Good!
Anti-nuclear is like anti-GMO and anti-vax: pure ignorance, and fear of that which they don’t understand.
Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change.
We’ve had the cure for climate change all along, but fear that we’d do another Chernobyl has scared us away from it.
imagine how much farther ahead we would be in safety and efficiency if it was made priority 50 years ago.
we still have whole swathes of people who think that because its not perfect now, it cant be perfected ever.
So uh, turns out the energy companies are not exactly the most moral and rule abiding entities, and they love to pay off politicians and cut corners. How does one prevent that, as in the case of fission it has rather dire consequences?
Since you can apply that logic to everything, how can you ever build anything? Because all consequences are dire on a myopic scale, that is, if your partner dies because a single electrician cheaped out with the wiring in your building and got someone to sign off, “It’s not as bad as a nuclear disaster” isn’t exactly going to console them much.
At some point, you need to accept that making something illegal and trying to prosecute people has to be enough. For most situations. It’s not perfect. Sure. But nothing ever is. And no solution to energy is ever going to be perfect, either.
a wind mill going down and a nuclear plant blowing up have very different ramifications
Force the Board of directors to live in close proximity to the plant
I think it’s fine to think of it as imperfect, even if those imperfections can never be truly solved.
We only need nuclear to bridge the gap between now and a time when renewable CO2 neutral power sources or the holy grail of fusion are able to take the place the base load power that we currently use fossil fuels for, and with hope, that may only be a few decades away.
I heard a bit from a podcast that stuck with me:
ALL Energy is nuclear energy-
The sun is a nuclear power source.
Plants absorb that nuclear energy and whether we eat them, or eat animals that ate them, that is still energy from a nuclear source.
Some of those plants ended up rotting for millenia underground, and we dig that up, now in the form of coal, oil or natural gasses- then burn it…thats still just nuclear power.
Even the wind is nuclear power, as is its mostly caused by the uneven heating of the air by the sun, as the earth rotates, leading to the creation of higher and lower pressure areas.
The podcast (which was about solar energy- i work for a solar panel company, thats why it was on in the work van, lol) went on to say that logically, nuclear, solar, to an extent wind are therefore the best ways to ‘generate/ harvest’ power- everything else is just laundering nuclear energy through an inefficient, and usually destructive battery.
We’ve had the cure for climate change all along
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this simply isn’t true with established nuclear technologies. Expanding our currently nuclear energy production requires us to fully tap all known and speculated Uranium sources, nets us only a 6% CO2 reduction, and we run out of Uranium by 2100. We might be able to use Thorium in fuel cycles to expand our net nuclear capacity, but that technology has to yet to be proven at scale. And all of this ignores the high startup cost, regulatory difficulties, disposal challenges and weapons proliferation risks that nuclear typically presents.
That’s a big no from me dog. I barely trust the government as it is, no way I’ll trust them with nuclear power plants. And besides we have vastly better options such as solar.
I read the 2 year old headline as 'unless green peace arms itself, countries will never take the environment seriously.
Why go nuclear when renewable is so much cheaper, safer, future proof and less centralised?
Don’t get me wrong. Nuclear is better than coal and gas but it will not safe our way of life.
Just like the electric car is here to preserve the car industry not the planet, nuclear energy is still here to preserve the big energy players, not our environment.
Wind and solar > nuclear > fossil fuels
Nothing really against nuclear except how it is being weilded as a distraction from better, cleaner, energy. We need to be going all in on converting everything to wind and solar, with batteries and other power storage like water pumping facilities filling the gaps.
Nuclear needs a few more issues figured out, like how to actually cheaply build and get power from all those touted newer cleaner reactor styles.
As a bit of a “young climate activist” myself (certainly more of a jaded, realistic one) , nuclear is still a bad idea. We don’t need a overabundance of electricity, we need more sustainable energy. The last thing we should be doing as environmentalists is giving governments and capitalists more resources to weaponize- ntm more opportunities to critically fuck up our planet. Yes, nuclear energy CAN be produced totally safely. However, from a logistics standpoint this depends on keeping a number of factors in check and one has to account for the materials involved. Storage of nuclear waste is already a problem on planet earth. The U.S has bunkers full of this sludge that will kill anyone who gets close- Not to mention how unethical industry practices are when it comes to mining on a world wide scale!
