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I wonder why "extinction rebellion" types don't love nuclear power more. When it works right we have unlimited clean energy. And when it goes wrong you have a

I wonder why "extinction rebellion" types don't love nuclear power more. When it works right we have unlimited clean energy. And when it goes wrong you have a 50,000 year nature preserve.

hammock 2y ago
[flagged]
ForTheKidz 2y ago
Because we talk about the harms of radiation far more than we discuss the harms of pollution and CO2, despite the latter having orders of magnitude more health impacts. We'd have to have hundreds or maybe thousands of chernobyls a year to compete.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  If you look only at deaths yes. But radioactive contamination can lead to a lot more damage to health and nature than just deaths. As an example, Fukushima caused 1 death but its pollution was detected all the way across the Atlantic. Yet usually only deaths are factored in. And the biggest issue is that one incident can cause so much of it. Add to the fact that we tend to rely on the lowest bidder who will then inevitably cut corners to make as much of a profit for their shareholders, and accidents will happen. Also, there's proliferation risk. No, nuclear material from power plants isn't useable for nuclear bombs but it is for dirty bombs. If we do it, it should be state managed like the military. We don't let commercial parties play around with nuclear bombs. Why should they be trusted with power plants that contain a hell of a lot more nuclear material? Edit: oh and uranium mining is also pretty polluting business. I'm not saying that coal is better. But renewable certainly is. That should be the #1 goal, and the base load met by power storage. Only by nukes if there's no other way. Anyway that's my opinion as an environmental type.
  - richardw 2y ago
    And if nuclear became the default clean energy technology, it would have to be shared worldwide. Every country with the same issues, but varying levels of competence, political alignment, terror risks etc. do we want 100 000 nuclear power stations? (Edit: although maybe thorium might shift the calculation.)
  - smallmancontrov 2y ago
    Focusing on anything except damage/kWh tends to increase damage/kWh. > its pollution was detected all the way across the Atlantic Ostrich Worship -- using detection limits as a proxy for harm -- implicitly promotes damage that is difficult to quantify over damage that is easy to detect in the most minute quantities. It elevates burying your head in the sand into a principle. The fact that nuclear pollution can be detected in mind-bendingly minute quantities is a very dumb reason to be anti-nuclear. > one incident can cause so much of it Headline Bias is usually something people aim to avoid rather than celebrate. Hundreds of thousands of slip-and-fall accidents from contractors running around rooftops can't reasonably be rounded to 0 on account of being individually "boring," yet that's what you do when you focus on the biggest incident. Speaking of which, do you oppose hydro-power on the basis of the Banqiao Dam disaster? > Edit: oh and uranium mining is also pretty polluting business. Single Ended Comparisons are the root of all evil. PV cells and windmills don't pop into existence without side effects. Their big problem is that you need a lot of them to generate electricity, leading to a lot of side effects. > I'm not saying that coal is better. But renewable certainly is. It's not. Or it wasn't. I'm extremely relieved that after 50 years we finally found a low-CO2 power solution that self-styled greens don't fight tooth and nail, and on that count solar and wind are unbeatable. But we had the solution. We could have been done phasing out CO2-emitting sources if we had just kept up the pace on nuclear rollout. Instead, we have just begun. The 50 gigatons excess CO2 emissions (so far, USA only) in order to wait for solar and wind to become economical were an absolute travesty.
  - wat10000 2y ago
    Being detectable isn’t very interesting. Modern technology can detect vanishingly small concentrations of weird isotopes. No harm came to anybody on the other side of the ocean from that stuff. Now consider a pollutant like mercury. It goes far beyond being merely detectable. There’s so much mercury in the oceans that it’s unsafe to eat seafood too often. Most of that came from human activity. A huge chunk of it came from burning coal. An entire category of food poisoned planetwide!
    - defrost 2y ago
