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Highly publicized 80s accidents (Three Mile Island in 79, Chernobyl in 86) coupled with late-Cold War anti-nuclear weapons proliferation protesting resulted in
by ethbr0 6y ago
Highly publicized 80s accidents (Three Mile Island in 79, Chernobyl in 86) coupled with late-Cold War anti-nuclear weapons proliferation protesting resulted in environmentalists lumping everything nuclear together until it reached "No" criticality.
After that, the reaction has been self-sustaining.
It's easy to campaign to tear something down. It's hard to be the one who has to rebuild the replacement. We need people who focus on the latter before the former.
- throwawayboise 6y ago"Believe the science" seems to be the rationale for many other things we are told to do, so why not this?
- kragen 6y agoWell, in part due to the nuclear weapons programs, the US and Soviet governments told a lot of lies about nuclear energy in the 01940s, 01950s, 01960s, and 01970s. A lot of the science on things like nuclear fuel enrichment isn't actually available publicly, even today, only to people whose families have been interviewed to make sure they will lie if the government orders to. So the US Secretary of the Navy is in a position to make an informed decision about nuclear reactors—and he's chosen to run a significant part of the US Navy on them—but the voting public is not.
- effie 6y agoI'll bite, what's up with those zero prefixes?
- radicalcentrist 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation
- cpeterso 6y agoPreparation for the Y10K problem. Five-digit years is something the Long Now Foundation started using to encourage people to think longer term: https://longnow.org/about/ https://longnow.org/about/
- stjohnswarts 6y agolol that's ridiculous. We'll either have wiped ourselves out by then or be so far beyond problems like Y2K that it's a ridiculous thing to worry about
- kragen 6y agoMore fun than worrying about global pandemics or nuclear meltdowns!
- thelean12 6y agoHoly hell, talk about premature. That's 100 lifetimes away. Is it still April 1st?
- krrrh 6y agoIt’s promoted by the Long Now Foundation, as a way of encouraging thinking on 10,000 year time scales. https://longnow.org/ https://longnow.org/
- why_Mr_Anderson 6y agoThat's so -idiotic- short term thinking. 10k years is nothing in the timescale of the universe.
- kergonath 6y agoYou’re missing the last bit, though. It’s “believe the science, when the science agrees with my ideas”. The truth is, a lot of those people claiming IPCC should be listened to conveniently ignore the bits in the IPCC reports that don’t align with their opinions. Also, nobody has time to read the reports and spend years training to actually understanding them. We are overall woefully uninformed about these things, to the point that the majority of people in some recent opinion polls in Europe believe that nuclear power plants emit greenhouse gases.
- moolcool 6y agoBecause NIMBYs
- tstrimple 6y agoThis argument is facile. We have a for profit energy sector that doesn't want to invest billions of dollars to see returns in over a decade when they can build wind turbines next month and start making money immediately. If you want nuclear power it needs to be a national investment (see France). No amount of NIMBY can stop coal plants. It seems silly to think that's the thing holding back nuclear adoption.
- moolcool 6y agoThe "BY" in "NIMBY" gets larger with nuclear imo. Nobody cares if a coal plant is built miles out of town, but sentiment is big that nobody wants a nuclear plant in their state
- noja 6y agoDon't spread FUD. Fukushima was ten years ago. The truth is our systemic desire to cut costs cuts corners. Everything after each disaster will have been "obvious". The price of the tiniest of mistakes is outweighing the advantage. Stick a power plant in the middle of nowhere and charge batteries with it if you want to convince people.
- cthalupa 6y ago... Did you just accuse someone of spreading FUD when they're specifically arguing for people to be less afraid? Fukushima was bad, but even if you count the deaths from the poorly handled evacuation, you're at ~2200 people that died because of it. Coal kills 13,000 people in just the US /every/ year.
- pc86 6y agoFukushima was also caused by an earthquake and tsunami - not exactly a scathing indictment of nuclear power itself.
- Ma8ee 6y agoEh? Earthquakes and Tsunamis happen, so it’s a bit weird to remove them from the equation.
- deckard1 6y agoI'm pretty sure people understood earthquakes and tsunamis from the 1960s to 2011. > not exactly a scathing indictment of nuclear power itself. No, but it's certainly a statement about our ability to operate nuclear power. You really can't separate the two. Fukushima may have been spared the worst, but the amount of deaths is only part of the story. Pripyat is still a ghost town. That's nearly 50,000 people that were permanently displaced from their homes. I imagine quite a few people are not returning to the Fukushima area as well.
- effie 6y ago> No, but it's certainly a statement about our ability to operate nuclear power. You really can't separate the two. ... in tsunami endangered areas. Yes, Japanese made a bad mistake to let Americans build such a badly designed nuclear plant in that region and this was known before the disaster. They did not care - the price was good and the risk was acceptable to the people in charge. Most of nuclear plants in the world are not in tsunami endangered areas though and are operated safely.