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I don't think this is fair. Although I think some among the anti-nuclear movement may have had subversive intent, most of the people who ended up aligning wit

I don't think this is fair. Although I think some among the anti-nuclear movement may have had subversive intent, most of the people who ended up aligning with that movement did have good intentions. They were reasoning that in the long term, nuclear power would bring great misery to humanity. Long term thinking is good, right? If you believe in the eventual probability of those doomsday scenarios, and you value the well being of your fellow citizens, then shouldn't you try to prevent that outcome? I see no moral fault here. And shaming these people isn't the solution. The solution is to bring them around to seeing the virtue of using nuclear power. They may be wrong about the relative safety of nuclear power but they aren't morally defective people, so shaming them isn't appropriate.

ozim 4y ago
The road to hell is paved with good intention... Other one I would quote is "perfection is the enemy of good" - it seems nuclear is good, but they would not give up only on good. It had to be perfect where renewable sources are 100% ideal.
luckylion 4y ago
I agree. The problem with that position is that pretty much everyone ever believed that their actions would make things better, even if they were very wrong and just made everything worse. Nevertheless, I don't think the anti-nuclear movement is evil. They're guided by extreme fear, not malice. I don't know how you can bring them around though, unless your offering some form of therapy. But even with that, would they accept it? Would you accept therapy to change some of your deeply held beliefs that you don't view as 'wrong'?
- konschubert 4y ago
  Some people do things that they know are bad for others because they want to hurt others.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    Sure, but I don't believe you run into a lot of actually evil villains in politics that only do what they do because they want to see suffering and want their action to scale instead of ripping the wings from a butterfly one by one. Stalin or Mao didn't just enjoy seeing peasants starve, they believed that sacrificing a million here and there is the price to pay for the communist utopia they thought they were building.
    - JohnBooty 4y ago
      I agree that very few, if any, leaders are intentionally evil. Even the most (in)famous ones such as your examples. However, I'm not sure the distinction is too useful. Ultimately we're judged by actions, not intentions.
      - luckylion 4y ago
        Certainly, I was just pointing out that that's the very problem with the position that someone or some group shouldn't be morally judged for things they do/cause while having good intentions. It's a tough problem, and I guess we're mostly basing our judgement on results. Push through a stupid policy and it's expensive but nobody freezes and you'll be forgotten. Do the same and be unlucky and a million citizens freeze because of it and you won't be forgiven.
- wizofaus 4y ago
  "Extreme" seems an overstatement, and I don't think it's necessarily the main motivator for a lot of people that are anti-nuclear. Many don't like it because they believe large-scale power sources supplied and run by (or inevitably being a source of profit for) mega-corporations are a bad idea in general. Others because there are genuine environmental consequences to and risks with uranium mining and storage of radioactive waste that we don't have complete solutions for, even if by almost any measure those consequences are less serious than they are for fossil fuel extraction and consequent GHG emissions. And others because they're skeptical it can scale up quickly and economically enough to reach necessary emissions targets (I have one foot in that camp, at least for my own country). Ultimately I think increased nuclear power will be accepted as a "necessary evil" or "least worst" solution in most developed countries, though it's hard to see it happening here in Australia, despite the fact we supply much of the world's uranium (*) and arguably have a fair number of appropriate options for waste storage. * actually we have almost 30% of known viable resources, but only contribute 8% or 9% of the world total supply currently, producing less than a 5th of Kazakhstan, by far the most prolific supplier.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    It looks extreme to me, and from my experience is closely related with a general fear of GMOs, strong dislike for plastics, a preference for "alternative medicine" etc. It's fundamentally an emotional approach that isn't concerned with "how do we deal with the waste?" but just grips on to that to rationalize the intuitive fear. Maybe I'm the crazy one, but I am not overly concerned about nuclear plants, I'll gladly live next to one (but not too close, I don't want to live in a shadow half the day) and have the waste containers stored a few hundred meters below me. And my willingness just increases with a thought of all the great things energy does for us. Of course there are risks, but everything has risks attached -- we calculate the probabilities and then stop worrying about the risks if they're minuscule. And of course there's an economic part to consider, but I'm pretty sure if you counted the amount of hours Germans have spent in 2022 talking about the energy crisis, we could've been well on our way to 100% nuclear coverage if we had spent that time productively instead.
    - 4y ago
sapiol 4y ago
> I see no moral fault here. Why do you appoint morality a higher ground than rationality? Edit: Typo
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  I didn't. Confusing comment. Well-meaning anti-nuclear activists have reasoned incorrectly, but that doesn't mean they should be shamed. Shame is not the appropriate way to correct somebody who has reasoned incorrectly. Shaming them is counterproductive since they know themselves to have good intentions. If you want to bring them around to your point of view, you should use rational arguments. Use shaming tactics against those who know they've done wrong, like those paid to lie by coal companies. They actually have something to be ashamed of.
