I've never understood the opposition to nuclear power. Was this a reaction to Chernobyl or did it start earlier?
For example Greenpeace had it roots in the oposition to nuclear weapon testing at the end of 1960s.
The large portion of the environmentalist left are degrowthers who literally want people to just live with less, which means "less energy" is actually good. It will never be a politically viable position, but again, we're talking about a party that until recently has never come close to wielding power.
That I think it's an idiotic position is beside the point. Things and prosperity generally are not the problem, and can grow pretty much indefinitely for the foreseeable future if it's done in a reasonable and sustainable way.
There are a lot of things that would work fine if done in a reasonable and safe way but we have plenty of examples of people making unreasonable and unsafe decisions.
And most of these things have impact much bigger than just the climate. They pollute in a lot more ways than that. Resource extraction, manufacturing pollution, transport, waste disposal.
It's stuff like forcing repairability that allows us to do with much less impact on the environment.
In a perfect world, perhaps. In the real world, it very often does.
It really does. You can live without clothes, that's less. You can live on 1500 kcals a day. You would be at the brink of starving all the time but you would be alive. I could lock you in a cage and just give you the bear minimum of bread and water. Just enough heat so you don't freeze and never let you out. That's certainly less. Just how much less do you want?
PS Young people almost always use more resources than the old. When my kid isn't here, our trash and recycling containers are pretty empty. When he is here, they overflow. And he is only a 50% increase in the house's population.
Living without AC in a warm summer is one example. It feels like a first world inconvenience to the Green types, that we should all learn to accept. Good luck with democratically convincing everyone else - you'd need authoritarian for a true success in keeping everyone "living with less."
If you accept both of these then like Vaclav Smil, you'll conclude that you need to use less fossil fuels and nothing else will replace them. And if you care about fairness globally then 1st world nations need to really use less.
It all makes perfect sense if you believe all the lies told about renewables.
Most of the people mocking it helped spread those lies, which makes attacking the people who believe them a bit rude.
Literally the leftist dense cities have been the ones pushing back hardest against high rises, sustainable transportation alternatives, and in large part, electrification through overly restrictive environmental laws designed in the 70s.
That’s over now. Climate change is here, and you still can’t convert a house to a duplex in LA without jumping through a thousand hoops.
Basically, converting from one form of energy to another usually can be done at 50%. The lone exception is voltage potential (electricity) where we can get 90% for motion but 10% for anything else. And when you use motion for transport you have all the problems of a heavy battery reducing efficiency. This is why we can make an EV but not an electric plane. Then there are the problems to do with storage (remember 2 conversions so 25% efficiency there unless you use a battery). Finally, remember that capitalism is really good at efficiency. When people started trying to find energy uses to cut, this was easy in less developed places but in the US it was nearly impossible. Every cut caused problems elsewhere (even for something as minor as an HVAC fan). Ironically we learned this during COVID when the older "inefficient" buildings were healthier than the newer ones because they moved less air.
I was talking more about general decarbonization.
This is wrong for two reasons.
One: you can make heat with electricity from renewables sources, if that were necessary.
Two: you don't need heat because you can make ammonia with green hydrogen from electrolysis then follow the standard Haber-Bosch process. The normal fossil route does this too but gets the hydrogen by splitting fossil gas and vents the waste CO2.
* (2022) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-022-01043-9
* (2026) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036031992...
soon to be piloted .. with results expected to take a while.
Part of it was a Soviet psyop to get Western citizens to oppose West's nuclear weapons. Encourage people to oppose nuclear in general, both nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
Sure, you and I can talk about newer plant designs that fail safely, or about how coal plants emit more radiation by far. But if we had the ability to rapidly convince large swathes of the populace of provable scientific facts, then clean power is only one of the many many problems we would be able to solve.
The leader of Germany that phased out nuclear and made Germany fully reliant on Russia then took a job... at Gazprom. The VP from the Greens responsible took a very high paying job lobbying for foreign Gas firms, too.
