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From my aged perspective, this is reaping the "green benefit" from the 70s and 80s, when there were world wide activists campaigning against nuclear power for "

From my aged perspective, this is reaping the "green benefit" from the 70s and 80s, when there were world wide activists campaigning against nuclear power for "reasons" (largely the Cold War). If you think green activists are something new, it's because you're "young". We're reaping what we sowed back then: the "brainwashing" of the public that unquestioningly accept that nuclear power is 'bad' and tightly linked to nuclear weapons and death. Despite the fact that nuclear power stations do not have to produce "weapons grade" plutonium/whatever and, I'll repeat this until I'm blue in the face, has been responsible for smallest number of deaths of any form of energy generation and produce the lowest amount of CO2 (i.e. zero, other than construction). It's entirely likely more people die in a day world wide from fossil fuel pollution and production than have ever died from nuclear accidents. > The trouble, as ever, is time. “Any investment decisions you make now aren’t going to come to fruition until the 2030s,” said Osbaldstone, the research director at Wood Mackenzie. “Nuclear isn’t an answer to the current energy crisis.” As the saying goes "the best time to build X was yesterday". Careful what you wish for. The millions of tons of CO2 we could have avoided emitting in Europe... > “Nuclear isn’t an answer to the current energy crisis.” Sorry, but to use an old quote, nuclear is the worst solution to the current energy crisis, apart from all the others.

