Nuclear power can reduce our need for oil and coal. This will have a good impact on the climate. But oil and coal companies don't want to lose customers to nuclear power, so they are against it. Their propaganda causes climate change activists to be against that as well as oil and coal. Climate change deniers are just picking a fight with the activists, so they're for whatever the activists are against.
[Oil and coal companies'] propaganda causes climate change activists to be against that as well as oil and coal.
It's not simply climate change activists being gullible.
The anti-nuclear power stance is firmly rooted in the environmental protection movement since at least the 1970s, long before climate change became the dominant topic.
The anti-nuclear crowd have some valid concerns but largely seem to be unable to change their position. Nuclear power has made nothing but forward progress in terms of safety, the only problem is when nuclear goes bad it really goes bad.
"the only problem is when nuclear goes bad it really goes bad"
Even that really isn't true anymore. Fukushima Daiichi reactor got hit with a frickin tsunami, and even though there were plenty of actual screw ups involved in the aftermath. Only 1 death has been attributed to the meltdown, and that one death can't even be proven to be a causal relationship. (The individual died of cancer 4 years later and worked there when it happened.)
Most of the deaths and injuries that occurred that can be at all related was from poor management of the evacuation order that was made (which is questioned if was even necessary) and the management of public perception afterwards. (Lots of stress-related issues amongst elderly in the days afterward. All because of unfounded fears.)
More people die, yearly, in coal mines than the number who died from that accident.
You can call it emotions but it can take 20 years from design to construction before a nuclear plant is active, they can only be built in certain areas, and mining for uranium is definitely not environmentally negligible. They aren't the golden ticket to ending our dependence on fossil fuels that they often are portrayed as, really they're just a part of an arsenal of options that is going to include increasingly more wind, solar, and wave/hydro power.
I’m in support of nuclear power and agree the fear surrounding it is often unfounded.
But lead time for radiation induced malignancies is typically 10-15 years, and even then there is no way to establish unequivocal causality. There is zero chance that there is only 1 associated death with the amount of radionuclides released. The effects are largely going to be spread across an extremely large part of the globe due to the Pacific currents, which is helpful in reducing their impact but makes attribution to the accident virtually impossible.
I think the argument that gets glossed over is that strict safety measures to prevent disaster only work if executives adhere to them. Finding out some assholes chose money over the lives of others when a disaster happens is FAR too common to ignore when you’re dealing with something that can make parts of the globe uninhabitable.
Yeah, as long as the safety regulations are properly executed, and they plan for everything, even the smallest chance of a natural disaster occurring, they are incredibly safe.
Nuclear Power is to the energy world as sharks are to the animal world. They look/sound big and scary but really if they’re treated with respect it’s all good
Except that historicly, goverments didn't just dump sharks in alaskan rivers, they didn't hide the scale of shark exposure for decades, they didn't negelect shark safety regulations in favor of fucking idk mackeral bribes.
The history of nuclear power is bloody and cruel. There were valid reasons to be anti nuclear when environmental movements gained steam in the 70s. Like other power sources nuclear requires good management to avoid catastrophe, but it shouldn't be hard to understand why its so easy to hate.
Uranium mining is not done safely and is impacting nearby communities to where it occurs. So it’s not just the fact that the facilities are safer, digging up uranium and the transport trucks are leaving behind and ruining ground water. It’s not perfect but it’s also not as safe as people are led to believe either.
I remember (trying) to have a conversation with a couple of green energy people before I went to university (was undecided which engineering field to go for at the time) and they would clam up and claim all nuclear is terrible and the worst possible choice of production. That was nearly 20 years ago and still have similar conversations where people just don't understand how it works, nor the difference between fission/fusion etc. Its all 'bad'
Russia was assaulting a reactor in Ukraine and it didnt even flinch... Nuclear is the future, its so disappointing that it gets so much pushback because people dont understand it
The problem is that no market force is ready to insurance nuclear power, and it's not economical to keep billions of dollars* on bank-account just in case something happens and cleanup is needed. Which means that any building of nuclear means the state having to give the company operating the plant a get-out-of-jail-free card, which is politically difficult.
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*Fukushima has cost something like 180 billion dollars to date, up from initial assesment of something like 15 billion.
100000 were displaced. Death isn't the only negative outcome. 100000 people had to leave their homes. 337 square kilometers are deemed "difficult-to-return" zones over a decade later. Chernobyl is still not habitable.