scythe 4y ago
>Although I think some among the anti-nuclear movement may have had subversive intent This is a dramatic understatement. It was coordinated by the Rockefeller Foundation from the very beginning: https://atomicinsights.com/how-did-leaders-of-the-hydrocarbon-establishment-build-the-foundation-for-radiation-fears/ https://atomicinsights.com/how-did-leaders-of-the-hydrocarbo... >They may be wrong about the relative safety of nuclear power but they aren't morally defective people, so shaming them isn't appropriate. The moral failing that you're missing is arrogance. People who actually study radiation were not leading this movement.
asdff 4y ago
No one who was for blocking nuclear power was doing any long term thinking, I can assure you. That was cold war paranoia thinking that suddenly everyone would be engaging in nuclear warfare. They would have realized we are not ready to transition away from nuclear power because there is no alternative for our power requirements beyond nuclear energy or dirty energy. Long term thinking would realize that the march we are on currently with climate change will also end up looking a lot like a world after nuclear warfare disrupts society. No, it was short term thinking that has brought on these opinions. Thats who funds these anti nuclear opinions anyway, people who are invested such to benefit in the near term over preventing adoption of nuclear energy, not actual scientists engaging in long term thinking.
JohnBooty 4y ago
most of the people who ended up aligning with that movement did have good intentions. They were reasoning that in the long term, nuclear power would bring great misery to humanity. Long term thinking is good, right? The problem is that those with good intentions didn't think very hard about the issue. Even the occasional Fukushima or Chernobyl is preferable to the irreversible fossil fuel-induced hell we're about to experience, with potentially billions of people displaced and so forth. It's especially galling since protecting the planet was their entire raison d'etre. And there were certainly who opposed nuclear power with evil intentions, specifically the fossil fuel industry. I'm not sure which one is worse. At least the fossil fuel industry never claimed to be noble.
throwaway221017 4y ago
Intentions do not matter, as emotions do not. This is an calculable problem to almost 99.9% certainty. Nuclear waste will not pose a problem to 99.95% of all human population for the next 1ky even in the worst case. Even if chernobyl was 10 times as bad, it wouldn't cause large-scale issues, and chernobyl was almost the worst possible nuclear incident possible at the technology level of the time. We have so much other, more real, more tangible and even right now happening vectors of "problems", starting with Covid, not ending with the real chance of WW3, and we whine about miniscule pollution of square kilometers at worst? Hard to get.
paulmd 4y ago
It also downplays the fossil fuel industry's responsibility for anti-nuclear advocacy. Like gosh it's not the literal billions of dollars this industry spends lobbying congress and subsidizing pro-fossil-fuel perspectives in media and think-tanks, it's the healing-crystals wacko's fault! Much like recycling or jaywalking, it's a way for an industry to diffuse and downplay their own advocacy and push the fault onto the public. Like yeah, it would be better if Greenpeace supported nuclear... but they're not the ones sitting in senator's offices getting bills passed subsidizing the fossil-fuel industry. Even the "climate change" bill had to throw almost 10% of its spending to fossil-fuel subsidies.
Phil_Latio 4y ago
> And shaming these people isn't the solution. The solution is to bring them around They sit in the government.
sokoloff 4y ago
There are no doubt some people who are arguing against nuclear with exactly those pure intentions underlying their advocacy. Given the experience of the US Navy in nuclear power generation, I don't think their doomsday scenarios are inevitable. I think a lot of people are negatively disposed to nuclear based on beliefs that are not justified by the relative risk and reward of nuclear power generation at this stage in humanity's technological evolution. I don't think we have a combination of (better, cleaner, more reliable) base load generation power source that's available right now (which is the question to consider when contemplating "we have a working nuclear reactor; should we shut it down?")
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  > Given the experience of the US Navy in nuclear power generation, I don't think their doomsday scenarios are inevitable. I often see this given as a reason for why nuclear power generation can be safe, but I think it overlooks the fact that military reactors operate in a very different context from civilian ones. For a start, do we know how expensive (per unit energy) US Navy reactors are? It doesn't matter how safe they are if they are twice as expensive as renewables (plus storage / power-to-gas). More generally, though, given the secrecy around military and nuclear programs, would we even know how many near-meltdowns and embarrassing accidents US Navy reactors have experienced (at least in the past few decades)?
  - asdff 4y ago
    We would have known about near meltdowns by now, which probably would have been more common in the early decades of nuclear navy power, considering we know things like how the air force nearly destroyed a huge swath of North Carolina due to an accident involving a nuclear bomb for example.
  - JohnBooty 4y ago
    do we know how expensive (per unit energy) US Navy reactors are? It doesn't matter how safe they are if they are twice as expensive as renewables (plus storage / power-to-gas). Renewables (and fusion, although that's arguably a renewable) are obviously the end goal but until they can fill 100% of our energy needs the real cost comparison needs to be "the cost of nuclear" versus "the cost of fossil fuel plus the cost of the damage done by fossil fuels."

