8 ms·

May be depending on Natural gas for everything in the name of climate change fighting isn't such a good goal. Now not only is coal not fully out, nuclear is dea

May be depending on Natural gas for everything in the name of climate change fighting isn't such a good goal. Now not only is coal not fully out, nuclear is dead/dying and solar, wind unreliable or unplanned for interms of integration into the grid and support of peak load. Overall a perfect showcase of why activism in a lot of things end up hurting more than helping. And of course all this before whether we know or care how 'green' the renewables are in the first place as the equipment it self needs to be manufactured/mined/produced. Its the recycling debacle all over again.

pixl97 5y ago
Or maybe it's we've been warning about this for 50+ years now and the fruit is coming to bear. I'm not sure if it's what you meant, but your post just reeks of "Lets keep doing the things we always did because it was so much better then", while discounting the massive amounts of damage we were doing then.
- mc32 5y ago
  On the other hand, poster has a point, if it weren't for the likes of Jane Fonda and company who take up a cause without understanding it just for political points, leads us to where we are now. There is no reason we could not be where France is in terms of nuclear power. This is on those activists who blindly followed anti-nuke dogmatism. Thanks guys and gals. This is why the public should by and large disregard opinions by celebrities who have no expertise in what they are advocating.
  - FemmeAndroid 5y ago
    I think the engineering and decision making at Three Mile Island had a much bigger impact on the current state of nuclear power in the US than Jane Fonda.
    - mc32 5y ago
      Only because Jane Fonda used it as a tool to promote her anti-nuke activism. The atmospheric release was insignificant but she scared Americans away from nuclear-generated power. She could have used her activism to promote better processes for example, or incremental improvements rather than kill the industry.
      - FemmeAndroid 5y ago
        Within 12 days of the movie Jane Fonda made about nuclear power, the biggest accident in the USA occurred. Within 10 years, we had Chernobyl. Blaming the lack of nuclear power on a celebrity for her activism and not the fact that decision makers saw the results of real catastrophic failure seems wrong. Sure, Jane Fonda didn’t help nuclear energy. But we should have started by never letting any of the major nuclear failures happen. If we can’t do that, we should work on solving that problem and not blaming critics.
        throw0101a 5y ago
        And in the meantime we continued to use fossil fuels. TMI had little to no impact on the environment and public. Chernobyl was the result of a corrupt political system which skimped on safety (e.g., no containment building/vessel) because of costs—something that isn't present in any developed country. That leaves Fukushima. I'll take the low odds of maybe one incident in 60+ years of industry over the certainty of climate change. And I say this as someone who lives 50km from a nuclear power plant.
        cinntaile 5y ago
        Corruption is still a big problem all over the world, if that was the cause then you're arguing against more nuclear buildout.
        wongarsu 5y ago
        If the impact of the coal industry wasn't so gradual but was released in a sudden event every 10-20 years, we would outlaw coal mining, with prison times for anyone who burns it. But with the impact being diffuse in time and space, we don't really mind. It's the same effect as nobody caring that deaths from car crashes in the US increased by 3000 people between 2019 and 2020, but kill 3000 people at once and it's a tragedy that will be remembered for decades. Our skewed perception of threats is maybe one of the most destructive psychological quirks of humanity. It makes fighting gradual events like climate change or disease outbreaks incredibly difficult.
  - jsilence 5y ago
    Wondering where we would stand if we had dumped all the funding and subsidies that went into nuclear fission and fusion research and into coal subsidies into solar panels. Guessing dependency on oil and gas would be much much lower which also frees up a large chunk of the military budget.
    - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
      Democratization of resources also reduces the chance of war. A fair amount the second world war can be told purely in attempts to control access to fuel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_campaign_of_World_War_II https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_campaign_of_World_War_II
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    What is your opinion of Bill Nye? He's been anti-nuke since BNtSG.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      Definitely a hero for getting a generation of kids into science with the science guy, but if anti-nuke then definitely wrong about nuclear, and his newer stuff is kind of weird and less interesting.
sdoering 5y ago
You make a lot of bold statements. Care to provide some sources? Your sentiment, without providing sources actually sounds a lot like the talking points of lobby groups fighting against the increased usage of renewable energy. Just one example to counter your "arguments" is the there are currently 50 nuclear reactors Being under construction world wide. With nuclear energy capacity increasing [1]. So care to provide some facts? [1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/plans-for-new-reactors-worldwide.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...
- gruez 5y ago