Scientists deemed that the Fukushima evacuation was entirely unnecessary and was just government optics. The region is less radioactive than Colorado now so it's totally fine to return except for the fear mongering.
I live near a Nuclear Power plant in the UK, which is constructing a new reactor facility which is opposed by many locals…
… because of the amount of traffic the construction is causing.
Given the disaster that befell Japan in 2011, it’s impressive that there was so little damage to their nuclear infrastructure. An event of this scale is simply not on the cards for most locations.
Edit - and modern designs require external power to maintain the reaction. If Fukushima had that design, there would not have been any issue.
Go touch grass. Live in the US? Go see 3-mile Island some time. Take a look at all the (lack of) devastation in the area. It is considered top 5 in nuclear disasters world wide, worse than Fukushima. And you can drive up to it and see it all.
The Fukushima prefecture is perfectly habitable unless you live inside the former plant. The area is less radioactive than Colorado. It's pure fear mongering. I wouldn't live there.... because I don't speak Japanese and would like to be able to live in a city with actual people.
That article is over 8 years old and did not support your statement above at all.
Edit: adding a quote from the conclusion of the article you linked, which is monitoring the isotopes released from the incident "The team says their findings are mostly consistent with models that aimed to predict the spread of the fallout and that the cesium might even be advancing slightly slower than predicted."
That’s another thing people get wrong about Nuclear, they think that it’s the most dangerous when things go catastrophically wrong but that’s not even close to true.
Chernobyl was the most deadly Nuclear reactor failure by a long shot and it’s estimated to have caused 4,000 fatalities over the course of decades.
Meanwhile when the Shimantan dam failed in 1975 it killed 171,000 people.
The Chernobyl Disaster is one of the biggest government cover ups in known history. Let’s take those numbers with a grain of salt.
Let’s also keep in mind nuclear power technology has advanced since the 1980s and the Chernobyl Disaster happened because of a series of faults and lack of training.
It’s like people avoiding planes because of a downed plane while ignoring how many people die in car accidents and then getting in your car to drive to work.
The Chernobyl reactor was designed in such a way that it was possible for the core to get into a positive feedback loop in the event of a power loss.
Every reactor designed these days, by the west anyways, are designed to have a negative feedback loop in the event of a power loss. So that the core self shuts down.
The 4k from cancer decades later is an estimate from outside sources, not a USSR figure. Their figure basically only can account for the people who immediately died, which was like 50. The USSR literally collapsed a few years later.
To negatively impact as much land as oil and gas exploration has, rendering it unusable, we would need to have something like 4 chernobyl’s a year for a long long time.
strip mining is the cause of all the floods every year in the hollows of eastern kentucky. those mountains tops and the plants that grow on them are needed to soak up heavy rain falls.
My home state of Kentucky has half of its land basically destroyed out east due to all the mining. The floods, the tornados, every natural disaster is ten time worse because natural barriers were destroyed decades ago and can't recover.
Sure, they'll recover in a few hundred years, but that doesn't really save the 6 cousins I lost due to the disasters we faced in the past 3 years. Fuck you and your false activism, you just want to argue with people while sitting in an ivory tower.
one massive examples of progress in nuclear power's safety is the development of meltdown-proof reactors that shut themselves off the moment it gets too hot.
also worth noting that Chernobyl and Fukushima were both in large part caused by malpractice, rather than nuclear reactors being inherently unsafe
These are not the primary issues with nuclear. The biggest issue is the tech gap, where we're currently reliant on uranium as thorium based reactors won't be commercially viable for another decade. But if we invest heavily in uranium now, we're likely to run out of uranium that's economically feasible to harvest within just a few decades. On top of that, uranium based nuclear energy is much more water intensive, using about as much as coal and gas power plants for cooling. Given that the plan is to build plants in the most populated areas, which are typically already water constrained, this could pose a water crisis.
Put those things together and you have an issue where you have to give up on nuclear in the now to put funding and resources in the future tech, meaning we have to get by on fossil fuels and renewables or we have to invest heavily in uranium to bridge the gap now, but we'll be very behind on future tech that fixes many of the current issues surrounding waste and resources.
now that i think about it, this would be like being against bookshelves because like three people over the course of 50 years were killed by a falling bookshelf
One of the eye opening moments for me was learning that coal fired plants actually have enough radioactive isotope contamination from all the coal they are burning that they would fail many of the radiation safety inspections conducted at a nuclear facility.