dachryn 5y ago
ironically, that same could now be said about our gas crisis in Europe, where we handover immense leverage into the control of Russia.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
> I'll repeat this until I'm blue in the face, has been responsible for smallest number of deaths of any form of energy generation and produce the lowest amount of CO2 (i.e. zero, other than construction). Will you stop repeating this if I explain why it's false? So first up, the stat is usually fatalities per TwH, since that skews things in Nuclear's direction, not just number of fatalities which would be won by some obscure but not very successful power source. Second, even with the correct metric, solar and wind are now beating nuclear and projected to continue to do so, widening the gap over time. Comparing the very start of the renewable rollout gives misleading stats as the total power generated is low, and many stats that get quoted on this are more than a decade out of date. You can build a wind turbine and ritually sacrifice someone on completion of the build and the fatalities per TwH is infinite as it's not generated any power yet, but with every year of operation it gets lower. Basically the same applies to carbon output, nuclear does well, but wind/solar/nuclear have been basically tied on both metrics unless you're relying on some very, very old data. Of course if you have a limited amount of money to spend, then you'll generate more energy and save more lives with whatever the cheaper form of energy is, so we should really take that into consideration too. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
- schnitzelstoat 5y ago
  But it doesn't matter anyway - wind and solar should complement to nuclear, not to replace it. This year we saw weaker summer winds in Europe which is part of what has caused the current energy crisis. These weaker winds are expected to become more common as climate change continues.[1] Nuclear has the benefit that it's reliable. If you design a plant to output X gigawatts - it'll still be able to do so regardless of the weather. [1] https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-winds-mean-for-the-future-energy-grid-170135 https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-w...
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    No, nuclear plants are regularly taken offline for weather related reasons. The main problem seems to be that people have invented an entirely ficticious nuclear power that does not and has never existed, just so they can slag off renewables and "elite culture" whatever the heck that is. The real actual nuclear power, which is better than coal, but not particularly competitive with modern renewables is apparently irrelevant to people who have bizarrely joined a one sided culture war on the side of fossil fuel companies and think this makes them cool, well informed and counter-cultural despite reality leaning the other way.
    - robertlagrant 5y ago
      > No, nuclear plants are regularly taken offline for weather related reasons. Do you have a source for this?
      - formerly_proven 5y ago
        Every summer in France
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        5y ago
throwawaylinux 5y ago
The fossil fuel industry has had no better friend over the past 50 years than the "green" movement. It has worked so well to keep the dirtiest most polluting coal power generation viable that they could not have paid to get better lobbyists. Following the money and principle of least surprise, you might even be forgiven to think it's very likely anti nuclear movement was funded if not founded by big coal.
- fsflover 5y ago
  > you might even be forgiven to think it's very likely anti nuclear movement was funded if not founded by big coal https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-fossil-fuel-interests-bankrolling-the-anti-nuclear-energy-movement https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f... https://thebreakthrough.org/blog/the-true-face-of-the-anti-nuclear-movement https://thebreakthrough.org/blog/the-true-face-of-the-anti-n...
  - WithinReason 5y ago
    "In 1970, a leader of the petroleum industry and the head of the Atlantic Richfield Co. named Robert O. Anderson contributed $200,000 to fund Friends of the Earth, an organization that is strident in its opposition to nuclear energy, citing both safety and cost issues." Why am I surprised at learning this?
    - patall 5y ago
      I am actually surprised that the article doesn't provide more examples. The article argues that the fossil fuel industry is paying the antinuclear movement and the single, one example given is a onetime payment in the 70s to start a new organization by a private person. Sure, everyone requires different levels of evidence, but I heavily doubt that you will be able to convince anyone with that one. And then the rest of the text is about how renewable are (as of 2016) so much smaller than the loss in nuclear power.
      - WithinReason 5y ago
phicoh 5y ago
It is very simple, nuclear has been a failure in Europe in the last couple of decades. Look at projects in the Finland, France and the UK. The situation would have been much better if there was a nuclear industry that could deliver in time and within budget. A country like France with a massive amount of aging nuclear power plants is in serious trouble replacing them in time. Fortunately, wind and solar are doing very well in reducing CO2 emissions. In the coming one or two decades, wind and solar can easily outpace nuclear in reducing CO2 emissions.
- fsflover 5y ago
  > In the coming one or two decades, wind and solar can easily outpace nuclear in reducing CO2 emissions. This is not a fight between wind/solar and nuclear. This is a fight against coal. You should reduce the coal first, not nuclear.
  - phicoh 5y ago
    Ultimately, this is about money. For aging nuclear power plants, keeping them running becomes more and more costly. So the question becomes, if we need to invest a big chunk of money, what should we invest in to reduce CO2 emissions the most. And the answer is that building out wind/solar and insulating buildings is at the moment way more effective than keeping old nuclear power plants running.
    - fsflover 5y ago
      > what should we invest in to reduce CO2 emissions the most. > And the answer is that building out wind/solar Proofs?
      - phicoh 5y ago
        The proof is that nobody is investing in keeping old nuclear power plants open. All over Europe. When those plants stay open it is governments paying for it. In contrast, companies are now paying money to rent a piece of sea to put a wind farm in.
fundatus 5y ago
Nuclear is also the most expensive energy source (total cost per MWh). Which is the real reason why "Europe is losing nuclear power". When finished the UKs Hinkley Point C nuclear plant will probably have cost around £23 billion for ~3.000 MW which is completely insane.
- arkh 5y ago
  > 3.000 MW Well those are 3000 real MW. Not 10% when the weather is good and 0 otherwise. And it can be piloted as needed.
  - fundatus 5y ago
    Let's do some math. You can build a 3 MW wind turbine for around £2 million. Which means you could build around 11,500 wind turbines with the amount of money spent on HPC. Which in turn means a maximum production of 34,500 MW. So even under the assumption that these will run at below 10% of their capacity you're still producing more electricity than HPC. Now in reality this number averages around 30% actually. So the price per MWh is orders of magnitudes lower compared to nuclear.
    - robertlagrant 5y ago
      This is still not equivalent because we haven't solved storage (peaky energy is not as valuable as constant energy) [and because you've compared build costs to total costs]. Bit in [] is false; apologies.
      - fundatus 5y ago
        I've compared the build costs of HPC to the build costs of wind turbines. Not total costs.
        robertlagrant 5y ago
        You're right. Will edit.
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
I wonder how much of the green movement of that era was supported by the Soviets, who had obvious motives for undermining nuclear research in the West. I could be that even long after the USSR has been wiped away that its influence remains.
