Comradeship // Freechat

2562 readers

269 users here now

Talk about whatever, respecting the rules established by Lemmygrad. Failing to comply with the rules will grant you a few warnings, insisting on breaking them will grant you a beautiful shiny banwall.

A community for comrades to chat and talk about whatever doesn't fit other communities

founded 4 years ago

MODERATORS

felipeforte@lemmygrad.ml

Anti-Nuclear Trend in the Western Left? (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 2 years ago by CITRUS@lemmygrad.ml to c/comradeship@lemmygrad.ml

3 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Okay so I was scrolling through the PSL's info page, and it is stated that they are to denuclearize the power grid. Why is this? I was under the impression that Nuclear Energy is the much more sustainable and frankly realistic source of power--even without Molten Salt Reactors and Thorium based ones.

 Im finding it most orgs tend to stay away from Nuclear energy due to fear mongering from fossil fuel industries; Thus its stain in the imperial core, reaching from liberals to western "leftists". But I am surprised the PSL, a radical organization, is anti-nuclear.

   FYI this isn't a deal breaker or anything--they seem to be taking the lead for vanguard party--just was curious of the stance on nuclear energy.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I dug into this quite a bit a few years ago and came to the conclusion that opposition to nuclear power was originally all astroturfed, and continues to be astroturfed to this day. I may have missed something and I don't know why leftists in particular are against it, but here's what I learned.

Environmentalist organizations were for nuclear power into the 1960s. In general people were for it, it was a promising new technology. Then in the late 60s and early 70s these big environmentalist groups (Sierra Club primarily, but others as well) were taken over and astroturfed by oil and gas companies. Obviously oil and gas capitalists were not at all on board with the idea of getting plentiful and cheap energy from little bits of metal, so nuclear energy had to go.

At the same time there was a huge anti-war and anti-nuclear weapons movement. It was super easy for bad faith actors to conflate nuclear weapons with nuclear power, and that's one of the anti-nuclear-power misconceptions to this day. There also wasn't any public awareness or even concept of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.

In the 70s public opinion shifted hard against nuclear power, first due to these oil and gas lobby efforts and later due to opportunistic propaganda around the Three Mile Island accident (and the conveniently released film The China Syndrome). Further accidents such as Chernobyl (and its easy conflation with anti-communism) have only served to make nuclear less and less popular over the years.

[–] CITRUS@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Thanks for the history! Im guessing this can be easily fixed with education, hell i might compile an essay myself. As others have said, a nuclear base with renewables to subsidize energy seems the way to go.

Overall I need to dig into it more for specifics, but my main point will be: You can have a nuclear power plant with a sound system that only plays Fallout Music! Who'd say no to that?! 🤣

[–] knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 2 years ago

It's both an "easy" fix as well as a really difficult one, much the same as teaching liberals about Marxism-Leninism. They're on board with the core principles, but as soon as you tell them what the topic is that you're talking about they're immediately 9000% against you.

If you're interested in sources I'm sure I can still dig up a few. Unfortunately most of the authors are imperial core libs but their historical investigations and analyses of opposition to nuclear power still seem pretty solid.