  >Just one example to counter your "arguments" is the there are currently 50 nuclear reactors Being under construction world wide. With nuclear energy capacity increasing [1]. nuclear capacity increasing doesn't necessarily contradict the parent's claim that "nuclear is dead/dying". Nuclear power can be growing in absolute terms, but be falling in relative terms.
- bin_bash 5y ago
  Funny you’re the one accusing someone of making misleading claims with a statement like that. 50 reactors for the world is not a lot. We’re clearly losing more reactors in the US than we’re gaining. You say “capacity” is increasing, but is the percentage?
  - sdoering 5y ago
    I just provided one source against a string of claims right out of the playbook from the conservative anti global warming lobby. If this makes me a "funny" one, I gladly am. I don't like dealing with people throwing out unsubstantiated claims or dismissing others with ad hominems. Btw. you could just provide a counter argument (I would be open to that in a empirical discussion) but you chose to do a counter question showing you actually have no interest in rational, fact based discussion culture. To quote numbers: Between 2013 and 2025, 14 nuclear plants are slated to shut down. As of July 2018, there are 99 operational plants in the country.[1] I wasn't able to quickly find the number of reactors that compromise said plants. But from a purely nationalistic perspective you are right. The US actually looses reactors. But I stated World wide numbers. I don't care about the US loosing reactors. I was looking at it from a global perspective and just providing one counter point to someone stating unsubstantiated stuff. Btw. themain reason for the US not building new reactors in the same amount they are shutting down others seems to be economic, though. Other sources of energy are nowadays way cheaper to produce and atomic seems to have lost the status of cash cow for the industry. [1] [1]: https://theconversation.com/the-demise-of-us-nuclear-power-in-4-charts-98817 https://theconversation.com/the-demise-of-us-nuclear-power-i...
pjc50 5y ago
> activism in a lot of things end up hurting more than helping And where would the CO2 levels be if there had been no activism?
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  Maybe lower, if you included anti-nuclear activism.
  - drran 5y ago
    Yep. Few more Chornobyls, and CO2 level will plummet back to 200ppm then.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - inglor_cz 5y ago
      There weren't any more Chernobyls, though. Getting rid of nuclear technology because RMBK reactors were badly designed makes about as much sense as getting rid of civilian jet planes because early British Comets fell out of the sky with many casualties. There is no progress without problems. What happend since then? Fukushima, and Fukushima killed fewer people than a highway car pile-up.
      - drran 5y ago
        Radiation poisoning has a long tail, so it hard to calculate how many were killed by cancer and for how long. It doesn't mean that we easily discard long-term safety when talking about nuclear power.
        inglor_cz 5y ago
        No one rational wants to discard long-term nuclear safety, much less easily... My worry is that we have swung collectively towards the very opposite, towards a demand for unrealistical level of one hundred per cent safety, unparalleled in any other modern activity (flights, medicine, construction, food...)
marcosdumay 5y ago
Natural gas being expensive is exactly what you need if you want people to replace it. There is no reason fertilizers can't be made with unreliable solar and wind and carbon capture.
- cableshaft 5y ago
  > There is no reason fertilizers can't be made with unreliable solar and wind and carbon capture. Yes there is. It's not just a matter of needing to use energy, natural gas itself it part of the process for making fertilizer. "Nitrogen is a key component of most synthetic fertilizers. It is made by combining the nitrogen in the air with hydrogen in methane to produce ammonia (NH3). The ammonia is then used to create other forms of nitrogen including ammonium nitrate and urea (ammonia + CO2). Natural gas is used to provide the methane and a heat source for the process." You can't just replace that process with 'solar and wind'. I actually didn't realize this myself until I started reading Countdown by Alan Weisman recently, about overpopulation, where he went over this process because it's the only reason why we're able to support and feed so many people today, is because we discovered this process for creating synthetic fertilizer and we're making so much of it today.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    You didn’t even read what you quoted! The Haber Process for making nitrogen fertilizer uses HYDROGEN as the feedstock for making ammonia, NOT methane! Natural gas steam reforming is just the cheapest source of hydrogen (usually), but before about 1950, we used electricity (usually from cheap renewables like hydro) to make hydrogen for ammonia. Easy peasy with wind and solar!
    - cableshaft 5y ago
      Yeah I just read a couple other articles and you're right. I was about to delete my post actually, when I saw you responded to it. It does seem like most places don't currently have the infrastructure in place to do proper green hydrogen though, since only 0.1 percent of hydrogen produced as of Jan 2021 could be considered green hydrogen.[1] So I don't think it's quite as 'easy peasy' as you're suggesting, probably a lot of money has to be invested and infrastructure has to be built to support it, but sure, I'm all for doing that. [1]: https://ohvec.org/the-myth-of-green-hydrogen/ https://ohvec.org/the-myth-of-green-hydrogen/
JamisonM 5y ago