- fundatus 5y ago
  Don't think so. Taking Germany as an example, many people joined these movements after the country was in large parts affected (to this day actually) by the nuclear fallout of the disaster in Chernobyl. So I guess experiencing this first hand made a huge impact for many people. Personally I don't have a very strong opinion on nuclear (neither positive nor negative) but I also believe that you can't simply take these experiences away from people and it would be wrong to invalidate them.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    >> I wonder how much of the green movement of that era was supported by the Soviets, who had obvious motives for undermining nuclear research in the West. I could be that even long after the USSR has been wiped away that its influence remains. > Don't think so. Taking Germany as an example, many people joined these movements after the country was in large parts affected (to this day actually) by the nuclear fallout of the disaster in Chernobyl. I don't think those things are mutually exclusive. It's quite conceivable the Soviets supported a seed, which sprouted once Chernobyl created the right conditions for it to take off. It looks like the German Green party opposed nuclear power before Chernobyl and it was also infiltrated to a degree by the East German Stasi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_90/The_Greens#1980s:_Parliamentary_representation_on_the_federal_level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_90/The_Greens#1980s:_...: > In 1982 ... Those who remained in the Green party were more strongly pacifist and ... tended to identify more closely with a culture of protest and civil disobedience, frequently clashing with police at demonstrations against nuclear weapons, nuclear energy, and the construction of a new runway (Startbahn West) at Frankfurt Airport... > Among the important political issues at the time was the deployment of Pershing II IRBMs and nuclear-tipped cruise missiles by the U.S. and NATO on West German soil, generating strong opposition in the general population that found an outlet in mass demonstrations. The newly formed party was able to draw on this popular movement to recruit support. Partly due to the impact of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, and to growing awareness of the threat of air pollution and acid rain to German forests (Waldsterben), the Greens increased their share of the vote to 8.3% in the 1987 federal election.... > The Greens were the target of attempts by the East German secret police to enlist the cooperation of members who were willing to align the party with the agenda of the German Democratic Republic. The party ranks included several politicians who were later discovered to have been Stasi agents, including Bundestag representative Dirk Schneider, European Parliament representative Brigitte Heinrich, and Red Army Faction defense lawyer Klaus Croissant. Greens politician and Bundestag representative Gert Bastian was also a founding member of Generals for Peace [de], a pacifist group created and funded by the Stasi, the revelation of which may have contributed to the murder-suicide in which he killed his partner and Greens founder Petra Kelly.[11] A study commissioned by the Greens determined that 15 to 20 members intimately cooperated with the Stasi and another 450 to 500 had been informants.[12][13]
7952 5y ago
All those things may be true, but they still count against nuclear energy. Lack of public support and lack of continuous development make building capacity more difficult to deploy in the present. Technical superiority is not enough.
Aeolun 5y ago
> has been responsible for smallest number of deaths of any form of energy generation So far. The spent fuel will be around for another 10k years to potentially cause further deaths. If we have a few more Fukushimas, we might ruin the ocean forever.
- WithinReason 5y ago
  There's 4.5 Billion metric tons of uranium in the ocean already. https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6191296 https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6191296
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > If we have a few more Fukushimas, we might ruin the ocean forever. I could be wrong, but, IIRC, coal power has actually created more radioactive pollution than nuclear energy. It's just a far, far larger volume of less concentrated pollution. Also, Fukushima-style pollution isn't "forever." The most radioactive stuff also decays the quickest, so it disappears relatively quickly. It looks like most of the pollution from Fukushima was caesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years.
  - DrBazza 5y ago
    There's no small irony that after Chernobyl, all evidence is that animal life has actually thrived in spite of the radiation, and if anything, the most sensitive species to radiation is us. Another commenter has already pointed out that there is vastly more radioactivity in the sea than anything we can add. A few million gallons of nuclear contaminated water into the ocean is nothing, it'll dilute to next to nothing, Nuclear homeopathy, if you prefer.
hourislate 5y ago
Part of the problem with Nuclear is tax payer exhaustion. Every time they build a plant it take 10-20 years longer and cost over runs are in the billions. And then you have costly refurbishment that runs into the billions and takes half a decade longer than anticipated. It's a shit show from day one until they finally shut it down 20 billion $$$ later...
- caoilte 5y ago
  even then it's still a shit show because someone has to play for cleanup and storage and the nuclear company usually goes conveniently bankrupt soon after they stop producing energy.
krageon 5y ago
> 'bad' Given that japan had a giant radioactive ocean leak and I still haven't heard comprehensive reasoning about why we think facilities for storing nuclear waste will not be slowly defunded, I think the scare quotes can go. Politics anywhere (at the moment) simply cannot be trusted to properly manage nuclear waste, so we should not be producing it.
- School-Cotton 5y ago
  The alternative is producing emissions from coal and oil which we just dump into the air. Nuclear is far and away the less harmful solution.
  - VyperCard 5y ago
    The alternative is to switch to renewable energy and storage faster
yholio 5y ago
Nuclear had roughly 60 years to deliver clean, cheap and reliable energy. If it did all that, no amount of green lobby could have derailed it. Unfortunately, and I feel that deeply as an engineer, it did not achieve those goals. What we have currently have are slightly evolved designs over those of the 60s, which are fantastically expensive, take up to a decade to build and three more decades to recover investment, and present a large economic failure risk - see the Nukegate fiasco. No sane financial investor wants to approach nuclear, no one wants to insure it, so the only ones willing to eat the risk are states. Yes, we had a window in the last 20 years to reinvent fission, have new, secure and cheap reactors which cannot proliferate, are passively safe and fast to deploy. The industry and regulators remained paralyzed, structurally risk averse. That window has now closed. Renewables are cheaper then nuclear, fast to come online and have very low risk. Storage is quickly dropping in price. Together, storage and renewables, coupled with a smart grid, will be able to cover more and more of the demand and require fossils to be fired less and less. It does not matter if you go fosil for a whole week in a year where there is no sun, wind or rain, that's still only 2% of the production and you can use very expensive mitigations like CCS, as long as you have cheap renewables in the rest of the time.
- DrBazza 5y ago
  In the UK, every single time there's been a proposal for a reactor, there are local protests, and CND/Greenpeace turn up en masse. There's been no opportunity to deliver 'cheap' energy in terms of up-front cost, because there are so many artificial hoops to jump through - legislation, planning, and so on. As for clean and reliable. No CO2 right? And the nuclear power stations in the UK pretty much have run continuously since they were switched on, so I'm not sure what 'reliable' means here.
- WithinReason 5y ago
