4 ms·

Government's ignore activists all the time. Not sure why it was apparently so effective in the case of nuclear power.

• evgen 5y ago
  The target of the activist is not the government, it is other citizens. The goal is to increase the disapproval and outrage above the activation energy of government agencies or legislatures. Anti-nuke activism hit as the first wave of the environmental movement was peaking (think anti-pollution efforts against some really, really bad industrial practices and the anti-litter movement) and it also pulled in a large swathe of anti-war activists who were looking for their next mission after the Vietnam war wound down. Combine these with some genuine hubris on the part of the nuclear energy industry and a public that has a hard time assessing actual risk and you get a perfect storm of sorts. It was easy to pass regulations and laws that made nuclear more difficult to deploy and casually ignore the consequence that this had on making petroleum products and coal the only viable alternatives.
• qsort 5y ago
  chernobyl
  • chillingeffect 5y ago
    And numerous more. [0x0] Plus nuclear power was never found to be cost-effective. Maybe this decade. I understand reactors will be more uniform in new designs. [0x0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiatio...
    • qsort 5y ago
      I'm not making an argument as to whether nuclear energy is good or bad, cost effective or not. My prior on that is "it depends", but I don't know much about it, so it's a rather weakly informative prior. I was specifically addressing parent's point. Chernobyl had a disproportionate effect on the public perception of the matter. I hadn't even heard of half the disasters in that list, for instance.
      • amanaplanacanal 5y ago
        Not on that list is the Three Mile Island accident that happened almost simultaneously with the release of the movie "The China Syndrome", seven years before Chernobyl. In the US at least, I suspect that was very influential.
        • pfdietz 5y ago
          More consequential was the passage in 1978 of PURPA. With PURPA, the grids began to be opened to non-utility competition -- and this was cheaper than utility nuclear plants. Initially it was mostly just cogeneration, or at least things that were nominally cogeneration, but mostly run to make power to sell to the grid. But this (and the cessation of the growth in electric demand) ruined the case for new utility nuclear plants.
• kortilla 5y ago
  The US government absolutely listen to people when it comes to things like approvals because politicians need to get re-elected. Harry Reid stopped the yucca mountain complex after the govt had already agreed to it for nuclear storage.