I would say that characterizing the supply/demand mismatch caused by a once in a century pandemic as a showcase of why activism is often bad is not a very well considered perspective. 6 months from now if fertilizer prices are essentially normal and food supplies are just fine will you reconsider this view?
lindseymysse 5y ago
It is a very American perspective that allows anyone trying to change anything to be blamed. I personally blame the status quo, and think that if fewer people had stayed home and let things be we would be a far better position. Your politics say sit at home and let the world end -- I have never and will never do that. I'm an activist in every part of my life.
- option_greek 5y ago
  I understand the sentiment. But problem is every new generation thinks they are the only revolutionaries to have suddenly discovered activism. For previous to previous generation it was about stopping wars and killing nuclear power. For the current generation (Greta T) it is climate change and inaction by politicians. Next generation it will be something else. It's like every one below 30 thinks they are the only ones who were ever below 30. Meanwhile neither the wars have stopped nor did the climate change. It is easy to say that is because no one is doing enough and everyone should be an activist. But then if everyone is continuously doing activisty thingies, they are not even expounding the same ideas or even worried about the same things. The result is meaningless placard holding protests and pulling in a million directions. It's difficult to take anyone to take the climate activists seriously when on one hand they say we are heading towards catastrophe and at the same time say Eww to nuclear.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - lindseymysse 5y ago
    Or we could live less energy dense lives, take the bus, grow more vegetarian food closer to our homes (food gardens, no suburban lawns!) quit building homes in places that are hostile to humans, etc etc etc. Nuclear Energy powered electric cars only cuts emissions by about 50%, we need a lot more than that. You have an easy solution to a complex problem -- you're as bad as any activist you're bad mouthing now.
  - Melting_Harps 5y ago
    > It's difficult to take anyone to take the climate activists seriously when on one hand they say we are heading towards catastrophe and at the same time say Eww to nuclear. I think for some of us, it's less about 'eww' and more about how foolish is it have near active fault lines or below sea level (like Fukushima, SONGS, Dablo Canyon etc...) where they KNEW it was an issue but did nothing about it. I've lived through the cluster** that was SONGS refurbishment, and eventual decommissioning, it's not something I'd want anyone to have to go through and it was only possible an unmonitored effluence event (typical for that time in 2011) that coincided with the Fukushima disaster. I've come around the idea that I'm less anti-nuclear and more anti-20th Century Nuclear and it's headlong methods that was backed by GE and it's American Century at all costs type of thinking. Because for years we've been told Thorium reactors were the stopgap between Fusion which was always 'just around the corner' by Nuclear proponents, while many anti-nuclear people (like myself) were helping install PV, smart meters and volunteering where ever possible to decentralize the power grid in order to avoid what has happened in the last 2-3 years in CA with it's repeated outages due to climate change. I've lived in an anti-nuclear border town in Germany along Alsace, where the roofs are covered in state subsidized PV (it's where I got my first experience with installing it) which is still a net importer of French electricity so I'm well aware of the hypocrisy in some of these cases; what I'm afraid is that with agencies like the NRC and it's poor storage solutions (pay to bury in NV, until they refuse and we have leave it on site in decommissioned plants) it's more a repulsion towards the lack of insight when it comes to regulating and maintaining these plants. Just Solar alone is a larger part of the energy market share than nuclear from SONGS and DC combined in CA at it's peak [0], and they are having to turn off production (foolish decision) due to having a larger supply than demand. What I think is needed is an entire paradigm shift as to what and how to utilize the energy sources we do have, and consider Nuclear an option of last resort due to the heavy costs, time, and resources it requires. But it should be an option where coal, gas, or other harmful sources are being used and cannot be recaptured. CA is not one of these places given it's wide array of solar, wind and hopefully soon wave energy like in Scotalnd. 0: https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/solar/california-has-too-much-solar-power/ https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/solar/c...
vegetablepotpie 5y ago
The recycling movement was green washing from the petro chemical industry to shift responsibility of trash from the industry to individuals. It was a failure by design and never meant to create a closed loop of production and consumption [0]. You are correct by pointing out the intermittency of some renewable sources of energy. These are constraints of the technology that have engineering solutions. I don’t think activists are to blame for what we see. They are a convenient scapegoat. Think about who would benefit from having us all sit quietly at home waiting for our leadership to make the right decisions for us. [0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/drilled/id1439735906?i=1000467303816 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/drilled/id1439735906?i...