  France did it
  - yholio 5y ago
    "so the only ones willing to eat the risk are states." Sure, if you can cook the accounting books to pay for a military nuclear industry, and also get a civil sector that has no need to pay for capital, insurance and cleanup. I doubt it's a scalable model, and France had its own share of fuckups and close calls.
mnsc 5y ago
> the "brainwashing" of the public that unquestioningly accept that nuclear power is 'bad' and tightly linked to nuclear weapons and death. I can only speak for myself but I don't think nuclear power is bad, and I don't connect it with nuclear weapons or even deaths. It's just scary. And that's due to Chernobyl and Fukushima. And I haven't dug into the technicalities of why one of these new level 5 grand wizard mosfet reactor types can't fail in 50 years like the old ones did. Because we are smarter now? But if I look around at the current state of affairs I would say it looks like we have started to walk backwards as a civilisation. Not a rational thought I know, but it nicely feeds into that first ingrained irrational fear.
- ch4s3 5y ago
  Fukushima wasn't that bad. Very little radiation was leaked and the max number of expected cancer cases expected based on conservative modeling is ~100, mostly of the treatable thyroid variety. Most of those people will likely die of other causes. Chernobyl was just an idiotic design that no one outside of the USSR would have built after about 1954. Graphite piles are death traps, and not building a containment building is insane.
  - vkazanov 5y ago
    Fukushima as a plant was also asking for trouble: "the earthquake had also generated a tsunami 14 metres...swept over the plant's seawall" (c) Wikipedia. 14 metres is a joke for a country where 40 metre tsunamis happen. It is amazing how this could be built not taking high waves into account.
    - sliken 5y ago
      This what happens when politicians control the placement of nuclear plants. The scientist and engineers picked a much better location for the plant, but were overridden, and a political favor moved the location. The engineers mentioned they needed a large seawall to protect the plant from the frequent tsunamis, and were overridden because it cost too much. Nuclear can be safe, but you have to keep politics out of it.
whatever1 5y ago
Thanks for calling us brainwashed. First, show us what is the progress in nuclear waste treatment. (None) Show us the data of long time term safety of operating nuclear plants. (Every decade we have an unmitigated disaster, even with so few operating nuclear plants) Also please show us an economically viable plan to keep sourcing Uranium for increasing demands. (Ideally one that does not involve waging wars)
- tapland 5y ago
  If you would let somone collect #2 ;)
raxxorrax 5y ago
Nuclear power is not a solution to climate change. It would bind too many resources (which are also finite in economical quantities). Last year the first permanent storage worldwide opened, it is not a solved problem. Nuclear processing plants have elevated cancer rates around their location and it is still legal to dumb contaminated water into the ocean. It was only restricted for barrels. The construction costs are very relevant, not only from a CO2 perspective. Nuclear power is not very attractive, only if you reduce environmental protection to CO2 output, which is insufficient. So no, the greens of former years were not that wrong. It is questionable to shut down working plants, but if nuclear was that feasible, it would already play a larger in energy production today. If you start building plants today, you will need at least a decade to get them operational. You can look at France for the youngest examples of that. And would you want to mine Uranium? Have fun with that. https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-nuclear-energy-good-for-the-climate/a-59853315 https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-nuclear-energy-good-for-...
- VHRanger 5y ago
  Base load Base load Base load Any green energy plan that dismisses nuclear without addressing base load issues with a concrete plan (no future tech that doesn't exist yet) is profoundly unserious
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    It is important to mix your energy, but it is an insufficient argument. https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-three-myths-about-baseload https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-thr...
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    The technology for addressing baseload exists: renewables, batteries, and long term chemical storage (like hydrogen). All these exist, it's just a matter of pushing the costs down via deployment and experience. If you object to these because they are not scaled out, I will point out that a nuclear powered world will also need new tech of that kind: either seawater uranium extraction on a massive scale, or a breeder-based fuel cycle. Existing burner reactors would, if they powered the entire world, exhaust available uranium resources in just a few years.
eternalban 5y ago
You need to include the risk, cost, and near and long term consequences, of catastrophic failure in your analysis. That may alter the conclusion that N.E. is 'the least worst option'.
toss1 5y ago
And now you know why Russia supports Green Party in many countries. Such support can advance many geopolitical goals, from undermining the party opposed to your interests, e.g.,[1], to undermining forms of energy opposed to your interests, as here. How convenient is it for Russia that Germany could really use the nuclear power that was removed in no small part to strong opposition lead by the Green Party, and just as Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline is nearing completion, tying Germany's entire economy to paying Russia for energy for the next few decades? It is not a coincidence. [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/russians-launched-pro-jill-stein-social-media-blitz-help-trump-n951166 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/russians-...
- VyperCard 5y ago
  You are incorrect. They are advocating against the greens and support the social democrats, because of gas gerd. Google it
- zeegroen 5y ago
  That's only one example, in a voting system that is easily gamed with vote-splitting. Do you have any more examples to show us? You mention Germany, well in that country the best buddies of Putin are the previous Christian democrats and the socialists, while the biggest opponents are the greens under the leadership of Annalena Baerbock.[1] [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/25/world/europe/germany-russia-nato-ukraine.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/25/world/europe/germany-russ...
  - toss1 5y ago
    Yes, the RUS support does seem to have switched, they were supporting DE Greens in the past, not sure why the change, haven't followed it closely enough. Maybe damage (to nuke industry) already done, and they needed to amp up support for importing fossil fuels, which wouldn't be credible for Greens to support. As far as I can tell, it's all opportunistic, laying groundwork for whatever might work in their favor. Since I don't have copies of the checks, it is also possible that the Greens merely played the role of Useful Idiots (in the V. Lenin definition) and happily helped with RUS goals.
pelasaco 5y ago
For sure I can understand that maybe nuclear power plants from the 70s don't have the best security for today's standards. But based in the technology leap from the 70s until today, I can imagine that a nuclear power plant being built today are much safer than those from the 70s. And you are right, death numbers by nuclear energy accidents is much smaller than with Nuclear. UN says that not more than 50 person died in Chernobyl[1]. In Fukushima: 0[2]. However that's maybe like accidents with Cars x accidents with Airplane: The statistics are irrelevant for people with intrinsic fear from Airplanes. Resouces: [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster#Differing_direct,_short-term_death_toll_counts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di... [2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56252695 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56252695