ozim 4y ago

The road to hell is paved with good intention... Other one I would quote is "perfection is the enemy of good" - it seems nuclear is good, but they would not give up only on good. It had to be perfect where renewable sources are 100% ideal.

luckylion 4y ago

I agree. The problem with that position is that pretty much everyone ever believed that their actions would make things better, even if they were very wrong and just made everything worse. Nevertheless, I don't think the anti-nuclear movement is evil. They're guided by extreme fear, not malice. I don't know how you can bring them around though, unless your offering some form of therapy. But even with that, would they accept it? Would you accept therapy to change some of your deeply held beliefs that you don't view as 'wrong'?

konschubert 4y ago
Some people do things that they know are bad for others because they want to hurt others.
- luckylion 4y ago
  Sure, but I don't believe you run into a lot of actually evil villains in politics that only do what they do because they want to see suffering and want their action to scale instead of ripping the wings from a butterfly one by one. Stalin or Mao didn't just enjoy seeing peasants starve, they believed that sacrificing a million here and there is the price to pay for the communist utopia they thought they were building.
  - JohnBooty 4y ago
    I agree that very few, if any, leaders are intentionally evil. Even the most (in)famous ones such as your examples. However, I'm not sure the distinction is too useful. Ultimately we're judged by actions, not intentions.
    - luckylion 4y ago
      Certainly, I was just pointing out that that's the very problem with the position that someone or some group shouldn't be morally judged for things they do/cause while having good intentions. It's a tough problem, and I guess we're mostly basing our judgement on results. Push through a stupid policy and it's expensive but nobody freezes and you'll be forgotten. Do the same and be unlucky and a million citizens freeze because of it and you won't be forgiven.
wizofaus 4y ago
"Extreme" seems an overstatement, and I don't think it's necessarily the main motivator for a lot of people that are anti-nuclear. Many don't like it because they believe large-scale power sources supplied and run by (or inevitably being a source of profit for) mega-corporations are a bad idea in general. Others because there are genuine environmental consequences to and risks with uranium mining and storage of radioactive waste that we don't have complete solutions for, even if by almost any measure those consequences are less serious than they are for fossil fuel extraction and consequent GHG emissions. And others because they're skeptical it can scale up quickly and economically enough to reach necessary emissions targets (I have one foot in that camp, at least for my own country). Ultimately I think increased nuclear power will be accepted as a "necessary evil" or "least worst" solution in most developed countries, though it's hard to see it happening here in Australia, despite the fact we supply much of the world's uranium (*) and arguably have a fair number of appropriate options for waste storage. * actually we have almost 30% of known viable resources, but only contribute 8% or 9% of the world total supply currently, producing less than a 5th of Kazakhstan, by far the most prolific supplier.
- luckylion 4y ago
  It looks extreme to me, and from my experience is closely related with a general fear of GMOs, strong dislike for plastics, a preference for "alternative medicine" etc. It's fundamentally an emotional approach that isn't concerned with "how do we deal with the waste?" but just grips on to that to rationalize the intuitive fear. Maybe I'm the crazy one, but I am not overly concerned about nuclear plants, I'll gladly live next to one (but not too close, I don't want to live in a shadow half the day) and have the waste containers stored a few hundred meters below me. And my willingness just increases with a thought of all the great things energy does for us. Of course there are risks, but everything has risks attached -- we calculate the probabilities and then stop worrying about the risks if they're minuscule. And of course there's an economic part to consider, but I'm pretty sure if you counted the amount of hours Germans have spent in 2022 talking about the energy crisis, we could've been well on our way to 100% nuclear coverage if we had spent that time productively instead.
  - 4y ago

sapiol 4y ago

> I see no moral fault here. Why do you appoint morality a higher ground than rationality? Edit: Typo

MichaelCollins 4y ago
I didn't. Confusing comment. Well-meaning anti-nuclear activists have reasoned incorrectly, but that doesn't mean they should be shamed. Shame is not the appropriate way to correct somebody who has reasoned incorrectly. Shaming them is counterproductive since they know themselves to have good intentions. If you want to bring them around to your point of view, you should use rational arguments. Use shaming tactics against those who know they've done wrong, like those paid to lie by coal companies. They actually have something to be ashamed of.