pixl97 5y ago

Or maybe it's we've been warning about this for 50+ years now and the fruit is coming to bear. I'm not sure if it's what you meant, but your post just reeks of "Lets keep doing the things we always did because it was so much better then", while discounting the massive amounts of damage we were doing then.

mc32 5y ago
On the other hand, poster has a point, if it weren't for the likes of Jane Fonda and company who take up a cause without understanding it just for political points, leads us to where we are now. There is no reason we could not be where France is in terms of nuclear power. This is on those activists who blindly followed anti-nuke dogmatism. Thanks guys and gals. This is why the public should by and large disregard opinions by celebrities who have no expertise in what they are advocating.
- FemmeAndroid 5y ago
  I think the engineering and decision making at Three Mile Island had a much bigger impact on the current state of nuclear power in the US than Jane Fonda.
  - mc32 5y ago
    Only because Jane Fonda used it as a tool to promote her anti-nuke activism. The atmospheric release was insignificant but she scared Americans away from nuclear-generated power. She could have used her activism to promote better processes for example, or incremental improvements rather than kill the industry.
    - FemmeAndroid 5y ago
      Within 12 days of the movie Jane Fonda made about nuclear power, the biggest accident in the USA occurred. Within 10 years, we had Chernobyl. Blaming the lack of nuclear power on a celebrity for her activism and not the fact that decision makers saw the results of real catastrophic failure seems wrong. Sure, Jane Fonda didn’t help nuclear energy. But we should have started by never letting any of the major nuclear failures happen. If we can’t do that, we should work on solving that problem and not blaming critics.
      - throw0101a 5y ago
        And in the meantime we continued to use fossil fuels. TMI had little to no impact on the environment and public. Chernobyl was the result of a corrupt political system which skimped on safety (e.g., no containment building/vessel) because of costs—something that isn't present in any developed country. That leaves Fukushima. I'll take the low odds of maybe one incident in 60+ years of industry over the certainty of climate change. And I say this as someone who lives 50km from a nuclear power plant.
        cinntaile 5y ago
        Corruption is still a big problem all over the world, if that was the cause then you're arguing against more nuclear buildout.
        wongarsu 5y ago
        If the impact of the coal industry wasn't so gradual but was released in a sudden event every 10-20 years, we would outlaw coal mining, with prison times for anyone who burns it. But with the impact being diffuse in time and space, we don't really mind. It's the same effect as nobody caring that deaths from car crashes in the US increased by 3000 people between 2019 and 2020, but kill 3000 people at once and it's a tragedy that will be remembered for decades. Our skewed perception of threats is maybe one of the most destructive psychological quirks of humanity. It makes fighting gradual events like climate change or disease outbreaks incredibly difficult.
- jsilence 5y ago
  Wondering where we would stand if we had dumped all the funding and subsidies that went into nuclear fission and fusion research and into coal subsidies into solar panels. Guessing dependency on oil and gas would be much much lower which also frees up a large chunk of the military budget.
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    Democratization of resources also reduces the chance of war. A fair amount the second world war can be told purely in attempts to control access to fuel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_campaign_of_World_War_II https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_campaign_of_World_War_II
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  What is your opinion of Bill Nye? He's been anti-nuke since BNtSG.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    Definitely a hero for getting a generation of kids into science with the science guy, but if anti-nuke then definitely wrong about nuclear, and his newer stuff is kind of weird and less interesting.

sdoering 5y ago

You make a lot of bold statements. Care to provide some sources? Your sentiment, without providing sources actually sounds a lot like the talking points of lobby groups fighting against the increased usage of renewable energy. Just one example to counter your "arguments" is the there are currently 50 nuclear reactors Being under construction world wide. With nuclear energy capacity increasing [1]. So care to provide some facts? [1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/plans-for-new-reactors-worldwide.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...