dachryn 5y ago

ironically, that same could now be said about our gas crisis in Europe, where we handover immense leverage into the control of Russia.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

> I'll repeat this until I'm blue in the face, has been responsible for smallest number of deaths of any form of energy generation and produce the lowest amount of CO2 (i.e. zero, other than construction). Will you stop repeating this if I explain why it's false? So first up, the stat is usually fatalities per TwH, since that skews things in Nuclear's direction, not just number of fatalities which would be won by some obscure but not very successful power source. Second, even with the correct metric, solar and wind are now beating nuclear and projected to continue to do so, widening the gap over time. Comparing the very start of the renewable rollout gives misleading stats as the total power generated is low, and many stats that get quoted on this are more than a decade out of date. You can build a wind turbine and ritually sacrifice someone on completion of the build and the fatalities per TwH is infinite as it's not generated any power yet, but with every year of operation it gets lower. Basically the same applies to carbon output, nuclear does well, but wind/solar/nuclear have been basically tied on both metrics unless you're relying on some very, very old data. Of course if you have a limited amount of money to spend, then you'll generate more energy and save more lives with whatever the cheaper form of energy is, so we should really take that into consideration too. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

schnitzelstoat 5y ago
But it doesn't matter anyway - wind and solar should complement to nuclear, not to replace it. This year we saw weaker summer winds in Europe which is part of what has caused the current energy crisis. These weaker winds are expected to become more common as climate change continues.[1] Nuclear has the benefit that it's reliable. If you design a plant to output X gigawatts - it'll still be able to do so regardless of the weather. [1] https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-winds-mean-for-the-future-energy-grid-170135 https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-w...
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  No, nuclear plants are regularly taken offline for weather related reasons. The main problem seems to be that people have invented an entirely ficticious nuclear power that does not and has never existed, just so they can slag off renewables and "elite culture" whatever the heck that is. The real actual nuclear power, which is better than coal, but not particularly competitive with modern renewables is apparently irrelevant to people who have bizarrely joined a one sided culture war on the side of fossil fuel companies and think this makes them cool, well informed and counter-cultural despite reality leaning the other way.
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    > No, nuclear plants are regularly taken offline for weather related reasons. Do you have a source for this?
    - formerly_proven 5y ago
      Every summer in France
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - 5y ago

throwawaylinux 5y ago

The fossil fuel industry has had no better friend over the past 50 years than the "green" movement. It has worked so well to keep the dirtiest most polluting coal power generation viable that they could not have paid to get better lobbyists. Following the money and principle of least surprise, you might even be forgiven to think it's very likely anti nuclear movement was funded if not founded by big coal.

fsflover 5y ago
> you might even be forgiven to think it's very likely anti nuclear movement was funded if not founded by big coal https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-fossil-fuel-interests-bankrolling-the-anti-nuclear-energy-movement https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f... https://thebreakthrough.org/blog/the-true-face-of-the-anti-nuclear-movement https://thebreakthrough.org/blog/the-true-face-of-the-anti-n...
- WithinReason 5y ago
  "In 1970, a leader of the petroleum industry and the head of the Atlantic Richfield Co. named Robert O. Anderson contributed $200,000 to fund Friends of the Earth, an organization that is strident in its opposition to nuclear energy, citing both safety and cost issues." Why am I surprised at learning this?
  - patall 5y ago
    I am actually surprised that the article doesn't provide more examples. The article argues that the fossil fuel industry is paying the antinuclear movement and the single, one example given is a onetime payment in the 70s to start a new organization by a private person. Sure, everyone requires different levels of evidence, but I heavily doubt that you will be able to convince anyone with that one. And then the rest of the text is about how renewable are (as of 2016) so much smaller than the loss in nuclear power.
    - WithinReason 5y ago

phicoh 5y ago

It is very simple, nuclear has been a failure in Europe in the last couple of decades. Look at projects in the Finland, France and the UK. The situation would have been much better if there was a nuclear industry that could deliver in time and within budget. A country like France with a massive amount of aging nuclear power plants is in serious trouble replacing them in time. Fortunately, wind and solar are doing very well in reducing CO2 emissions. In the coming one or two decades, wind and solar can easily outpace nuclear in reducing CO2 emissions.