      "Detecting Fukishima" from North America was no mean feat .. it was akin to hearing the footfall of an ant several miles away. The radiometric procedure here was (IIRC) replace a large number of air filter mats in a large number of HVAC units and after a week to cycle them back and then reduce the "contaminated" mats down to samples that sat within highly sensitive high crystal volume spectrometers for 72 hours or more. The 'normal' environmental radiation event count level in 40 litres of doped Sodium Iodide scintillation Crystals (if that's what was used) at some 80m above ground level is between one and two thousand events per second. The Fukishima signature gamma events came to a few thousand in 72 hours (again, IIRC) whch had to be teased out from a flood of other events many magnitudes greater in count. Absolutely not enough to be concerned about, but a seriously interesting bit of detection work.
WorkerBee28474 2y ago
Because their stated purpose and their real intents are not aligned.
hijinks 2y ago
people have seemed to forget that there were some people in LA that use to walk outside in gas masks due to all the air pollution.
serviceberry 2y ago
Because a lot of environmental movements aren't rooted in utilitarianism, but in deeper beliefs that the endless pursuit of growth is inherently evil. The basic idea is that tigers and wolves have as much right to the planet as we do, and we've already taken too much. Hence the degrowth movement, etc. This is why many environmental activists see cheap, abundant energy as problematic. It would mean less air pollution or less climate change, but it would allow humans to "consume" more of the ecosystem. To be clear, this isn't my worldview. But as with most other movements advocating for social change, the underlying ideology is usually more complex than it appears.
- zenolijo 2y ago
  I only personally know one person who had been an active member in Extinction Rebellion and I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. It seems like they all agree that the amount of growth we have today is unsustainable, but what sustainable growth exactly is and in turn how much growth needs to be compromised is not agreed upon. So I don't believe that endless pursuit of growth is against most of their members opinion, they just have a much stricter view on what sustainable growth is (and that some degrowth might be needed to achieve sustainable growth in the long term).
  - forinti 2y ago
    The Sustainable Development Index had Cuba and Equador as the sole sustainable economies in years past. There's no way we're going to convince the middle classes of the central economies to reduce consumption to that level, or even to convince people in that class of development economy to stop aiming for more.
    - genewitch 2y ago
      > There's no way we're going to convince the middle classes of the central economies to reduce consumption to that level, or even to convince people in that class of development economy to stop aiming for more. What if there is 200% tariffs on junk they shouldn't be buying anyhow? What if a new car becomes so expensive that the idea of having to replace it in 3-5/years induces outrage and class action lawsuits? What if you were only allowed to own one residence? What if out of season foods were fantastically expensive unless you had a community "garden"? I know, HN, straight to -4. I'll meet you down there.
PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
> a 50,000 year nature preserve that begins with none of the existing lifeforms that were there beforehand.
- defrost 2y ago
  The comment spoke about nuclear power accidents; neither Three mile island, Fukishima, nor Chernobyl wiped out all (or even a significant number) of existing lifeforms. Bikini Atoll was blasted with 23 (or 24, there's an edge case) separate nuclear explosions in the air, at sea level, and underwater, one a thousand times more powerful than either of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons. Not comparable to a nuclear power station accident.
tdeck 2y ago
What is this baaed on, vibes? I don't see an official position on nuclear power from XR. All I can find is discussions like this where people discuss a diversity of views about nuclear power. https://old.reddit.com/r/ExtinctionRebellion/comments/bhah12/what_is_extinction_rebellions_views_on_nuclear/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ExtinctionRebellion/comments/bhah12... Extinction rebellion is focused on forcing politicians to take climate change seriously and make urgent policy changes. If politicians want to meet them with "we are taking this seriously, we're making a massive investment into nuclear power" they're free to do so.