It has to be one of the most successful foreign influencing campaigns in history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schr%C3%B6der#Business... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joschka_Fischer#Business_activ...
The chances of a Soviet leadership-induced meltdown like at a German nuclear reactor that is properly designed and maintained is laughable.
It is, however, extremely hard to film the slow killing of people by browncoal. It's easy to film a nuclear reactor incident.
A slightly racist belief in the Japanese as superior at following the rules meant a big shock when the Germans realised that even the Japanese could not be trusted with nuclear power.
The waste will burden hundreds of generations for millenia and the reason? Our current consumption
Such greed and disregard for following generations
Climate change is a minor problem in comparison
Nuclear: hundreds
That said solar panels and batteries are so bloody good now, why even bother building nuclear reactors in much of the world? And geothermal looks promising too, with the new fracking tech they're using. But who knows.
https://www.legislation.qld.gov.au/view/whole/html/inforce/c...
And of course have a chat with the traditional custodians of the land, and see if they're keen.
( eg: Noonkanbah - https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/sep/30/the-d... )
They do make agreements and keep them when they are part of the discussion from the outset and consulted for advice.
ie: find a place to make a hole that is both stable and not a significant site.
It doesn't help that more recent good faith agreements have been torpedoed by, say, Rio Tinto not keeping their word going forward.
( in recent follow up news from an epic Rio FUBAR - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-25/juukan-gorge-archaeol... )
Don't let perfection be the enemy of improvement.
>Climate change is a minor problem in comparison
No one knows what the best and worst case scenarios for deaths during to climate change as they effects might include AMOC shutdown, sea level rise, forced mass migrations of people, wars, shortages of food, etc. In all credible scenarios the deaths and suffering in even the best case scenarios will be much, much, higher than any deaths due to radiation exposure from nuclear waste.
Yes there is, bury it. Its what we do with lots of other waste. Of course, you have to be a bit more careful than you would be with a standard landfill. But the engineering is well understood. It is usually just the fact that nobody wants it buried near them that causes political issues.
>The waste will burden hundreds of generations for millenia
Pumping more carbon into the atmosphere is also a huge burden for future generations.
>Climate change is a minor problem in comparison
What do you base that on?
We have no way to communicate the danger of the waste to people 55,000 years in the future
That greed, yours and mine, could create that dangerous pile of rubbish, that will be deadly to people who will never know of our existence
What astounding recklessness and hostility to the future
For current consumption
Unbelievable
B) We could reprocess the waste
C) There are reactors that produce 95% less waste, regulation prevents their testing and deployment
D) All the nuclear waste in the US (the country with by far the most NPPs) fits in 1 Olympic sized pool
Nuclear waste is great for several reasons:
- the first one is quantity: very small in comparison with how much energy it produced (a nuclear reaction generates one million times more energy than a chemical reaction so less resource usage across the whole lifecycle);
- the second one is that most of it (over 90%) can be recycled and used with gen 4 reactors;
- the third one is that it stays local, i.e. unlike CO2 it doesn't go into the atmosphere (and then the ocean), and since CO2 is inert, from a human time scale how long CO2 can stay in the atmosphere is, I would argue, comparable to nuclear waste decay.
You cannot predict t that any place on Earth will be stable, or stay local, over hundredsof millenia
Wishful thinking so you can make future generations pay for your consumption
You maybe mixing up danger and risk, those are two different concepts. Nuclear waste is dangerous, but it doesn’t have to be risky. Consider this: where do we have the most unknown (risk): long-term geological storage of nuclear waste, or the consequences of climate change and our ability to adapt?
I really wish I could share the educational resources that I have with you, unfortunately it’s all in French…
Sellafield's current expected bill is £127B over the next 100 years. Hanford is looking at a cost between $364B and $589.4B.
The imagined economics sold to the public never delivered followed by accidents like Windscale, TMI and Chernobyl.
With climate change the nuclear industry saw the possibility of finally having actual product market fit. So another round of subsidies were created in the 2000s and 2010s. At the same time renewables were seen as the upstart, and storage barely crossed any minds.