fsflover 5y ago
> In the coming one or two decades, wind and solar can easily outpace nuclear in reducing CO2 emissions. This is not a fight between wind/solar and nuclear. This is a fight against coal. You should reduce the coal first, not nuclear.
- phicoh 5y ago
  Ultimately, this is about money. For aging nuclear power plants, keeping them running becomes more and more costly. So the question becomes, if we need to invest a big chunk of money, what should we invest in to reduce CO2 emissions the most. And the answer is that building out wind/solar and insulating buildings is at the moment way more effective than keeping old nuclear power plants running.
  - fsflover 5y ago
    > what should we invest in to reduce CO2 emissions the most. > And the answer is that building out wind/solar Proofs?
    - phicoh 5y ago
      The proof is that nobody is investing in keeping old nuclear power plants open. All over Europe. When those plants stay open it is governments paying for it. In contrast, companies are now paying money to rent a piece of sea to put a wind farm in.

fundatus 5y ago

Nuclear is also the most expensive energy source (total cost per MWh). Which is the real reason why "Europe is losing nuclear power". When finished the UKs Hinkley Point C nuclear plant will probably have cost around £23 billion for ~3.000 MW which is completely insane.

arkh 5y ago
> 3.000 MW Well those are 3000 real MW. Not 10% when the weather is good and 0 otherwise. And it can be piloted as needed.
- fundatus 5y ago
  Let's do some math. You can build a 3 MW wind turbine for around £2 million. Which means you could build around 11,500 wind turbines with the amount of money spent on HPC. Which in turn means a maximum production of 34,500 MW. So even under the assumption that these will run at below 10% of their capacity you're still producing more electricity than HPC. Now in reality this number averages around 30% actually. So the price per MWh is orders of magnitudes lower compared to nuclear.
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    This is still not equivalent because we haven't solved storage (peaky energy is not as valuable as constant energy) [and because you've compared build costs to total costs]. Bit in [] is false; apologies.
    - fundatus 5y ago
      I've compared the build costs of HPC to the build costs of wind turbines. Not total costs.
      - robertlagrant 5y ago
        You're right. Will edit.

Mountain_Skies 5y ago

I wonder how much of the green movement of that era was supported by the Soviets, who had obvious motives for undermining nuclear research in the West. I could be that even long after the USSR has been wiped away that its influence remains.

fundatus 5y ago
Don't think so. Taking Germany as an example, many people joined these movements after the country was in large parts affected (to this day actually) by the nuclear fallout of the disaster in Chernobyl. So I guess experiencing this first hand made a huge impact for many people. Personally I don't have a very strong opinion on nuclear (neither positive nor negative) but I also believe that you can't simply take these experiences away from people and it would be wrong to invalidate them.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  >> I wonder how much of the green movement of that era was supported by the Soviets, who had obvious motives for undermining nuclear research in the West. I could be that even long after the USSR has been wiped away that its influence remains. > Don't think so. Taking Germany as an example, many people joined these movements after the country was in large parts affected (to this day actually) by the nuclear fallout of the disaster in Chernobyl. I don't think those things are mutually exclusive. It's quite conceivable the Soviets supported a seed, which sprouted once Chernobyl created the right conditions for it to take off. It looks like the German Green party opposed nuclear power before Chernobyl and it was also infiltrated to a degree by the East German Stasi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_90/The_Greens#1980s:_Parliamentary_representation_on_the_federal_level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_90/The_Greens#1980s:_...: > In 1982 ... Those who remained in the Green party were more strongly pacifist and ... tended to identify more closely with a culture of protest and civil disobedience, frequently clashing with police at demonstrations against nuclear weapons, nuclear energy, and the construction of a new runway (Startbahn West) at Frankfurt Airport... > Among the important political issues at the time was the deployment of Pershing II IRBMs and nuclear-tipped cruise missiles by the U.S. and NATO on West German soil, generating strong opposition in the general population that found an outlet in mass demonstrations. The newly formed party was able to draw on this popular movement to recruit support. Partly due to the impact of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, and to growing awareness of the threat of air pollution and acid rain to German forests (Waldsterben), the Greens increased their share of the vote to 8.3% in the 1987 federal election.... > The Greens were the target of attempts by the East German secret police to enlist the cooperation of members who were willing to align the party with the agenda of the German Democratic Republic. The party ranks included several politicians who were later discovered to have been Stasi agents, including Bundestag representative Dirk Schneider, European Parliament representative Brigitte Heinrich, and Red Army Faction defense lawyer Klaus Croissant. Greens politician and Bundestag representative Gert Bastian was also a founding member of Generals for Peace [de], a pacifist group created and funded by the Stasi, the revelation of which may have contributed to the murder-suicide in which he killed his partner and Greens founder Petra Kelly.[11] A study commissioned by the Greens determined that 15 to 20 members intimately cooperated with the Stasi and another 450 to 500 had been informants.[12][13]

7952 5y ago

All those things may be true, but they still count against nuclear energy. Lack of public support and lack of continuous development make building capacity more difficult to deploy in the present. Technical superiority is not enough.