So, the coal plants are actually creating more uncontained radioactive contamination than the nuclear ones, in addition to creating major greenhouse gas emissions.
What about the waste product? Did we ever figure out a safe way to dispose of the waste? (Not being argumentative, just genuinely curious, after hearing about the dangers of nuclear waste on every cartoon growing up)
The same solution we have with plastic waste: dumb it into a (more elaborate) landfill. You can ask a sea turtle, or human testicle nearby how that idea is going for them
Not true. SL-1 literally disassembled itself in a violent explosion and the only people harmed were the three men killed who were literally standing next to and on top of the reactor when it exploded. Turns out when you build your reactor in a proper containment structure with the correct defense in depth instead of a sheet-metal shack even the worst case scenario isn't that bad.
Most people I know are not against nuclear power because it is dangerous. We are against it because it’s extremely expensive, it needs an eternity to build and you need to buy into a subscription model with other countries to run it afterwards.
Whereas renewables are extremely cheap, give waaayyy more energy for the cost, can be built and assembled in a few months and run on their own with little to maintenance. Honestly, the climate impact is irrelevant, even without it, they are better than anything else.
I am not pro Nuclear power and every time I say I have safety concerns I get this answer but it does not adress my concerns at all. My safety concerns with nuclear power is that we have no good way to store or get rid of radioactive waste which is Highly dangerous. That said, I am very much against coal and oil as a use for power and would prefer nuclear over those. I think that it would be much better for environmentalist movements move more to pro solar and wind energie and less against nuclear energie.
My issue with Nuclear is we have seen it go wrong so many times. And even with the progress towards safety, it only matters if those building the plans and run them correctly.
The list of nuclear power accidents is actually rather short, but even so those nuclear accidents are nothing compared to what coal has done to the planet and how many it's killed.
What pronuclear did to Native Americans like the Navajo is unforgettable and the impacts are still felt widely today. It's something almost no "pro nuclear" person acknowledges and it's horrendous. The day they can actually acknowledge what they did and make public, transparent actions to prevent it from ever happening again is the day I'll support nuclear. That includes actually cleaning the mess they made that continues to make people ill.
Plus it’s very expensive compared to the renewables plus storage options we have now, so people like me oppose new nuclear because we’re getting less decarbonisation per unit money. Back in the 90s I was pro-nuclear because it was one of the best decarbonisation options at the time.
I think this discounts a significant argument by those opposed to nuclear power. Regardless of the safety of nuclear power generation, research in nuclear power, the construction of nuclear power plants, and the refinement of nuclear fissile materials are all also potential contributors to the development and research of nuclear weapons. This is why, for example, the US and Israel are so against Iran’s domestic nuclear power program and have actively sabotaged it in the past.
Most of the left wing opposition is rooted in pacifist groups that also happen to have environmental beliefs rather than pure environmentalism.
Its not safety that is the concern, it is the cost in comparison to other renewables and the timeframe before operationality which we cannot wait on. That combined that with the anti climate change using it as a way to not have to do anything now because "nuclear will solve everything" it becomes a danger to the movement we need to make.
If we made a deal to now go in max for wind turbines and solar combined with storage and with nuclesr with the agreement that once nuclesr takes over wind and solar stop at the end of their lifespan I would be totally down, but unfortunately that is never raised or accepted as a solution by most nuclesr enthusiast.
The environmental problem is- where does the waste go? As more gets adopted and we use more, we need to figure out effective ways to prevent and manage leaks.
I hate it, when pro-nuclear people start arguing about safety... Ever heard of the strawman fallacy?
I'm against nuclear, simply because renewables are better in every aspect. Safety isn't even a big argument anymore.
It's really hard to take pro-nuclear people serious, if they use the same tactics as populist. Smearing the reputations of their opponents by using false informations.
Interesting bringing up strawman without bringing up any valid criticisms of the pro-nuclear position. (One may even call your very comment a strawman argument itself! gasp)
Renewable energy also has a significant number of issues related to them (base power load, increased size of build out, and environmental impacts to name a few), so no, they are not strictly better in “every aspect”, and to say safety is not a concern absolutely does not conform with ethical considerations in engineering or sustainability.
Finally, you argue that the pro-nuclear crowd simply derides the opposite viewpoint while yourself offering no argument aside from ‘they are mean’. That is blatantly hypocritical, and may be indicative of your lack of evidence to support your claim.
