Nuclear energy is a terrible idea in both a physically (climate change) and socially destabilizing world.
Even Gen4 proliferation-resistant reactors still represent a lethal threat in the event of a release of fissionable materials into the local environment. Building a nuclear reactor without a cast-iron guarantee that there will be a supply of engineering staff, components, materials and clear strong regulation to keep it running safely is a surefire path to disaster.
Whilst the technology and physics behind it are well understood, we have shown time and again in a few short decades of utilizing this technology that we lack the responsibility in our administrative structures to properly manage the risks.
It would take just one full-on reactor meltdown or disaster to poison an entire continent. We have consistently demonstrated that we cannot responsibly assume that risk, which is why there is opposition to nuclear power.
If you want to avoid bad things from happening, do not deploy a dangerous technology and instead focus on what we can do. Renewables are more than capable of providing for our energy needs, and the big kicker here is that they can do so without putting the literal power “off” switch in the hands of the grid or plant operator.
Normally I’m not a “lesser of two evils” type, but nuclear is such an immensely lesser evil compared to coal and oil that it’s insane people are still against it.
Especially when you start counting the number of people that have died either directly or indirectly from coal, oil and every fossil fuel.
If your extrapolate the data into the next hundred years … fossil fuels will have responsible for the deaths of billions.
Compared to nuclear energy … fossil fuels is killing us slowly and will kill us all if we don’t stop using them.
Coal plants gives more radiation through radioactive mercury as a left over from processign
I spoke with a far left friend of mine about this. His position essentially boiled down to the risk of a massive nuclear disaster outweighed the benefits. I said what about the known disastrous consequences of coal and oil? Didn’t really have a response to that. It doesn’t make sense to me. I’ll roll those dice and take the .00001% chance risk or whatever.
I’ve heard some people worry that it can be used for weapons. idk.
Ironic argument for someone in a country where you can buy actual assault weapons over the counter, isn’t it?
No new assault weapons have been manufactured for sale to civilians since the 80’s.
I researched and it turns out no fully automatic weapons have been available for a few decades now. Tightly controlled. Semi automatic is just as lethal though. Also apparently the las vegas shooter in 2018 use bump stocks on his semi automatics which makes it pseudo automatic if you’ll pardon the pun. Notably, the DOJ announced this bump stock reg in 2018, under the Trump administration. Interesting, but not surprising, that the insane right didn’t lose their shit about “muh gunz” when it happened under Trump’s reign.
Nah the reason people didn’t make much noise about bump stocks is because they’re terrible. They are purely something you might do for entertainment rather than any serious attempt to shoot; they really hurt accuracy and comfort.
Nuclear is fantastic and would have been even more fantastic 30 years ago. But it’s 2023 and renewables are getting better every day. There’s just no real reason to not invest primarily in green energy sources, especially when the track record on nuclear waste management is abysmal. People will say “oh but the resources, oh but the storage, oh but the blah blah blah”. We act like these things can’t be done, but they are being done all over the place. While the US argues about whether solar is viable, China has almost produced more solar panels in a year than the US has ever produced. And they are planning to try and deliver to other countries with less productive capacity as well.
I love the nuclear waste storage argument. Wouldn’t it be grand if we could just stick it in the atmosphere like we do with coal and oil? Smh…
Thing is bad, therefore other things that’s not as bad is good. Yo your brain is fucking melted lmao
8 day old account, second post is to be an asshole to me for no reason. Classy. You’re either a bot or another shitty lemming. You’ll fit right in here with all the other insufferable shitheads in this forum.
Yeah, nuclear is to fossil fuels as planes are to cars, safety wise. Sure it’s a huge deal when an accident occurs, but that’s because accidents are drastically more rare.
For the love of everything, at least let’s stop decommissioning serviceable nuclear plants.
Looking at you, Germany…
For real, God forbid we keep the actual safe, clean nuclear plants running
My understanding is that they eventually become unserviceable as they age, because of mechanical/structular reasons, or because the costs of servicing them is so prohibitive that they are unserviceable economically.
That they definitely have a begin, middle, and end, life cycle.
Well other countries have and are doing done so. I really doubt that the reason is anything that politics.
Buildings and machinery fatigue and wear out over time.
