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Fifty years of anti-nuclear movement has left its mark.
by Luc 4y ago
Fifty years of anti-nuclear movement has left its mark.
- tgv 4y agoIf the best retort the nuclear industry had was a Russian-Ukrainian war, then it's not so odd to see why.
- zmgsabst 4y agoActual retorts: - we don’t have the mineral supplies for other non-fossil options - nuclear has a better safety record, all in - nuclear doesn’t require we do business with cobalt slavers - nuclear can supply the base load - nuclear produces rare elements that help with advanced medicine But you can’t reason people out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into, and many people were raised in a green-washed death cult. Like most religious people, they uncritically repeat that faith and become angered if you point out the inconsistencies.
- flir 4y ago> nuclear has a better safety record, all in Better than... wind turbines? Solar panels? Hydroelectric?
- mensetmanusman 4y agoDue to installation deaths, PV has higher deaths per kWhr install: https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
- jefftk 4y agoNote that your source is specifically "rooftop solar", not solar overall.
- jefftk 4y agoThe safety profile of hydro and nukes are dominated by large rare events, which makes prediction tricky. Hydro is much less safe historically because of a single event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure Wind and solar don't have catastrophic failures, but people installing and repairing them do sometimes fall. Residential rooftop solar is especially bad here, since the deaths are divided over a relatively small amount of generation capacity. Still, overall wind and solar are safer than nukes, and data sources saying otherwise generally are using pre-Fukushima stats. More: https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy#what-are-the-safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy#what-are-the-safes...
- prottog 4y ago> data sources saying otherwise generally are using pre-Fukushima stats. I thought only one person died as a direct result of the Fukushima meltdown? And the other deaths attributed to it were due to poor handling of the people who evacuated; basically frail people dying in temporary shelters, unrelated to the nuclear aspect.
- moloch-hai 4y agoIt has always been easy to lie with statistics. The "one" figure is such a lie, easy to parrot.
- rhn_mk1 4y agoThis is a serious accusation. Show the truth.
- Arnt 4y agoThe "one" figure ignores deaths caused by evacuation SNAFUs. But if some event causes an evacuation and the evacuation has a normal number of mishaps, then that event causes those mishaps. Evacuations are rare and happen under unusual circumstances, they will suffer from SNAFUs. You can't cause an evacuation, expect that it'll go perfectly and deny any responsibility when it doesn't.
- mrob 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam
- krzyk 4y agoWind turbines are a bit loud, and there is a reason why they can't be placed near places where people leave. Hydroelectric - if it is a damn, then again, there is a possibility of the damn breaking and flooding. Solar is the real alternative, but not effective enough, yet.
- lostlogin 4y agoI think it’s ‘dam’ in this, as opposed to ‘damn’ where something is condemned.
- tpm 4y ago"- nuclear can supply the base load" Looking over the border to France, can it? The forecasted load factor for French nuclear power generation this year is 51.5% and the energy there is probably the most expensive in whole of Europe. https://mastodon.energy/@Sustainable2050/109625562357246897 https://mastodon.energy/@Sustainable2050/109625562357246897
- snehk 4y agoThe most recent (complete data) we have shows that electricity prices in France are below EU and Euro zone average: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Electricity_price_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
- tpm 4y agoThose are household prices, pretty much irrelevant in this case as they are decided by national regulators and often subsidised. Have a look at wholesale prices. Those were around 1000e/MWh between August and November: https://mobile.twitter.com/Emericdevigan/status/1609973029932601345 https://mobile.twitter.com/Emericdevigan/status/160997302993...
- rolenthedeep 4y agoI'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. Nuclear is an ideal base load provider because nuclear plants really like to run 100% of the time, only shutting down for refueling or maintenance. Which is exactly what you want to meet a demand that exists 100% of the time. If you have enough generation, nuclear is an ideal base load provider.
- tpm 4y agoThat's exactly the counterpoint I'm trying to make: a lot of French reactors were and are down "for maintenance", making it very much not the ideal base, or any, load provider. That's something we never hear from nuclear power proponents, why?
- Workaccount2 4y agoI honestly don't blame people who grew up in the shadow of Chernobyl (some literally) who are critical of nuclear. They're wrong, but I understand completely where their fear comes from.