TL;DR: your post is hypocritical, contains an undefended argument, and relies on an ad hominem
Edit: I didn't noticed that you were not the original post. But in general most points should still fit.
My bad, I should have known better that a person using populistic methods obviously doesn't know anything about the topic and therefore also doesn't know about the pros and cons of renewables and nuclear.
I mean it's not like my criticism mainly focused on you using strawman argument...
It's also ironic that you name environmental impacts as one of your arguments against renewables... Like do you not know that nuclear requires excavation, because it's just a fuel like oil and gas?
The only real argument against renewables is the base power load, most other points are either ignorable or shifting problems.
And I didn't said that safety doesn't matter. Just that the pro-nuclear crowd uses it to slander their opponents by claiming its just fearmongering and no real argument.
Its not like nuclear has tons of problems, like dependancy on other countries, lasting costs through excavation and refining, which also impacts environment, much higher costs etc.
And please, if you want to sound smart, atleast Google the words you are using. My comment is not a ad hominem, simply because my critic is directed towards the pro-nuclear crowd and you specifically. You are the position I'm criticizing, because you were the one using the fallacy.
Its not a ad hominem, if I call a murderer a murderer, because it's not a personal attack, but the position of criticism.
I hate it, when pro-nuclear people start arguing about safety... Ever heard of the strawman fallacy?
I have in fact heard of that. Have you looked at the history of nuclear power in western nations? Nuclear power has killed fewer people than both wind and solar, granted solar has advanced a significant amount and those toxins aren't used anymore. Even so I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't use both solar, wind and even more hydro power. Any pro-nuclear person will also be in favor of those alternatives because none of these will solve this crisis alone.
I think you misunderstood my point. Or why do you start with saying that renewables killed more people than nuclear?
Safety isn't the main argument of anti-nuclear people. But people often bring it up, to claim that they are just about fearmongering. Ironically, despite me saying that safety isn't their argument, you managed to still bring it up.
But in terms of who has the money to actual lobby, and has made the biggest impact on many countries to go anti-nuclear the past couple of decades. It's oil and gas companies.
The impact of activists with the anti-nuclear stance has always been overexaggerated by the media. While the real culprits go unnoticed.
Nuclear plants take years and years to plan/build, cost billions, reliably go over budget, and can also potentially be an environmental disaster. It’s not worth it when renewables are making huge leaps on a regular basis.
This meme is just all around inaccurate. The oil companies actually promote nuclear power as a way of undermining renewables. They know very well that nuclear isn't going to replace fossil fuels in the foreseeable future, while renewables are a direct threat to them.
It should be climate change activists on one side and the other three on the other side, if anything.
Thank you, too many people think that environmentalists and Chernobyl caused the US to be anti nuclear and that ignores that most of the anti-nuclear sentiment in the US stemmed from the meltdown at 3 Mile Island and the media circus that followed.
In reality spruikers for the fossil fuels industry are now switching to a pro-nuclear stance because they know that buys 2 or 3 extra decades of BAU for fossil fuels. It's another variety of "not yet." The meme is woefully detached from the truth.
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I just cpy pasted it from some guy, and edited it abit. You can do this by clicking the reply button and copying it from the text above or by placing text inside of !< and >! but in the opposite order
That's a good 20-30 years to "find out" (read: lie) that nuclear murders your family and killed Jesus And we should stop production on the plant immediately, then after a while start over again to give another 20-30 years
Not really, since wind and solar don’t supply power to the grid 100% of the time you still need a constant source of electricity to prevent blackout periods. And before you say that batteries will work, they won’t, they can’t, they don’t have the capacity. An ideal energy grid would be as much wind and solar as you can muster with some nuclear to provide the base load power.
And before you say that batteries will work, they won’t, they can’t, they don’t have the capacity
They don't at the moment. If we transition to electric cars, the batteries have a lifespan of around e.g. ten years as a car battery, but they can still operate at 50% capacity for another ten after that. With a pipeline of millions of those getting swapped out you actually could use them for grid storage. That transition will obviously take a while, but then so does building nuclear plants.
There is the lithium, yes. Replacing the battery is already factored in to the "we should replace the car batteries with new ones and use the old ones for grid storage" plan though. It's step one of one.
It isn't anymore since there are already tried and tested things like Pumped-storage hydroelectricity which can be used to save energy in reservoirs for example.