And highly critical uptime devices and buildings need extra maintenance and upkeep.
Old sites need to be decommissioned. Even if you ignore the financial costs in the upkeep at some point they just fatigue to the point of needing to be replaced.
I’m not anti-nuclear, all I’m saying is if you want nuclear you have to build new sites, you can’t keep the old sites going forever.
Rotating equipment are replaceable is not that much of an issue they operate on regular steam.
Buildings are reinforced concrete unlikely to be a concern not in a reasonable timeframe unless rebars corrode for some reason.
Issue would be items operating with water directly in contact with the reactor, so critical piping, heat exchangers and reactor vessels, which I can’t say I am an expert specifically for nuclear plants.
I imagine the main concern would be the reactor itself as all reat can be replaced.
Disproven by Russia. Maybe sometimes core is replaced because it uses unsafe design by current standards like in St. Petesburg.
Anti-nuclear people in here arguing about disasters that killed a few k people in 50 years. Also deeply worried about nuclear waste that won’t have an impact on humans for thousands of years, but ignoring climate change is having an impact and might end our way of life as we know it before 2100.
They’re bike-shedding and blocking a major stepping stone to a coal, petrol and gas free future for the sake of idealism.
The biggest enemy of the left is the left
A lot of the anti-nuclear sentiment comes from the 80s when the concerns were a lot more valid (and likely before half the pro-nuclear people in this thread were born).
But blaming people on social media for blocking progress on it is a stretch. They’re multi-billion dollar projects. Have any major governments or businesses actually proposed building more but then buckled to public pressure?
Anyway, I’m glad this conversation has made it to Lemmy because I’ve long suspected the conspicuous popularly and regularity of posts like this on Reddit was the work of a mining lobby that can’t deny climate change anymore, but won’t tolerate profits falling.
At least part of the billion dollar cost is the endless court fights and environmental impact reports before you can even break ground.
Like every other piece of infrastructure. Are you actually advocating that people should just be able to build power plants wherever they want?
No, I’m saying the opposition to nuclear plants is uniquely strident. It’s almost easier to get a new coal plant built. And it shouldn’t be.
People tend to overrate the harms from potential changes, while simultaneously vastly underrating the harms that already exist that they’ve gotten used to.
This is the most wise thing I’ve read today. We all know it, but it needs to be said more.
They’re bike-shedding and blocking a major stepping stone to a coal, petrol and gas free future for the sake of idealism.
I really don’t get this “nuclear as stepping stone” argument. Nuclear power plants take up to ten years to build. Also (at least here in Germany) nuclear power was expensive as hell and was heavily subsidized.
We have technology to replace coal and gas: Wind, solar, geothermal, etc. Why bother with nuclear and the waste we can’t store properly…?
How do you plan to reach 80% non-carbon-based energy by 2030? That’s the current stated goal by the Biden Admin, and it’s arguably not aggressive enough. Nuclear plants take a minimum of 5 years to build, but that’s laughably optimistic. It’s more like 10.
SMR development projects, even if they succeed, won’t be reaching mass production before 2030.
The clock has run out; it has nothing to do with waste or disasters. Greenpeace won.
Greenpeace won
And in doing so, helped doom us all together with big oil, gas and coal.
This is why I’m very wary of groups that are environmentalists vs groups of scientists. I have strong distaste for the former as woo woo people who only follow the science when it’s convenient.
The biggest enemy of the left is the right, it’s just that everyone on the left can agree that they’re terrible so it doesn’t come up in discourse too much, whereas the people who are on your side but want to do things a different way will take up much more of your attention.
If socialists and liberals worked together in Germany, the Nazis would not have come to power. It’s their bickering that led to liberals giving Hitler power in a coalition and socialists famously saying “after Hitler, us”.
Even when there’s a fascist takeover, it’s enabled by the left of center arguing with itself.
Firstly, liberals are not left of centre, they are the original capitalists, the ideology that socialism was built in opposition to.
Secondly, Liberals will always side with fascists when push comes to shove. To liberals, Fascists are distasteful, bigots and extremists, however, fascism does not threaten the liberal system. It does not threaten the liberal ruling class, at least inherently, whereas socialism is an existential threat to that class. To a liberal economy, to a liberal nation.
