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I love Kraftwerk, but contributing to anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany hasn't been a major success. If only more European countries had followed the French exa
by ainch 5mo ago
I love Kraftwerk, but contributing to anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany hasn't been a major success. If only more European countries had followed the French example and developed substantial nuclear fleets.
- msla 5mo agoBeing against nuclear only kept the world on coal longer.
- senectus1 5mo agoonly if renewable resources are not considered an option.
- lionkor 5mo agoIt's a fact that Germany turned off nuclear and subsequently extended the lifetime of brown coal power plants (they still run). Germany has plenty of renewable energy, but that is not a replacement for a steady base supply of power yet.
- rectang 5mo agoAnd perhaps meaningfully contributed to a reduction in the quantity of radioactive waste products requiring custodianship on a timescale that humans can barely conceive of let alone commit to or execute responsibly.
- mgfist 5mo agoCoal power produces more radiation waste into the environment than nuclear power. That's because nuclear power has this amazing quality where all the waste is neatly packaged whereas burning coal just releases it into the air. > requiring custodianship on a timescale that humans can barely conceive of let alone commit to or execute responsibly. This is fearmongering. Casing waste in big concrete casks is enough. It's so incredibly overblown that we're willing to burn coal and kill people over it.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- rectang 5mo agoI distrust techno-optimist promises to manage ever-growing collections of spent nuclear fuel over millennia. We can hardly trust plant operators to manage it safely over decades. Will it actually get encased successfully, will it be stored onsite in environmentally sensitive areas because it’s too much trouble to move, will your children’s children uphold the commitments you foisted on them through the political and economic turbulence in their lifetimes, and if not what happens comparatively when those coal ash heaps and nuclear fuel dumps are left to rot… The externalities of concentrated radioactive material are not something that our socio-economic institutions are capable of handling at scale. Tragedies of the commons are the rule and eventually all of that waste will be go through periods of mishandling at one time or another.
- mgfist 5mo ago> I distrust techno-optimist promises to manage ever-growing collections of spent nuclear fuel over millennia. We can hardly trust plant operators to manage it safely over decades. Nuclear power plants have been extremely safe for many decades! Fuck, even the worst disasters related to nuclear power plants have killed less people than coal or oil disasters, even including Chernobyl which was a fuck up beyond comparison. > Will it actually get encased successfully Yes, this is literally done and has been done for many decades. > will it be stored onsite in environmentally sensitive areas because it’s too much trouble to move What does that mean? You can live 1 feet away from a cask and receive less radiation than you do from the sun. > will your children’s children uphold the commitments you foisted on them through the political and economic turbulence in their lifetimes, and if not what happens comparatively when those coal ash heaps and nuclear fuel dumps are left to rot… This is a bad argument because all of society relies on our grandchildren upholding present commitments. What happens if our grandchildren stop upholding the electricity grid? They die. What happens if they stop large scale agriculture? They die. And on and on and on. > The externalities of concentrated radioactive material are not something that our socio-economic institutions are capable of handling at scale. It's quite literally something society has been doing very successfully for 50+ years.
- acidburnNSA 5mo agoI always find this sentiment curious for 2 reasons: 1. Radioactive waste gets less toxic over time unlike many toxins like mercury, lead, and cyanide. People seem to emphasize the duration of toxicity for radiation while apparently giving 'forever toxins' a total pass. 2. Short-lived radiation is what's really dangerous. When atoms are decaying fast, they're shooting out energy that can cause real damage fast. Longer-lived radioactive stuff with billion-year half-lives like natural uranium can be held in a gloved hand, no problem. In the extreme, and infinite half life means something is stable and totally safe (radiologically at least). Yet people still want to emphasize that radioactive byproducts of nuclear power have long half lives. I don't really get it.
- cma 5mo agoThere were also big proliferation concerns out of 70s era designs.