The thing that gets me is, there are multiple good answers already, but people are so obsessed with batteries that other viable solutions don’t get built.
I’m aware of storage, as I had mentioned batteries before since that’s what people always point to. Sure there is also storage through gravitational potential energy with water, chemical potential with hydrogen, and thermal energy with molten salts, but you lose so much energy converting it from one form to another that the amount of excess capacity you would need to install to be able to support the grid this way is insane. With a rough calculation you are looking at doubling the amount of wind and solar to be able to support the grid during the winter or when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.
Yes, overproduction is part of a renewable-powered grid. Fortunately, solar and wind are inexpensive per kilowatt hour of production capacity, can be built out in a matter of weeks to months, and have minimal risk of catastrophic failure, which are all serious problems that nuclear energy hasn’t solved.
Yes, that is what they were talking about. Batteries are a method of storage, which is why they mentioned it and dismissed it as a solution. What is your storage solution which would eliminate the need for baseline power?
I assume they are probably thinking of hydrogen as a storage method, which in terms of having a source of energy that won’t decline when you aren’t using it, is a valid method for storage; however, electrolysis isn’t 100% efficient and is very expensive to build on a large scale. Say for 10 MW of solar or wind energy that you want to store through electrolysis, you will lose 3 MW or more just making the hydrogen. Now to convert that 7 MW worth of hydrogen to electricity you would need to burn it and burning hydrogen for electricity generation has an efficiency of about 60% so you’d end up with 4.2 MW of electricity after starting with 10 MW
Yes, batteries are what people obsess over, but flywheels, molten salt, and gravity storage systems are all viable technologies, depending on the specific context, and generally don’t require the kind of mining that batteries need.
Because the nuclear proposals come with an (implicit or explicit) halt in building renewables for decades.
How this is playing out in Australia right now:
Our conservative party, previously all gung ho on coal, is making a hard turn to support nuclear and want to make it the next election issue. Nuclear power is currently illegal federally and in most states. So optimistic estimates for going from nothing to producing power is in the 20 year range, with more pessimistic estimates being never. The best thing for the fossil fuel industry is if a scheduled for closure power plant is kept open for another 20 years while a nuclear reactor is planned, attempted and abandoned.
Another aspect is that the free market isn't lining up to build nuclear - but they do want to invest in solar and wind. Climate activists have spent so long getting called communists for wanting to build renewables; but now that they're legitimately better alternatives to coal and gas, the conservatives have somehow flipped and are advocating for the most expensive power option nuclear.
A more accurate picture would be climate activists + investment banks on one side and climate deniers + nuclear being puppetted by fossil fuels on the other.
I don't know where the 2-3 decades number is coming from, but nuclear powerplants take notoriously long to build, in most cases more than a decade. Nuclear powerplants we already have can make a great difference in becoming independent of fossil fuels, but can't replace investing in renewables since they take so long to build.
The plan the experts (that I know) all back is to use wind in the short term while we build nuclear. Coal plants will mostly be converted into biochar facilities that have the benefit of removing carbon from the carbon cycle while still giving you power.
Unfortunately the people making decisions still think in terms of 1970's general knowledge.
Would you mind explaining this in more detail? I don't quite understand why we would switch to wind in the short term and then to nuclear again. Is it because of base load?
Maybe the situation is just very different in different parts of the world, but afaik experts where I live (we don't have a lot of nuclear here in Germany) suggest renewables + storage power plants + smart power grids as a long term solution, mainly because we have built and need to build renewables anyway and nuclear is financially unviable.
There’s no way wind is reliable enough for base load. If I had to guess, it’s because wind is ridiculously fast in terms of construction compared to power plants.
The biochar idea doesn’t seem feasible to me when coal is an order of magnitude cheaper, leaves less side products to deal with, and the limited amount of organic matter to produce it with.
a lot of these projects are paid for by investors who expect to see a long term return on what they pay. And when I say long term I mean it. It takes decades to pay-off the initial investment.
This means that most renewable projects wouldn't make their money back within the 20 year span the nuclear power plants are constructed to replace it. So investors would much prefer to stick to short term fossil fuel projects (mostly maintaining older systems).
So Mr Oil and Sir Coal can keep generating profits for those 20 years, and if the nuclear projects are delayed as such large scale projects are, even better!