And to Germany’s communist party, fascists were also distasteful, bigots, and extremists, and they would lead to the collapse of capitalism.
“As late as June 1933 the Central Committee of the [KPD] was proclaiming that the Hitler government would soon collapse under the weight of its internal contradictions, to be followed immediately by the victory of Bolshevism in Germany.” - The Coming if the Third Reich, Richard Evans
I’m not going to make some ridiculous statement however that leftists will always side with fascists when push comes to shove. German liberals tolerated fascists to get political power, and German communists tolerated fascists to get political power. They were both fucking idiots for doing so.
You’re correct that on the entire spectrum of political theory that liberals are on the right. However, on that grand spectrum, liberals are also authoritarian, and communists are also authoritarian – because the entire notion of having a centralized government is authoritarian. It’s pointless to look at the spectrum from an objective, academic position, because it’s totally incongruous with the actual reality of things. When it comes to the scope of Western politics, liberals are left of center, and most tend towards positions of complete civil equality for everyone, which is libertarian in Western scope.
Arguing that liberals are actually on the right is like arguing that we never actually have negative temperatures in winters because Kelvin is always positive and it’s impossible to have negative Kelvin. You’re technically correct, but for realistic purposes it’s utterly meaningless.
And to Germany’s communist party, fascists were also distasteful, bigots, and extremists, and they would lead to the collapse of capitalism.
This would be a good mirroring response if it had any amount of truth to it. To the Communists in Germany, the fascists were their mortal enemy. The two parties were fighting in the streets. The Communists saw the fascists as a capitalist system, they certainly were not under the impression that fascism would bring about the end of capitalism.
A declaration by the Communists that the Fascists would collapse under their own contradictions is not evidence to the contrary, or evidence that the German communists tolerated the fascists.
Liberal and libertarian are not the same thing and cannot be conflated, and authoritarianism isn’t anything with a state.
I swear, the political compass has rotted people’s brains.
But that’s kind of part of the problem though… By resorting to violence they destroyed democracy in Germany by the legitimizing the authority of the state.
As cited by the University of Cambridge:
“Smash the Fascists…” German Communist Efforts to Counter the Nazis, 1930–31 Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
By James J. Ward
“For most historians in the West, the German Communist Party (KPD) belongs among the gravediggers of the Weimar Republic. Other culprits certainly abounded; still, the Communists are held to have made a major contribution to the fall of Weimar by preaching violence, promoting civil disorder and economic disruption, and deliberately trying to weaken the republic’s chief supporters, the Social Democrats (SPD). With such policies, Western scholars have charged, the Communists in effect collaborated with the Nazis and their allies on the right to bring about the destruction of Germany’s first parliamentary democracy.”
I live less than 2 miles from the last remaining coal power station in England.
I would much rather have nuclear instead of a chimney chucking god knows what into the air (and subsequently into me) for my entire life.
Fun fact, coal plants produce more radiation into their environment than nuclear plants
Modern reactor designs are so damn safe it’s insane
If they are so damn safe why i can’t build one in my backyard?
Because the radioactive bits need to be handled by trained and trusted personnel because if those bits fall into the wrong hands they can be used for some horrible shit
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.
For what I’ve read, it’s beats nuclear tech exists and is ready to be built at scale now. Renewables are intermittent in nature and need energy storage to work at scale. We don’t have the tech for a grid wide energy storage.
I can’t imagine a future without solar, wind, and nuclear power.
not unless we find out we are wrong about thermodynamics.
Wind and Solar are “renewable” to a certain scale. If you dump gigantic wind farm in the middle of a jet stream, for example, you can impact downstream climate cycles.
that’s why we could be aware of all the externalities.
solar could be deployed on the ocean but that will certainly lower sea temperatures.
let’s terraform intentionally rather than just accidentally.
You don’t need to imagine a future without nuclear in the mix - there are plenty of places doing fine with renewables and without coal or nuclear right now.
which country?
For example South Australia - no coal since 2016, no nuclear ever, runs mostly on a mix of renewables - solar and wind with batteries and transient gas for in-fill.