- rectang 5mo agoI don't trust the coal industry to manage forever chemicals over the long term, and I don't trust the nuclear industry to manage spent nuclear fuel over the long term. The question that matters for both industries is what bad things happen when their stewardship inevitably lapses and the happy path dead-ends. I don't like either answer, so that heightens the urgency of pursuing alternatives with fewer long-lived hazardous byproducts. Neither coal nor nuclear is an acceptable long term solution.
- amanaplanacanal 5mo agoIt's not just coal and nuclear. We have intentionally set up our society so that the people that own and run corporations are not responsible for the long term damage they cause. They extract the profits, and when the bill comes due for what they have done to the rest of us, limited liability and bankruptcy protects them from what they have done. We did this so that people can buy stock on the market without having to take any responsibility for what they are doing. It's certainly a great funding mechanism, though.
- soperj 5mo agoCoal also produces radioactive byproducts. They just release them into the air.
- rectang 5mo agoBrazil nuts and bananas are radioactive too, compared to other foods — but do not pose risks compared to coal ash. Similarly, while coal ash is nasty stuff that kills lots of people, it lacks many of the qualities that make spent nuclear fuel especially difficult to manage even in small amounts. For example, a “dirty bomb” made by packing coal ash around conventional explosives would be far less effective than one made from spent nuclear fuel.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- pepa65 5mo agoWhat do you mean by "nuclear fleets"??
- acidburnNSA 5mo agoThis is often used within the industry to mean many dozens of commercial nuclear power plants.
- kingleopold 5mo agocoal kills more people, this is a fact. so with blocking nuclear lead to coal, so they indirectly supportered killing thousands, incredible stats really. who said art can't be bad for the public?
- kev009 5mo agoA hidden danger of coal is ironically the radioactivity of its waste, which gets put into concrete products and contribute to indoor air quality issues. The paranoia around nuclear power is tied to generational fear mongering of governments during the Cold War. The oddest part is why not use safer reactor designs; water reactors make sense for the US Navy and not on land.
- mejutoco 5mo ago> The paranoia around nuclear power is tied to generational fear mongering of governments during the Cold War And Chernobyl. And Fukushima. Nuclear is great but it has some very real risks
- ndsipa_pomu 5mo agoDon't forget Windscale and Three Mile Island
- butlike 5mo agoNuclear won't be ready until fusion (so if ever). The only safe nuclear is when the byproduct is helium
- amanaplanacanal 5mo agoJust for curiosity, are there proposed fusion reactor designs that don't create nuclear waste? I haven't followed what's going on in that space at all.
- butlike 5mo ago
- 01100011 5mo agoLike most backward looking judgements these days, such things require understanding the culture and zeitgeist of the mid 70s. I'm pro-nuclear as well, but understand that for many decades the "smart" thing to do was to oppose it. I wouldn't expect a musical artist to have a more nuanced opinion than most of their contemporaries.
- colechristensen 5mo agoIt was largely our own governments wanting to scare us of nukes so we'd be scared of the Soviets, like in America with the schoolchildren doing duck and cover drills. Having enemies the population is afraid of is good for politicians and they'll take any enemies they can find, and they'll do so indiscriminately regardless of the real nuance of the issues. Immigrants, abortion, this religion or that, rock music, jazz music, alcohol, marijuana, global warming, windmills, books... just whatever as hard as they can regardless of if it's reasonable or not.
- 01100011 5mo agoI think it came from peaceniks and hippies mostly. You're talking about the equivalent of modern anti-vax liberals. Anti-science and given to conspiracies and mysticism. There was a pretty good reason to be scared of nukes when these folks were children in the 50s. The world was quite a different place back then. The US was lagging behind the Soviets, militarily speaking, and Communism was much more expansionary.
- happymellon 5mo ago> anti-vax liberals Just a small correction, but the anti-vax arguments are very conservative, not liberal.
- secretsatan 5mo agoThere is undeniably a middle class anti vax wellness leftist movement whether it was originally conservative or not, unfortunately.