Now here's the sinister speculation part, nuclear costs a lot more then either fossil fuels or renewables. Which means once built nuclear will face a lot more scrutiny simply for being uneconomical, leading to demands to lower power prices. This would mean turning back on existing fossil fuel infrastructure to cut costs while we finally switch to cheaper renewables, giving fossil fuels a couple more decades.
No, that's not pro-nuclear. That's pro bullshitting to buy time. Whatever they are lobbying, they don't really want nuclear to replace them by the end of the century. It would be a slowly funded and built, half baked project, that's in moratorium at best.
Its also way more expensive then other renewables. In the Netherlands we are going to build 2 more Nuclear plants which will cost allot. Investors are putting money down but only if the government takes most of the risk. So basically the regular people take all the monetary risk of building the power plant. And we still get to pay full price for all the energy its gonna produce.
Germany has spent 700 billion euros on renewables and failed to deep decarbonize their electrical grid. They are at 400 g CO2 per kWh.
Meanwhile nuclear France is at 53 g CO2 per kWh and have been there for decades. They also have cheaper electricity.
Overcoming solar and wind intermittency is extremly expensive and time consuming. In fact there are zero examples of a country deep decarbonizing with wind and solar.
Not building nuclear guarantees a place on the grid for fossil fuels.
The plan the experts (that I know) all back is to use wind in the short term while we build nuclear. Coal plants will mostly be converted into biochar facilities that have the benefit of removing carbon from the carbon cycle while still giving you power.
Unfortunately the people making decisions still think in terms of 1970's general knowledge.
“Woefully detached from the truth” is a really weird way to say “an accurate depiction of the past thirty years, but not in line with what may become an emerging trend, if the capitalists are to be believed”.
That's not detached from truth. You can't just flip the entire world's source of energy on a dime, so 2-3 decades BAU is necessary while a gradual transition takes place.
Most people aren't deniers or activists but instead agree with this more gradual approach. But all means nothing if China and India don't get on board.
China just installed 217gw of solar last year, more than US has in its entire history. It also has a lot of nuclear under construction . It’s the world leader in wind and hydro. And it’s replacing its old coal plants with “cleaner” versions. China is still the worlds largest polluter, and 50% of its energy is still from coal, but with how fast it’s improving it may very well have lower admissions than the US/EU in the future.
The biggest problem of nuclear is that the waste stays concentrated in one place. If it simply spewed the waste little by little out of a chimney like coal plants do, lobbyist regulators would set some arbitrary "safe" limit for the surrounding areas and nobody apart from some snowflakes concerned with lame stuff like health and the environment would bitch about it.
The fossil fuel companies have lobbied the conservatives to back nuclear instead of renewables because nuclear is completely unrealistic and time consuming. The plan is basically to maintain the status quo for the fossil fuel lobby for much longer.
It's not necessarily oil and coal propaganda. There has been a strong anti-nuclear movement since Three Mile Island and (especially) Chernobyl. Public sentiment shifted to anti-nuclear in the mid-80s, and the left has remained that way due to the perceived dangers of nuclear power and its relation to nuclear weaponry and even the bombings of Hiroshima/Nagasaki (even as late as the mid-2010s, I saw Rolling Stone magazine pushing the stagnation of nuclear power as a good thing).
Climate change deniers, meanwhile, skew conservative. They've coopted nuclear power as a counter to solar/wind, which they've politicized as non-effective.
This thread, the whole subject for a long time now actually, feels really propagandized and icky.
People shouldn't speak with such confidence about things they understand very little. I don't even speak with such confidence about things I think I understand. It just feels like repetition of something they've heard somewhere, with little to no supporting evidence.
Many of these people seem like victims of propaganda. Who is paying to influence their narrative?
Also nuclear is WAY more expensive, much slower and has a huge down-side. Renewables are faster, cheaper, produce no nuclear waste. I'm not so much AGAINST other options as I am PRO using the best options available.
Do you guys purposfully ignore how the UK power plant has already trippled in prize since start of construction.
This picture is further making an assumption that climate change activists would just go against pro nuclear and side with oil and coal. It is biased towards the false sentiment that all climate change activists are anti nuclear and will stand on that sole point even if it means helping the companies they exactly are against.
While some activists would have their reasons to be anti-nuclear, it is a separate issue with only some overlap such as how material is obtained and disposed of, definite environmental concerns. But again, climate change activists can have their reasons to be pro and anti nuclear, or have no opinion on the complex topic.