gruez 5y ago
>Just one example to counter your "arguments" is the there are currently 50 nuclear reactors Being under construction world wide. With nuclear energy capacity increasing [1]. nuclear capacity increasing doesn't necessarily contradict the parent's claim that "nuclear is dead/dying". Nuclear power can be growing in absolute terms, but be falling in relative terms.
bin_bash 5y ago
Funny you’re the one accusing someone of making misleading claims with a statement like that. 50 reactors for the world is not a lot. We’re clearly losing more reactors in the US than we’re gaining. You say “capacity” is increasing, but is the percentage?
- sdoering 5y ago
  I just provided one source against a string of claims right out of the playbook from the conservative anti global warming lobby. If this makes me a "funny" one, I gladly am. I don't like dealing with people throwing out unsubstantiated claims or dismissing others with ad hominems. Btw. you could just provide a counter argument (I would be open to that in a empirical discussion) but you chose to do a counter question showing you actually have no interest in rational, fact based discussion culture. To quote numbers: Between 2013 and 2025, 14 nuclear plants are slated to shut down. As of July 2018, there are 99 operational plants in the country.[1] I wasn't able to quickly find the number of reactors that compromise said plants. But from a purely nationalistic perspective you are right. The US actually looses reactors. But I stated World wide numbers. I don't care about the US loosing reactors. I was looking at it from a global perspective and just providing one counter point to someone stating unsubstantiated stuff. Btw. themain reason for the US not building new reactors in the same amount they are shutting down others seems to be economic, though. Other sources of energy are nowadays way cheaper to produce and atomic seems to have lost the status of cash cow for the industry. [1] [1]: https://theconversation.com/the-demise-of-us-nuclear-power-in-4-charts-98817 https://theconversation.com/the-demise-of-us-nuclear-power-i...

pjc50 5y ago

> activism in a lot of things end up hurting more than helping And where would the CO2 levels be if there had been no activism?

Robotbeat 5y ago
Maybe lower, if you included anti-nuclear activism.
- drran 5y ago
  Yep. Few more Chornobyls, and CO2 level will plummet back to 200ppm then.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    There weren't any more Chernobyls, though. Getting rid of nuclear technology because RMBK reactors were badly designed makes about as much sense as getting rid of civilian jet planes because early British Comets fell out of the sky with many casualties. There is no progress without problems. What happend since then? Fukushima, and Fukushima killed fewer people than a highway car pile-up.
    - drran 5y ago
      Radiation poisoning has a long tail, so it hard to calculate how many were killed by cancer and for how long. It doesn't mean that we easily discard long-term safety when talking about nuclear power.
      - inglor_cz 5y ago
        No one rational wants to discard long-term nuclear safety, much less easily... My worry is that we have swung collectively towards the very opposite, towards a demand for unrealistical level of one hundred per cent safety, unparalleled in any other modern activity (flights, medicine, construction, food...)

marcosdumay 5y ago

Natural gas being expensive is exactly what you need if you want people to replace it. There is no reason fertilizers can't be made with unreliable solar and wind and carbon capture.

cableshaft 5y ago
> There is no reason fertilizers can't be made with unreliable solar and wind and carbon capture. Yes there is. It's not just a matter of needing to use energy, natural gas itself it part of the process for making fertilizer. "Nitrogen is a key component of most synthetic fertilizers. It is made by combining the nitrogen in the air with hydrogen in methane to produce ammonia (NH3). The ammonia is then used to create other forms of nitrogen including ammonium nitrate and urea (ammonia + CO2). Natural gas is used to provide the methane and a heat source for the process." You can't just replace that process with 'solar and wind'. I actually didn't realize this myself until I started reading Countdown by Alan Weisman recently, about overpopulation, where he went over this process because it's the only reason why we're able to support and feed so many people today, is because we discovered this process for creating synthetic fertilizer and we're making so much of it today.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  You didn’t even read what you quoted! The Haber Process for making nitrogen fertilizer uses HYDROGEN as the feedstock for making ammonia, NOT methane! Natural gas steam reforming is just the cheapest source of hydrogen (usually), but before about 1950, we used electricity (usually from cheap renewables like hydro) to make hydrogen for ammonia. Easy peasy with wind and solar!
  - cableshaft 5y ago
    Yeah I just read a couple other articles and you're right. I was about to delete my post actually, when I saw you responded to it. It does seem like most places don't currently have the infrastructure in place to do proper green hydrogen though, since only 0.1 percent of hydrogen produced as of Jan 2021 could be considered green hydrogen.[1] So I don't think it's quite as 'easy peasy' as you're suggesting, probably a lot of money has to be invested and infrastructure has to be built to support it, but sure, I'm all for doing that. [1]: https://ohvec.org/the-myth-of-green-hydrogen/ https://ohvec.org/the-myth-of-green-hydrogen/