Aeolun 5y ago

> has been responsible for smallest number of deaths of any form of energy generation So far. The spent fuel will be around for another 10k years to potentially cause further deaths. If we have a few more Fukushimas, we might ruin the ocean forever.

WithinReason 5y ago
There's 4.5 Billion metric tons of uranium in the ocean already. https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6191296 https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6191296
tablespoon 5y ago
> If we have a few more Fukushimas, we might ruin the ocean forever. I could be wrong, but, IIRC, coal power has actually created more radioactive pollution than nuclear energy. It's just a far, far larger volume of less concentrated pollution. Also, Fukushima-style pollution isn't "forever." The most radioactive stuff also decays the quickest, so it disappears relatively quickly. It looks like most of the pollution from Fukushima was caesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years.
- DrBazza 5y ago
  There's no small irony that after Chernobyl, all evidence is that animal life has actually thrived in spite of the radiation, and if anything, the most sensitive species to radiation is us. Another commenter has already pointed out that there is vastly more radioactivity in the sea than anything we can add. A few million gallons of nuclear contaminated water into the ocean is nothing, it'll dilute to next to nothing, Nuclear homeopathy, if you prefer.

hourislate 5y ago

Part of the problem with Nuclear is tax payer exhaustion. Every time they build a plant it take 10-20 years longer and cost over runs are in the billions. And then you have costly refurbishment that runs into the billions and takes half a decade longer than anticipated. It's a shit show from day one until they finally shut it down 20 billion $$$ later...

caoilte 5y ago
even then it's still a shit show because someone has to play for cleanup and storage and the nuclear company usually goes conveniently bankrupt soon after they stop producing energy.

krageon 5y ago

> 'bad' Given that japan had a giant radioactive ocean leak and I still haven't heard comprehensive reasoning about why we think facilities for storing nuclear waste will not be slowly defunded, I think the scare quotes can go. Politics anywhere (at the moment) simply cannot be trusted to properly manage nuclear waste, so we should not be producing it.

School-Cotton 5y ago
The alternative is producing emissions from coal and oil which we just dump into the air. Nuclear is far and away the less harmful solution.
- VyperCard 5y ago
  The alternative is to switch to renewable energy and storage faster

yholio 5y ago

Nuclear had roughly 60 years to deliver clean, cheap and reliable energy. If it did all that, no amount of green lobby could have derailed it. Unfortunately, and I feel that deeply as an engineer, it did not achieve those goals. What we have currently have are slightly evolved designs over those of the 60s, which are fantastically expensive, take up to a decade to build and three more decades to recover investment, and present a large economic failure risk - see the Nukegate fiasco. No sane financial investor wants to approach nuclear, no one wants to insure it, so the only ones willing to eat the risk are states. Yes, we had a window in the last 20 years to reinvent fission, have new, secure and cheap reactors which cannot proliferate, are passively safe and fast to deploy. The industry and regulators remained paralyzed, structurally risk averse. That window has now closed. Renewables are cheaper then nuclear, fast to come online and have very low risk. Storage is quickly dropping in price. Together, storage and renewables, coupled with a smart grid, will be able to cover more and more of the demand and require fossils to be fired less and less. It does not matter if you go fosil for a whole week in a year where there is no sun, wind or rain, that's still only 2% of the production and you can use very expensive mitigations like CCS, as long as you have cheap renewables in the rest of the time.

DrBazza 5y ago
In the UK, every single time there's been a proposal for a reactor, there are local protests, and CND/Greenpeace turn up en masse. There's been no opportunity to deliver 'cheap' energy in terms of up-front cost, because there are so many artificial hoops to jump through - legislation, planning, and so on. As for clean and reliable. No CO2 right? And the nuclear power stations in the UK pretty much have run continuously since they were switched on, so I'm not sure what 'reliable' means here.
WithinReason 5y ago
France did it
- yholio 5y ago
  "so the only ones willing to eat the risk are states." Sure, if you can cook the accounting books to pay for a military nuclear industry, and also get a civil sector that has no need to pay for capital, insurance and cleanup. I doubt it's a scalable model, and France had its own share of fuckups and close calls.

mnsc 5y ago

> the "brainwashing" of the public that unquestioningly accept that nuclear power is 'bad' and tightly linked to nuclear weapons and death. I can only speak for myself but I don't think nuclear power is bad, and I don't connect it with nuclear weapons or even deaths. It's just scary. And that's due to Chernobyl and Fukushima. And I haven't dug into the technicalities of why one of these new level 5 grand wizard mosfet reactor types can't fail in 50 years like the old ones did. Because we are smarter now? But if I look around at the current state of affairs I would say it looks like we have started to walk backwards as a civilisation. Not a rational thought I know, but it nicely feeds into that first ingrained irrational fear.