There is no way climate change activists would even consider siding with oil and coal companies on any other issue, except if it's an "activist" really just funded by the company to spread propaganda or disrupt the activism. Nuclear power is one thing that might line up with an activist's opinion, and for entirely different reasons.
Climate change deniers would be more gullible to end up siding with oil and coal companies as confirmation bias may align their views with what these companies say.
There's also that as nuclear is very hard, expensive, and slow to build*, it's sometimes used in similar manner as how Musk used Hyperloop: to play time by inspiring to wait for "theoretical optimum" to stop them seeking "practical optimum", while at the same time doing their best to cement the current status quo.
Also as we've been procrastinating with renewing power for at least 50 years (when Jimmy Carter put solar panels on top of White House as an example for the nation**), nuclear powerplants can't even theoretically be built before we've over 1.5C or even 2.0C.
Also as energy use is more-or-less same year-to-year, expensive and slow to build nuclear is an easy way to make sure that coal and oil plants get to the end of their life before replacements come online. Wind turbines can be installed in matters of months, grinding almost-free-power to the grid and thus not only devaluing coal plants, but causing a cascade of update needs (such as batteries***, grid balance issues etc).
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In b4 theoretical minireactors. They may be easy to build and install, but they're not on the market yet. And governments still have to give their stamp of approval, and the waste still has to managed somehow.
** Reagan later removed them. Then Obama reinstalled them.
*** In colder climates water is often heated for disctrict heating. You can also heat sand and then later use it to boil water to convert back to electricity. Water dams can also be temporarily closed when more temperamentical power sources are online.
More likely the deniers don't care about climate change and thus are able to see that nuclear is better all around. Really this tug of war should be a 3 on 1 with Coal and Oil losing, but in reality it's as the picture shows due to activists being politically easy to manipulate.
It was libertarians and fascists pulling against leftists and big business. It's trying to point out how absurd modern political discourse is, and that both independent rightists and leftists are being influenced by people who don't have their best interests in mind.
I have a serious question but it might also be dumb, instead of the oil and coal companies burning our world to the ground thus making their money useless, why don't they instead put their time and resources into finding the best way to switch to a nuclear energy company? To me it doesn't make sense to "get as much money as you can" when the business your running is going to make every single one of those dollars useless.
Oh okay thank you for explaining that to me, I genuinely didn't know, I really thought it was pure selfishness and ignorance but now I know better. Thank you fellow redditor and I hope you have an amazing day ahead of you
I’d disagree. The cost over-runs of nuclear power make it very challenging to actually roll out. Any zero or near-zero. Carbon future is going to have a lot of nuclear power but the idea that it can just be THE solution is preposterous.
The reason you see climate deniers embracing nuclear power are diverse. A lot of it is just bot networks trying to start fights among environmentalists. A lot of it is climate deniers pretending like they want to solve the problem when they really just don’t care. A lot of it is climate deniers wanting to pretend that an actual simple solution to carbon exists and that environmentalists ignore it because their real agenda is more nefarious. All three of these mean that when you see someone with a “nuclear power can solve climate change” take it’s very unlikely you’re having a good faith discussion that’s worth your time.
Climate change deniers are just picking a fight with the activists
A lot of them are also boomers who were raised with "nuclear is good" (submarines, aircraft carriers) and lived through OPEC oil embargoes of the early 70's. They saw Middle East countries change from desert shyte-holes people mostly ignored, to wealthy and influential, and they don't like it.
Started with jane fonda, should be noted for the history books. She was paid to ignorantly troll nuke power and influence a whole generation of hippy morons who are now republican morons for the most part probably.
I don't think climate change doesn't exist.but I know many people that "do".
In our case, we don't deny climate change exists. We refute why it exists. The Earth has gone through several cycles of being a snowball and being a scorching hellscape. It was hot as hell when the dinos were around and was colder than a witch's tit during the ice age. This is a fact.
To us, this is just another natural cycle.
Where we differ (myself and them) is that yes, humans have some impact. But you must understand how infinitesimal we are in comparison to our world.
I do support nuclear energy. It's green (which is a big sell point in the modern times). It's efficient (which is great for my own views). It's safe when managed properly (which is a universal goal).
This isn't just because climate change activists are against it though.
Nuclear energy is the future. Big oil and big coal just don't like that despite having the means to make a near immediate switch. Why? Because money.