JamisonM 5y ago

I would say that characterizing the supply/demand mismatch caused by a once in a century pandemic as a showcase of why activism is often bad is not a very well considered perspective. 6 months from now if fertilizer prices are essentially normal and food supplies are just fine will you reconsider this view?

lindseymysse 5y ago

It is a very American perspective that allows anyone trying to change anything to be blamed. I personally blame the status quo, and think that if fewer people had stayed home and let things be we would be a far better position. Your politics say sit at home and let the world end -- I have never and will never do that. I'm an activist in every part of my life.

option_greek 5y ago
I understand the sentiment. But problem is every new generation thinks they are the only revolutionaries to have suddenly discovered activism. For previous to previous generation it was about stopping wars and killing nuclear power. For the current generation (Greta T) it is climate change and inaction by politicians. Next generation it will be something else. It's like every one below 30 thinks they are the only ones who were ever below 30. Meanwhile neither the wars have stopped nor did the climate change. It is easy to say that is because no one is doing enough and everyone should be an activist. But then if everyone is continuously doing activisty thingies, they are not even expounding the same ideas or even worried about the same things. The result is meaningless placard holding protests and pulling in a million directions. It's difficult to take anyone to take the climate activists seriously when on one hand they say we are heading towards catastrophe and at the same time say Eww to nuclear.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lindseymysse 5y ago
  Or we could live less energy dense lives, take the bus, grow more vegetarian food closer to our homes (food gardens, no suburban lawns!) quit building homes in places that are hostile to humans, etc etc etc. Nuclear Energy powered electric cars only cuts emissions by about 50%, we need a lot more than that. You have an easy solution to a complex problem -- you're as bad as any activist you're bad mouthing now.
- Melting_Harps 5y ago
  > It's difficult to take anyone to take the climate activists seriously when on one hand they say we are heading towards catastrophe and at the same time say Eww to nuclear. I think for some of us, it's less about 'eww' and more about how foolish is it have near active fault lines or below sea level (like Fukushima, SONGS, Dablo Canyon etc...) where they KNEW it was an issue but did nothing about it. I've lived through the cluster** that was SONGS refurbishment, and eventual decommissioning, it's not something I'd want anyone to have to go through and it was only possible an unmonitored effluence event (typical for that time in 2011) that coincided with the Fukushima disaster. I've come around the idea that I'm less anti-nuclear and more anti-20th Century Nuclear and it's headlong methods that was backed by GE and it's American Century at all costs type of thinking. Because for years we've been told Thorium reactors were the stopgap between Fusion which was always 'just around the corner' by Nuclear proponents, while many anti-nuclear people (like myself) were helping install PV, smart meters and volunteering where ever possible to decentralize the power grid in order to avoid what has happened in the last 2-3 years in CA with it's repeated outages due to climate change. I've lived in an anti-nuclear border town in Germany along Alsace, where the roofs are covered in state subsidized PV (it's where I got my first experience with installing it) which is still a net importer of French electricity so I'm well aware of the hypocrisy in some of these cases; what I'm afraid is that with agencies like the NRC and it's poor storage solutions (pay to bury in NV, until they refuse and we have leave it on site in decommissioned plants) it's more a repulsion towards the lack of insight when it comes to regulating and maintaining these plants. Just Solar alone is a larger part of the energy market share than nuclear from SONGS and DC combined in CA at it's peak [0], and they are having to turn off production (foolish decision) due to having a larger supply than demand. What I think is needed is an entire paradigm shift as to what and how to utilize the energy sources we do have, and consider Nuclear an option of last resort due to the heavy costs, time, and resources it requires. But it should be an option where coal, gas, or other harmful sources are being used and cannot be recaptured. CA is not one of these places given it's wide array of solar, wind and hopefully soon wave energy like in Scotalnd. 0: https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/solar/california-has-too-much-solar-power/ https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/solar/c...

vegetablepotpie 5y ago

The recycling movement was green washing from the petro chemical industry to shift responsibility of trash from the industry to individuals. It was a failure by design and never meant to create a closed loop of production and consumption [0]. You are correct by pointing out the intermittency of some renewable sources of energy. These are constraints of the technology that have engineering solutions. I don’t think activists are to blame for what we see. They are a convenient scapegoat. Think about who would benefit from having us all sit quietly at home waiting for our leadership to make the right decisions for us. [0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/drilled/id1439735906?i=1000467303816 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/drilled/id1439735906?i...