scythe 4y ago

>Although I think some among the anti-nuclear movement may have had subversive intent This is a dramatic understatement. It was coordinated by the Rockefeller Foundation from the very beginning: https://atomicinsights.com/how-did-leaders-of-the-hydrocarbon-establishment-build-the-foundation-for-radiation-fears/ https://atomicinsights.com/how-did-leaders-of-the-hydrocarbo... >They may be wrong about the relative safety of nuclear power but they aren't morally defective people, so shaming them isn't appropriate. The moral failing that you're missing is arrogance. People who actually study radiation were not leading this movement.

asdff 4y ago

No one who was for blocking nuclear power was doing any long term thinking, I can assure you. That was cold war paranoia thinking that suddenly everyone would be engaging in nuclear warfare. They would have realized we are not ready to transition away from nuclear power because there is no alternative for our power requirements beyond nuclear energy or dirty energy. Long term thinking would realize that the march we are on currently with climate change will also end up looking a lot like a world after nuclear warfare disrupts society. No, it was short term thinking that has brought on these opinions. Thats who funds these anti nuclear opinions anyway, people who are invested such to benefit in the near term over preventing adoption of nuclear energy, not actual scientists engaging in long term thinking.

JohnBooty 4y ago

most of the people who ended up aligning with that movement did have good intentions. They were reasoning that in the long term, nuclear power would bring great misery to humanity. Long term thinking is good, right? The problem is that those with good intentions didn't think very hard about the issue. Even the occasional Fukushima or Chernobyl is preferable to the irreversible fossil fuel-induced hell we're about to experience, with potentially billions of people displaced and so forth. It's especially galling since protecting the planet was their entire raison d'etre. And there were certainly who opposed nuclear power with evil intentions, specifically the fossil fuel industry. I'm not sure which one is worse. At least the fossil fuel industry never claimed to be noble.

throwaway221017 4y ago

Intentions do not matter, as emotions do not. This is an calculable problem to almost 99.9% certainty. Nuclear waste will not pose a problem to 99.95% of all human population for the next 1ky even in the worst case. Even if chernobyl was 10 times as bad, it wouldn't cause large-scale issues, and chernobyl was almost the worst possible nuclear incident possible at the technology level of the time. We have so much other, more real, more tangible and even right now happening vectors of "problems", starting with Covid, not ending with the real chance of WW3, and we whine about miniscule pollution of square kilometers at worst? Hard to get.

paulmd 4y ago

It also downplays the fossil fuel industry's responsibility for anti-nuclear advocacy. Like gosh it's not the literal billions of dollars this industry spends lobbying congress and subsidizing pro-fossil-fuel perspectives in media and think-tanks, it's the healing-crystals wacko's fault! Much like recycling or jaywalking, it's a way for an industry to diffuse and downplay their own advocacy and push the fault onto the public. Like yeah, it would be better if Greenpeace supported nuclear... but they're not the ones sitting in senator's offices getting bills passed subsidizing the fossil-fuel industry. Even the "climate change" bill had to throw almost 10% of its spending to fossil-fuel subsidies.

Phil_Latio 4y ago

> And shaming these people isn't the solution. The solution is to bring them around They sit in the government.

sokoloff 4y ago

There are no doubt some people who are arguing against nuclear with exactly those pure intentions underlying their advocacy. Given the experience of the US Navy in nuclear power generation, I don't think their doomsday scenarios are inevitable. I think a lot of people are negatively disposed to nuclear based on beliefs that are not justified by the relative risk and reward of nuclear power generation at this stage in humanity's technological evolution. I don't think we have a combination of (better, cleaner, more reliable) base load generation power source that's available right now (which is the question to consider when contemplating "we have a working nuclear reactor; should we shut it down?")

dane-pgp 4y ago
> Given the experience of the US Navy in nuclear power generation, I don't think their doomsday scenarios are inevitable. I often see this given as a reason for why nuclear power generation can be safe, but I think it overlooks the fact that military reactors operate in a very different context from civilian ones. For a start, do we know how expensive (per unit energy) US Navy reactors are? It doesn't matter how safe they are if they are twice as expensive as renewables (plus storage / power-to-gas). More generally, though, given the secrecy around military and nuclear programs, would we even know how many near-meltdowns and embarrassing accidents US Navy reactors have experienced (at least in the past few decades)?
- asdff 4y ago
  We would have known about near meltdowns by now, which probably would have been more common in the early decades of nuclear navy power, considering we know things like how the air force nearly destroyed a huge swath of North Carolina due to an accident involving a nuclear bomb for example.
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  do we know how expensive (per unit energy) US Navy reactors are? It doesn't matter how safe they are if they are twice as expensive as renewables (plus storage / power-to-gas). Renewables (and fusion, although that's arguably a renewable) are obviously the end goal but until they can fill 100% of our energy needs the real cost comparison needs to be "the cost of nuclear" versus "the cost of fossil fuel plus the cost of the damage done by fossil fuels."