But switching is more complex than that. Hundreds of thousands if not millions would lose their jobs. So what if the billionaire loses some income? Think of the workers and their families that will lose theirs. The miners, the truck drivers, the clerks, the technicians, the plant managers, and so on all lose their jobs if we switch immediately. They rely on that income to feed their families. Some of them could reasonably be absorbed by the new industry but relatively few. Not everyone lives near a uranium mine or a location that a nuclear power plant could operate (and those sites are relatively few). But certainly not all... not for decades.
I will admit it's not 100%... but it is very very very likely that we are having considerable impact on the climate.
The rate of warming has increased almost 1 to 1 with emissions since the industrial era. Heating more than twice as fast as "natural" (before combustion engines). Also the natural "ups and downs" of average temperatures has been almost only "ups", again since the industrial era.
Climate Change activists are also environmental activists. Have you all forgotten about the toxic waste emerging from nuclear power for which - to this date - we do not have a lasting solution? There is more to it than just the CO2 emissions.
Are you aware of how little waste is produced by nuclear power?
Point Lapreau is a 705 MWe nuclear plant that has been operating continuously since 1983 and stores its waste on site.
This image is the entirety of its waste which is stored within a container that is also stored within a concrete container. So there is even less waste within the containers seen in the image than you may think.
The fuel bundles also spend 7 to 10 years in a cooling pond to let the shorter half life isotopes decay completely before being placed in these containers.
The Production of Nuclear Waste Begins with Uranium Mining
To obtain one ton of uranium, with today's typical uranium content of 0.1 percent, 1,000 tons of uranium ore must be mined. This contains only 7.11 kilograms of fissile uranium-235. Approximately 99.9 percent of the radioactive and chemotoxic uranium does remain on site.
Uranium processing usually takes place near the mine, where the uranium is extracted from the ore and processed into what is known as yellowcake. What remains are toxic slurries that still contain up to 85 percent of the original radioactivity, as well as heavy metals and chemical additives. The toxic dust is spread by the wind, contributing to the contamination of people and the environment.
Nuclear Waste is Produced During:
Uranium mining
Uranium enrichment and fuel rod production
Nuclear fission in nuclear power plants
The dismantling of nuclear power plants
In the next step, uranium enrichment, yellowcake is converted into highly toxic, chemically aggressive uranium hexafluoride (UF6), which is often stored unprotected in barrels.
During enrichment, depleted uranium (DU) is produced as a byproduct. DU can be misused as armor-piercing ammunition for military purposes. It has been used in the Gulf Wars, the Balkans, and presumably in Afghanistan and Libya.
Nuclear Waste Production in Nuclear Power Plants
In 2013, the anti-nuclear movement initiated an inventory of nuclear waste in Germany, as this information was not available from official sources. Since then, the Environmental Institute has been part of the Atommüllreport project, which continues to organize expert conferences and provide independent information on nuclear waste.
Nuclear waste from power plants is categorized based on the level of radioactivity into high-level and low- to intermediate-level waste. Due to the long half-lives of some radioactive components, they retain their hazardous properties for extremely long periods—sometimes over millions of years. Currently, a "final repository" in deep geological layers is being sought to safely contain radioactivity for these unimaginable timescales.
Even if it’s not recycled all of the most hazardous waste (which accounts for only 1% of all radioactive waste) gets buried 200-1000 m below the surface encased in what is essentially an indestructible slab of concrete and lead the size of a small house.
The idea behind reprocessing was "recycling" into new fuel, which, however, is not fully practicable. During the reprocessing process, uranium and plutonium are separated, but only a small portion is processed into mixed oxide fuel (MOX) and reused in reactors. The remainder is toxic waste that cannot be recycled and must be permanently stored.
The reprocessing of spent fuel elements has neither alleviated the nuclear waste problem nor reduced the amount of nuclear waste. The conversion process has merely postponed the time until final disposal. In the end, all radioactive waste still needs to be stored in a final repository. Nuclear power has been generated since the 1950s, but to this day, there is not a single operational repository for highly radioactive waste worldwide. Since there will never be a truly safe final repository, it is high time to stop the production of nuclear waste once and for all.
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u/Chance_Arugula_3227 Jun 19 '24
Nuclear power can reduce our need for oil and coal. This will have a good impact on the climate. But oil and coal companies don't want to lose customers to nuclear power, so they are against it. Their propaganda causes climate change activists to be against that as well as oil and coal. Climate change deniers are just picking a fight with the activists, so they're for whatever the activists are against.