclear policy was a very galvanising touchpoint for the environmental and anti-war movements, so there's a bit more context there. Nuclear-free and the Springbok protests are referenced constantly as progressive wins.
- thundergolfer 7y ago"anti-nuclear" mean anti the weapons or anti the power?
- crummy 7y agoboth; nuclear-anything is banned in NZ
- phs318u 7y agoUntrue. The nuclear-free zone act specifically does not preclude nuclear power generation. The fact that it hasn’t happened is no different from most other places where it hasn’t happened. A combination of fear, nimby, cost, regulation and easier options.
- crummy 7y agoOops, looks like you're right. Wikipedia says "The nuclear-free zone Act does not prohibit nuclear power plants, nuclear research facilities, the use of radioactive isotopes, or other land-based nuclear activities."
- lostlogin 7y agoThe PET scanner next door and the cyclotron that fuels it beg to disagree.
- Taniwha 7y agoThe NZ anti-nuclear movement was mostly (but not completely) seen as a success against the US forcing their nuclear armed warships upon us (sailing into our harbours) during the cold war, and as a result making us a potential target. In the end one of the right wing party's lawmakers voted with the left wing party, enough to pass a law, the right wing party used this as an excuse to dissolve parliament and call a national election which they resoundingly lost (the reasons this happened had more to do with the right wing party lying about the state of the economy and getting caught - but a mandate's a mandate) - we don't get nuclear weapons sailing into our country any more
- thundergolfer 7y agoAny evidence you could link me to not that there existed "irrational opposition to nuclear" from people with left politics but that this opposition had any significant affect on the viability of nuclear power?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- lostlogin 7y ago> If we had embraced nuclear power 2 decades ago, we would have been in much better shape with respect to CO2 than we are in now. How would New Zealand be better off with nuclear power? Keep in mind our environment. We have lots of water, plenty of sun and wind and some regions have earthquakes, including big ones in areas previously thought safe. Down here ‘we’ are doing just fine without it.
- dzhiurgis 7y agoWhile I don't really think NZ needs nucular, the solar and wind adoption here is appalling. Further, afaik water dams have pretty bad environment impact...
- toomuchtodo 7y agoAll human efforts have some eco footprint. Hydro dams have similar CO2 emission profiles to wind and solar, so for argument's sake, let's assume their ecological impact is lesser than that of coal or natural gas. The south island of New Zealand is almost exclusively hydro, the north island has just a little bit of coal and natgas (less than 1GW of generation in aggregate) to displace to go 100% zero carbon for electrical generation. There is an interconnect (Cook Strait cable, 1200MW HVDC) between the islands, and the south island ships power to the north island (primarily hydro), so you can aggregate renewable generation between both islands fairly effectively and treat them together as a single system. Electricitymap.org South island: https://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=country&remote=true&countryCode=NZ-NZS https://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=... Electricitymap.org North island: https://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=country&remote=true&countryCode=NZ-NZN https://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=...
- roenxi 7y agoIt doesn't matter what New Zealand does. There is not enough industrial production for their emissions rate and their climate is at the mercy of whatever happens in China. I always like to refer to this chart [0] - but I also recall that nature only cares about absolute numbers. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita#/media/File:2018_AQAL_Group_variwide_chart_%22Worldwide_Co2_emissions%22.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
- crispinb 7y ago> the left’s irrational opposition to nuclear power This is nonsense. In nations where opposition to nuclear power is strong (like mine, Aus), there is not a left-right divide amongst the general population. People just don't want it, end of story, irrational or not. There is a huge divide regarding electricity supply in general here - ie. the right wants coal, the left renewables. But neither want nuclear. There have been some pro-nuclear political elite lobbies, and there is a slight rightward slant there for sure, but this is entirely ignored by the general populace, left & right alike, that just doesn't want nuclear.
- Ericson2314 7y agoAs a leftist, I do concede anti-nuclear was a 60s new left thing that then went mainstream. It may not still be a leftist position today, but it was then. Also, it does fall squarely on one side of the industrialist side of the industrialist-populist divide of the right.