I wonder why "extinction rebellion" types don't love nuclear power more. When it works right we have unlimited clean energy. And when it goes wrong you have a 50,000 year nature preserve.

hammock 2y ago

[flagged]

ForTheKidz 2y ago

Because we talk about the harms of radiation far more than we discuss the harms of pollution and CO2, despite the latter having orders of magnitude more health impacts. We'd have to have hundreds or maybe thousands of chernobyls a year to compete.

wkat4242 2y ago
If you look only at deaths yes. But radioactive contamination can lead to a lot more damage to health and nature than just deaths. As an example, Fukushima caused 1 death but its pollution was detected all the way across the Atlantic. Yet usually only deaths are factored in. And the biggest issue is that one incident can cause so much of it. Add to the fact that we tend to rely on the lowest bidder who will then inevitably cut corners to make as much of a profit for their shareholders, and accidents will happen. Also, there's proliferation risk. No, nuclear material from power plants isn't useable for nuclear bombs but it is for dirty bombs. If we do it, it should be state managed like the military. We don't let commercial parties play around with nuclear bombs. Why should they be trusted with power plants that contain a hell of a lot more nuclear material? Edit: oh and uranium mining is also pretty polluting business. I'm not saying that coal is better. But renewable certainly is. That should be the #1 goal, and the base load met by power storage. Only by nukes if there's no other way. Anyway that's my opinion as an environmental type.
- richardw 2y ago
  And if nuclear became the default clean energy technology, it would have to be shared worldwide. Every country with the same issues, but varying levels of competence, political alignment, terror risks etc. do we want 100 000 nuclear power stations? (Edit: although maybe thorium might shift the calculation.)
- smallmancontrov 2y ago
  Focusing on anything except damage/kWh tends to increase damage/kWh. > its pollution was detected all the way across the Atlantic Ostrich Worship -- using detection limits as a proxy for harm -- implicitly promotes damage that is difficult to quantify over damage that is easy to detect in the most minute quantities. It elevates burying your head in the sand into a principle. The fact that nuclear pollution can be detected in mind-bendingly minute quantities is a very dumb reason to be anti-nuclear. > one incident can cause so much of it Headline Bias is usually something people aim to avoid rather than celebrate. Hundreds of thousands of slip-and-fall accidents from contractors running around rooftops can't reasonably be rounded to 0 on account of being individually "boring," yet that's what you do when you focus on the biggest incident. Speaking of which, do you oppose hydro-power on the basis of the Banqiao Dam disaster? > Edit: oh and uranium mining is also pretty polluting business. Single Ended Comparisons are the root of all evil. PV cells and windmills don't pop into existence without side effects. Their big problem is that you need a lot of them to generate electricity, leading to a lot of side effects. > I'm not saying that coal is better. But renewable certainly is. It's not. Or it wasn't. I'm extremely relieved that after 50 years we finally found a low-CO2 power solution that self-styled greens don't fight tooth and nail, and on that count solar and wind are unbeatable. But we had the solution. We could have been done phasing out CO2-emitting sources if we had just kept up the pace on nuclear rollout. Instead, we have just begun. The 50 gigatons excess CO2 emissions (so far, USA only) in order to wait for solar and wind to become economical were an absolute travesty.
- wat10000 2y ago
  Being detectable isn’t very interesting. Modern technology can detect vanishingly small concentrations of weird isotopes. No harm came to anybody on the other side of the ocean from that stuff. Now consider a pollutant like mercury. It goes far beyond being merely detectable. There’s so much mercury in the oceans that it’s unsafe to eat seafood too often. Most of that came from human activity. A huge chunk of it came from burning coal. An entire category of food poisoned planetwide!
  - defrost 2y ago
    "Detecting Fukishima" from North America was no mean feat .. it was akin to hearing the footfall of an ant several miles away. The radiometric procedure here was (IIRC) replace a large number of air filter mats in a large number of HVAC units and after a week to cycle them back and then reduce the "contaminated" mats down to samples that sat within highly sensitive high crystal volume spectrometers for 72 hours or more. The 'normal' environmental radiation event count level in 40 litres of doped Sodium Iodide scintillation Crystals (if that's what was used) at some 80m above ground level is between one and two thousand events per second. The Fukishima signature gamma events came to a few thousand in 72 hours (again, IIRC) whch had to be teased out from a flood of other events many magnitudes greater in count. Absolutely not enough to be concerned about, but a seriously interesting bit of detection work.

WorkerBee28474 2y ago

Because their stated purpose and their real intents are not aligned.

hijinks 2y ago

people have seemed to forget that there were some people in LA that use to walk outside in gas masks due to all the air pollution.

serviceberry 2y ago

Because a lot of environmental movements aren't rooted in utilitarianism, but in deeper beliefs that the endless pursuit of growth is inherently evil. The basic idea is that tigers and wolves have as much right to the planet as we do, and we've already taken too much. Hence the degrowth movement, etc. This is why many environmental activists see cheap, abundant energy as problematic. It would mean less air pollution or less climate change, but it would allow humans to "consume" more of the ecosystem. To be clear, this isn't my worldview. But as with most other movements advocating for social change, the underlying ideology is usually more complex than it appears.

zenolijo 2y ago
I only personally know one person who had been an active member in Extinction Rebellion and I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. It seems like they all agree that the amount of growth we have today is unsustainable, but what sustainable growth exactly is and in turn how much growth needs to be compromised is not agreed upon. So I don't believe that endless pursuit of growth is against most of their members opinion, they just have a much stricter view on what sustainable growth is (and that some degrowth might be needed to achieve sustainable growth in the long term).
- forinti 2y ago
  The Sustainable Development Index had Cuba and Equador as the sole sustainable economies in years past. There's no way we're going to convince the middle classes of the central economies to reduce consumption to that level, or even to convince people in that class of development economy to stop aiming for more.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    > There's no way we're going to convince the middle classes of the central economies to reduce consumption to that level, or even to convince people in that class of development economy to stop aiming for more. What if there is 200% tariffs on junk they shouldn't be buying anyhow? What if a new car becomes so expensive that the idea of having to replace it in 3-5/years induces outrage and class action lawsuits? What if you were only allowed to own one residence? What if out of season foods were fantastically expensive unless you had a community "garden"? I know, HN, straight to -4. I'll meet you down there.

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago

> a 50,000 year nature preserve that begins with none of the existing lifeforms that were there beforehand.

defrost 2y ago
The comment spoke about nuclear power accidents; neither Three mile island, Fukishima, nor Chernobyl wiped out all (or even a significant number) of existing lifeforms. Bikini Atoll was blasted with 23 (or 24, there's an edge case) separate nuclear explosions in the air, at sea level, and underwater, one a thousand times more powerful than either of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons. Not comparable to a nuclear power station accident.

tdeck 2y ago

What is this baaed on, vibes? I don't see an official position on nuclear power from XR. All I can find is discussions like this where people discuss a diversity of views about nuclear power. https://old.reddit.com/r/ExtinctionRebellion/comments/bhah12/what_is_extinction_rebellions_views_on_nuclear/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ExtinctionRebellion/comments/bhah12... Extinction rebellion is focused on forcing politicians to take climate change seriously and make urgent policy changes. If politicians want to meet them with "we are taking this seriously, we're making a massive investment into nuclear power" they're free to do so.