- donny2018 4y agoThat fear could be easily dealt with by stopping unfounded anti-nuclear fearmongering and a tiny bit of education.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoNeed to keep it to a tiny bit, mind you. Lest they find out that attempts to keep attention on reactors are a diversion from the real harms.
- ethbr0 4y agoWhen you get things like "Activists have protested the arrival of [tanker LNG] acquired through fracking", during an energy crisis, it seems fair to point out that some people are just unreasonable. Environmentalism's greatest enemy has been environmentalists. Teddy Roosevelt et al. were able to get more done because they played realpolitik, and realized that getting 50% of what you want, even if you have to hold your nose at some compromises, is better than getting 100% of what you oppose. If anti-nuclear protesters were serious about ranking their worries, they'd be supporting the IAEA trying to cordon off the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station from the war ASAP.
- megaman821 4y agoSo every nuclear capable nation on Earth is ruled by this fear cabal? What else can this powerful cabal do, end world hunger or colonize the moon? If nuclear was everything it proponents claimed it to be, there would be at least one country on Earth going all in on them. Nuclear is useful in the power mix but it's value is way overstated. It is not an economical choice, if it was no amount of lobbying would stop them from being built. Coal usage did not decrease due to intense environment lobbying, but only when cheaper alternatives were available.
- microtherion 4y ago> nuclear doesn’t require we do business with cobalt slavers Uranium does not exactly get pooped out by sparkly unicorns either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_p...
- Gud 4y agoMy home country Sweden has plenty of Uranium but it is forbidden to extract it. And this is the problem for the nuclear industry - due to political road blocks, everything is unnecessarily expensive and difficult.
- geysersam 4y agoUranium mining has adverse side effects to the local environment. Few want an uranium mine in their area. You could also say: uranium mining is incredibly expensive, and we're not willing to pay the cost, so we import it from countries where the cost is paid by someone else.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Gud 4y agoIt is not banned because it’s expensive, it’s banned because of political reasons. Sweden are great with large scale mining.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoOnly the last is remotely related to reality in 2022, and existing reactors produce plenty.
- brightball 4y agoThe tail end of your post takes away from otherwise valid points IMO.
- xg15 4y ago> nuclear has a better safety record, all in If you use the pretty tortured metric "human lives lost per KWh energy produced" then yes (as of now). You know what would have an even better safety record according to that metric? Chucking the earth into the sun. > nuclear doesn’t require we do business with cobalt slavers Indeed we don't. We just ask the russians for it. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/europe-highly-dependent-russian-uranium-nuclear-power-plants-report https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/europe-highly-dependent...
- matthewdgreen 4y agoI am 100% in favor of any technology that allows us to stop emitting CO2 in a short time-frame, including nuclear. My reservation about the pro-nuclear (online) argument is that it always seems to be framed more as an excuse to "punch some hippies" than as a serious effort to calculate the cost of deploying nuclear at scale, let alone an effort to marshal political opinion to a state that would allow for any of it to happen.
- ouid 4y agoYou are the first person I have ever heard present this sentiment.
- marmetio 4y agoYeah I've never heard of it, either. I haven't even really seen hippies in the opposition. They're just normal people who, as soon as they hear the word "nuclear", panic really hard and refuse to receive any new information that would actually address their concerns.
- Arnt 4y agoTry it. Say my concern is that the relevant nuclear operators are organisationally similar to TEPCO. Give me some new information that either explains how they are different, or explains that an organisation like TEPCO is well suited to run a nuclear reactor safely.
- marmetio 4y agoYou're kind of proving my point here. Your concern is that an operator can be unsafe, which is valid and will always be true. So no, I won't argue against your contrived framing. The only true fix would be a reactor and fuel design that can't melt down. A walk-away safe design that, even if you intentionally induced the worst disaster, still wouldn't pose a real threat to the public. Then it wouldn't matter if the operator was a cartoon villain determined to destroy the city. This is the part that people still don't want to hear. They can't accept that their pet concern can be eliminated by approaching the problem differently and breaking their assumptions. They look for new concerns, but educating them doesn't help because when they run out of unaddressed concerns, they just circle back to old concerns that were already addressed. Their concern was never more than an excuse. They just want the answer to fit their preconceived notions. For nuclear to be accepted, it needs better public messaging, because ultimately people are reacting emotionally rather than thinking critically.