- crispinb 7y agoMaybe I should have quoted more of the gp: > .. that resulted in much of the world's electricity being produced by fossil fuels My point isn't that 'leftists' (a decreasingly useful categorisation in any case) aren't anti-nuclear. It's that this anti-nuclear stance has been causally impotent in most of the nations that haven't chosen to build much nuclear capacity. Australia is a great case in point - even its 'leftist' party is very right-wing (pro-coal, pro-asylum-seeker torture, etc), yet the population, right and left alike, simply will not countenance nuclear power. There's a great tendency for political pundits to confuse the positions and divisions of lobbyists, politicians and insiders with those of the population at large. Anyone attributing lack of nuclear capacity to 'leftists' is doing just that.
- CamouflagedKiwi 7y agoNuclear power was never a practical option for NZ; the country is too small, has no fuel handy and has no nuclear expertise, and a huge chunk of power (not all of it tbf) comes from renewables already. Fully agreed for many other countries (disappointingly Germany, most recently) but I don't think Ardern can be held to blame for them.
- yarg 7y agoPerhaps if the war hawks had allowed for the development of nuclear reactors with passive safety mechanisms- rather than exclusively funding R&D on those with weaponisable byproducts, we'd have globally usable nuclear energy technology today. Regarding the irrationality of the fear of current nuclear reactors, requiring active intervention (with control rods) to prevent nuclear meltdown is a genuine and justified cause for concern (as evidenced by Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima).
- EGreg 7y agoNot to mention that stuxnet proved that we can quickly go from “look at all this desalinated water and zero carbon footprint!” to “crap, we just built tons of honeypots for state level hackers to hold our entire population hostage to the threat of nuclear meltdown triggered by sabotaged software”
- arcticbull 7y ago> Regarding the irrationality of the fear of current nuclear reactors, requiring active intervention (with control rods) to prevent nuclear meltdown is a genuine and justified cause for concern (as evidenced by Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima). Fear of nuclear is irrational. Chernobyl was the single worst nuclear accident in the history of the world and UNSCEAR projects a death toll of no more than 4,000 [3] from the original accident (which directly killed about 50) onward. A large amount of them are suicide by people who fear they were “contaminated” when the most likely cancer, thyroid (due to radioactive Iodine-131 released) has a 98% survival rate [4]. Better than some flu years. That's what they were taking iodine pills for -- to saturate the thyroid so it didn't take up any of the Iodine-131. Three mile island killed nobody and Fukushima killed 2-12 (almost 600 died from the actual quake). We learned from all 3 incidents and incorporated substantial additional safety measures for future designs. The worst hydro accident by comparison, the Bangqiao Dam failure killed 230,000 people instantly. [2] Nuclear has an order of magnitude fewer deaths per TWh than solar (it’s 10X safer than solar panels, yes) and two to three orders fewer than hydro and coal. [1]. Nuclear is no question the safest and most environmentally friendly energy source in the world by all metrics, and especially carbon emissions. Of course I’d love to see thorium cycle explored too but we'll never get the funding with negative sentiment towards nuclear. It should be respected, not feared. [1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html%3famp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/d... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_disaster https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_dis... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thyroid_cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thyroid_cancer
- theRandomMoron 7y agoNuclear Power yields some of the lowest power generation per investment of any generation type. It has basically never returned profit, costs money for thousands of years to deal with spent fuel. Not to mention the immense impact of reactor containment failure. Any argument for using Nuclear to reduce CO2 emissions is redundant when the economics, safety and alternatives (wind/solar) are taken into consideration.
- akvadrako 7y agoFrance is a good examples of how nuclear power is more affordable than renewables. Storage of waste is almost a non issue because they is just so little of it - the fuel itself is incredibly dense, so it’s really only the old concrete that takes space, and it isn’t very dangerous.
- 9HZZRfNlpR 7y agoAnother interesting paradox is Thatcher closing coal mines in the UK for not being profitable and left protesting and wanting the mines to continue saying there's always a need for it. "we want coal, not dole"
- zip1234 7y agoUnions? The United Auto Workers is totally supported by the left and yet they make gas guzzling cars and trucks for a living.