- Tepix 5mo agoI, for one, am glad we don‘t have yet another 2600 square kilometers exclusion zone in densely populated Germany, like the one around Chernobyl.
- Rygian 5mo agoI'm glad we don't have exclusion zones like that one in France either.
- boshomi 5mo agoNuclear power has been killed off by economic forces; there’s no turning back. Solar and wind power generate cheap electricity in abundance, and midday electricity prices in Europe regularly dip into negative territory (as low as minus €500 (sic!) on May 1!). Modern grids do not require high-risk investments in ultra-inert baseload power that ultimately fails to find a market; instead, they require low-risk investments in highly flexible power sources, such as batteries or pumped-storage facilities and transmission upgrades, that can capture surplus electricity at low cost (sometimes negativ) and sell it hours later at favorable prices. The 2036 electricity futures price for Germany is €70/MWh. The break-even point for France’s EDF for old nuclear power plants that had long since been written off financially was at roughly the same level in 2020. Due to rising labor costs, their break-even point is now significantly higher. There were solid economic reasons why EDF was recently nationalized 100%. New nuclear power plant construction in France is a foreseeable economic disaster. Private investors would have fled long ago.
- Gud 5mo agoNuclear power has been amazing for my native country Sweden and I do not believe for a nanosecond that there were “economic forces” that shut down many of our operational nuclear plants. It was political lunacy, in Sweden and Germany and many other countries.
- pjc50 5mo agoI take a center position on this: every year new nuclear looks worse economically, but that's not a good reason to shut down already operating plants. The safety issues .. I think the combination of low probability (unknown) and potentially huge cost (Chernobyl affected almost the entirety of Europe!) make it exceptionally prone to toxic discourse. You just can't assign reliable numbers to it. There's a risk of ending up with a Space Shuttle situation, where because a disaster would be so bad everyone in the chain downplays the risk until an O-ring explodes. Maybe we can try SMRs once they're actually in production, but somewhere else can try them first on their own expense.
- 5mo ago
- pjmlp 5mo agoI just saw the Fukushima documentary over the weekend, no thanks.
- RobotToaster 5mo agoFukushima only killed one person https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-chernobyl-and-fukushima https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...
- pjmlp 5mo ago"No one died directly from the disaster. However, 40 to 50 people were injured as a result of physical injury from the blast, or radiation burns." Selective view of the victims?
- lionkor 5mo agoBrown coal power kills that many people in a good year directly, not mentioning the long term health effects of exposure to brown coal smoke (even if filtered).
- pjmlp 5mo agoYeah people are sniffing lines of coal. /s
- lionkor 5mo agoLol, but really coal power plants are more dangerous work environments, coal mining as well, and then of course there's the pollution (which, opposed to nuclear, isn't bottled up and stored, and instead just exhausted).
- Tangurena2 5mo agoBased on the number of coal license plates here in KY, yes, they sure do sniff lines of coal. https://secure2.kentucky.gov/kytc/plates/web/LicensePlate/Index/c1a92e2e-4843-45d1-88fc-cf2ca26ca621#plateAnchor https://secure2.kentucky.gov/kytc/plates/web/LicensePlate/In... One almost never sees any of the other 11 black license plates. I do expect that to change as the new (black) firefighter license plates replace the old red ones.
- wolfi1 5mo agonuclear is only cheap, if taxpayers pay for it, if all costs would be considered, nuclear is not cheap
- aa-jv 5mo agoKraftwerk killed nuclear power (Radio-Activity) and promoted petroleum consumption (Autobahn), like the true factory-idol industrialists they are ...
- rob74 5mo agoI think you're slightly overestimating their influence there... my theory is that they addressed all of these topics (along with others like robots, high speed trains and models) simply because they sounded cool and/or futuristic and fit their futuristic music. The article mentions that Radio-Activity only became an anti-nuclear song in the 1991 re-release.
- stefantalpalaru 5mo ago[dead]