ch4s3 5y ago
Fukushima wasn't that bad. Very little radiation was leaked and the max number of expected cancer cases expected based on conservative modeling is ~100, mostly of the treatable thyroid variety. Most of those people will likely die of other causes. Chernobyl was just an idiotic design that no one outside of the USSR would have built after about 1954. Graphite piles are death traps, and not building a containment building is insane.
- vkazanov 5y ago
  Fukushima as a plant was also asking for trouble: "the earthquake had also generated a tsunami 14 metres...swept over the plant's seawall" (c) Wikipedia. 14 metres is a joke for a country where 40 metre tsunamis happen. It is amazing how this could be built not taking high waves into account.
  - sliken 5y ago
    This what happens when politicians control the placement of nuclear plants. The scientist and engineers picked a much better location for the plant, but were overridden, and a political favor moved the location. The engineers mentioned they needed a large seawall to protect the plant from the frequent tsunamis, and were overridden because it cost too much. Nuclear can be safe, but you have to keep politics out of it.

whatever1 5y ago

Thanks for calling us brainwashed. First, show us what is the progress in nuclear waste treatment. (None) Show us the data of long time term safety of operating nuclear plants. (Every decade we have an unmitigated disaster, even with so few operating nuclear plants) Also please show us an economically viable plan to keep sourcing Uranium for increasing demands. (Ideally one that does not involve waging wars)

tapland 5y ago
If you would let somone collect #2 ;)

raxxorrax 5y ago

Nuclear power is not a solution to climate change. It would bind too many resources (which are also finite in economical quantities). Last year the first permanent storage worldwide opened, it is not a solved problem. Nuclear processing plants have elevated cancer rates around their location and it is still legal to dumb contaminated water into the ocean. It was only restricted for barrels. The construction costs are very relevant, not only from a CO2 perspective. Nuclear power is not very attractive, only if you reduce environmental protection to CO2 output, which is insufficient. So no, the greens of former years were not that wrong. It is questionable to shut down working plants, but if nuclear was that feasible, it would already play a larger in energy production today. If you start building plants today, you will need at least a decade to get them operational. You can look at France for the youngest examples of that. And would you want to mine Uranium? Have fun with that. https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-nuclear-energy-good-for-the-climate/a-59853315 https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-nuclear-energy-good-for-...

VHRanger 5y ago
Base load Base load Base load Any green energy plan that dismisses nuclear without addressing base load issues with a concrete plan (no future tech that doesn't exist yet) is profoundly unserious
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  It is important to mix your energy, but it is an insufficient argument. https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-three-myths-about-baseload https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-thr...
- pfdietz 5y ago
  The technology for addressing baseload exists: renewables, batteries, and long term chemical storage (like hydrogen). All these exist, it's just a matter of pushing the costs down via deployment and experience. If you object to these because they are not scaled out, I will point out that a nuclear powered world will also need new tech of that kind: either seawater uranium extraction on a massive scale, or a breeder-based fuel cycle. Existing burner reactors would, if they powered the entire world, exhaust available uranium resources in just a few years.

eternalban 5y ago

You need to include the risk, cost, and near and long term consequences, of catastrophic failure in your analysis. That may alter the conclusion that N.E. is 'the least worst option'.

toss1 5y ago

And now you know why Russia supports Green Party in many countries. Such support can advance many geopolitical goals, from undermining the party opposed to your interests, e.g.,[1], to undermining forms of energy opposed to your interests, as here. How convenient is it for Russia that Germany could really use the nuclear power that was removed in no small part to strong opposition lead by the Green Party, and just as Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline is nearing completion, tying Germany's entire economy to paying Russia for energy for the next few decades? It is not a coincidence. [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/russians-launched-pro-jill-stein-social-media-blitz-help-trump-n951166 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/russians-...

VyperCard 5y ago
You are incorrect. They are advocating against the greens and support the social democrats, because of gas gerd. Google it
zeegroen 5y ago
That's only one example, in a voting system that is easily gamed with vote-splitting. Do you have any more examples to show us? You mention Germany, well in that country the best buddies of Putin are the previous Christian democrats and the socialists, while the biggest opponents are the greens under the leadership of Annalena Baerbock.[1] [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/25/world/europe/germany-russia-nato-ukraine.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/25/world/europe/germany-russ...
- toss1 5y ago
  Yes, the RUS support does seem to have switched, they were supporting DE Greens in the past, not sure why the change, haven't followed it closely enough. Maybe damage (to nuke industry) already done, and they needed to amp up support for importing fossil fuels, which wouldn't be credible for Greens to support. As far as I can tell, it's all opportunistic, laying groundwork for whatever might work in their favor. Since I don't have copies of the checks, it is also possible that the Greens merely played the role of Useful Idiots (in the V. Lenin definition) and happily helped with RUS goals.

pelasaco 5y ago

For sure I can understand that maybe nuclear power plants from the 70s don't have the best security for today's standards. But based in the technology leap from the 70s until today, I can imagine that a nuclear power plant being built today are much safer than those from the 70s. And you are right, death numbers by nuclear energy accidents is much smaller than with Nuclear. UN says that not more than 50 person died in Chernobyl[1]. In Fukushima: 0[2]. However that's maybe like accidents with Cars x accidents with Airplane: The statistics are irrelevant for people with intrinsic fear from Airplanes. Resouces: [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster#Differing_direct,_short-term_death_toll_counts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di... [2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56252695 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56252695