Edit: thanks to whoever downvoted my verified statement of fact (see below)
never heard of that country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal-fired_power_stations_in_Australia?wprov=sfla1
Weird argument. “It’s a place bigger than a bunch of EU countries put together but it’s not a country so I’m going to use other places that aren’t South Australia to counter your point which was about South Australia”
lol im not playing this shell game.
do not let “perfect” be the enemy of “good enough”
edit: quick addendum, I really cannot stress this enough, everyone who says nuclear is an imperfect solution and just kicks the can down the road – yes, it does, it kicks it a couple thousand years away as opposed to within the next hundred years. We can use all that time to perfect solar and wind, but unless we get really lucky and get everyone on board with solar and wind right now, the next best thing we can hope for is more time.
I completely agree with everything you said except for ONE little thing:
You are grossly misrepresenting how far that can is kicked down, for the worse. It doesn’t kick it down a couple thousand years, it kicks it down for if DOZENS of millennia assuming we stay at the current energy capacity. Even if we doubled or tripled it, it would still be dozens of millennia. First we could use the uranium, then when that is gone, we could use thorium and breed it with plutonium, which would last an incomprehensibly longer time than the uranium did. By that point, we could hopefully have figured out fusion and supplement that with renewable sources of energy.
The only issue that would stem from this would be having TOO much energy, which itself would create a new problem which is heat from electrical usage.
I am not sure when the narrative around nuclear power became nuclear energy vs renewables when it should be nuclear and renewables vs fossil fuels.
We need both nuclear and renewable energy where we try to use and develop renewables as much as possible while using nuclear energy to plug the gaps in the renewable energy supply
Easy, by paying people to spread misinformation.
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!
I don’t think we should shutter existing nuclear plants, but renewables are a better idea than new nuclear plants
Nuclear power is neither safe nor ecologically sustainable. The waste is immensely toxic for hundreds of thousands of years. The model is centralized so wealthy oligarchs own the power source and sell it to everyone else. Better to move toward distributed power generation that isn’t massively toxic. Greenpeace must stay anti-nuke.
Im not a fan of nuclear but not super against it. It takes a lot of capital and resources for a return far in the future and there are options that can get us more sooner. Waste is an issue as long as it exists and is not taken care of properly long term and overall its the least desirable of solutions outside of straight out burning stuff.
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.
Sorry to burst your bubble on wind and solar… The amount of fiberglass and resin waste of astounding. The concrete trashes that particular spot for many hundreds of years. There are piles of birds in many areas with wind. And then solar… Oof… Most of the chemicals come from China. The slave labor, child labor, and toxic waste at the mines and refineries is just mind boggling. There’s a huge amount of work to do before wind and solar can be good options for humanity and the environment.
Nuclear has made great strides. We just don’t see those advances in the US unless you’re on a modern nuclear ship in the engine room. Europe has amazing modern designs. So does japan.
A lot of what you just said is not true, fully bullshit, so I’ll just ignore all that. Dead birds? Cmon. Are we going to tear down all the skyscrapers in the world because birds run into them? Are we going to stop the entire logging industry because it takes away bird’s nesting space? Don’t spout anti-green energy propaganda like you are worried about the birds, if you were really worried about them, you would be pro green energy
If you consider the peripheral waste involved in their production it is only fair to do the same for everything else, and when you do, solar and wind still win. And it’s only going to get better, we are refining and recycling the rare materials involved better and better every year. We are kindof in the golden age of solar power improvements.
I don’t think any of us should be making assumptions about how many birds/bats are being killed without looking up the numbers. At least back when I was in school and learning about windmills (a decade ago) there were concerns because wind farms were often located along migratory pathways for birds. And it’s not just ‘birds’ that die, it can be an important species within the trophic level that gets decimated, and then there are consequences of that felt within the food web. It’s not as bad as a city, but we’re talking about introducing something new into the environment, and people should talk about the potential issues. We should be able to have both sides arguments about this stuff, since we’re still likely to agree it’s the right choice to replace carbon plants.
If you were an ecologist it wouldn’t be so easy to claim others are ignorant when they bring up concerns about renewable energy harming the natural spaces they are introduced into.
Wow. What’s toxic here is your made up industry propaganda.
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Don’t get scared off by the N Word
Nuclear isn’t the monster it’s made out to be by oil and coal propagands.