The outcome being ruinously expensive plants as seen in Vogtle, Virgil C. Summer, Olkiluoto, Flamanville 3, Hinkley Point c and so on.
What we're seeing now is a token investment to subsidize the necessary industry for military research and reactors. But no one expects it to deliver electricity at a relevant price, or point in time, compared to renewables and storage.
But not anywhere near the nuclear frenzy seen online.
Also, Hanford has nothing to do with civilian NPPs and the processes used there would never be done as part of power generation.
Finally, the cost of NPPs is almost always about the lawsuits. Look at how much Korea and China payed for their NPPs. It was less than 20% of what we pay, they were online in less than 5 years and they are producing 2.8GW for each country for the last decade.
PS The UK has never deployed a standardized design for a NPP. All of their NPPs are different types of experimental designs. Just buy a AP1400 and be done with it for far cheaper.
They were deeply entwined, and still are. The AEC established in 1946 was responsible for both nuclear weaposn and peaceful nuclear technology.
There's been a bunch of civilian dual purpose reactors ran at hanford.
Yes. Much of the waste is from the weapons program. But saying that the site has nothing to do with civilian nuclear plants is just you making stuff up.
It is sad when the premier example touted is South Korea. The country where 68 people received prison sentences totaling 253 years and 9 months from the corruption scandal involving falsified safety certificates, fraudulent components and bribery.
China is also especially funny. Despite the nuke bros perfect environment of stable regulations, cheap workforce, state financing, authoritarian rule and so on nuclear remains insignificant. Sitting at 4% of the grid mix and shrinking. While renewables and storage are absolutely exploding in scale.
> I've said this before and I'll say it as many times as is needed.
> The problem with the waste (and nuclear and radioactivity in general) is the messaging coming from those who do understand it. That is what solidifies misconceptions and fear, just as much as what anti-nuclear activists fearmongering may contribute.
> The average person believes that the mere existence of nuclear waste is an existential threat. That it's like a monster trying to break free from its container, and if it does, or if someone lets it out, it will wreak absolute devastation on the biosphere of potentially the entire Earth.
> You cannot appease or dispel such fears by insisting about how seriously waste is being handled and how we've gotten much better at it and that we've reduced the chances of accidents and contamination by this and that.
> Those arguments do not matter when the belief is that the threat is world-ending. People do not believe that the chances of accidents are zero - nor should they be expected to.
> What you need to tell people is that their inherent belief is wrong. Like it's absolutely, completely wrong on so many levels that it isn't even in the same ballpark as ludicrous. I know, I know, they will probably not believe you, at least it will take a lot of time for them to start believing you. But you have to say it nevertheless. Stop reinforcing their fears by always talking about how safe you've made the process, that will never work. Never.
This talks about nuclear waste but I think it applies even more to nuclear accidents. At least it applied to how I saw nuclear power before I actually decided to learn about it (after watching the Chernobyl series lol !)
Thanks to the inherent safety of nuclear? Or that the wind was, by chance, blowing to the sea when the worst happened?
https://www.ianfairlie.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/fukush...
https://www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/wp-content/upload/2011/...
And who cares about the 150 000 displaced people and the still existing exclusion zone?
Oh, yeah, because the Fukushima nuclear accident is still ongoing. The plant is still too dangerous to access and dismantle. Cooling water is still pumped into the reactors to keep them from melting down. That water is still contaminated by a mixture of radioelements and being released to the ocean after partial treatment. And this will go on for several decades still.
You are also missing that the evacuation was expanded in stages:
- Accident day: Loss of cooling, 3 km evacuation.
- 1 day after: 10 km. Followed by extended to 20 km when unit 1 exploded. Followed by unit 3 and 4 exploding as well.
What did Japan's nuclear regulators do after Fukushima? They expanded the emergency planning zone from roughly 8 - 10 km to 30 km.
https://theconversation.com/evacuating-a-nuclear-disaster-ar...
Also, you can't spell.