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this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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I highly, highly recommend the Oliver Stone documentary Nuclear Now from earlier this year. Completely changed my perspective. I had no idea that the oil industry was behind so much of the fear mongering around nuclear.
To be fair we have seen multiple disasters in the past including Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima, which have serious and long lasting effects. I'm not against nuclear power but we can't pretend the downsides are just made up or blown out of proportion.
They are sort of blown out of proportion when you take into account modern safety protocols.
Chernobyl and three mile island were user error, fukushima was force majeure.
Since then they've been piloted widely. France has about 50 reactors and a laundry list of smaller errors that we've since learned from.
Have you ever compared the impact of Fukushima compared to the tsunami that caused it?
Other than that, even if we assume rectors keep being old tech from the 60s, never using newer generations of rectors that can be inherently safe: Who cares about a bit of contaminated area, very localized, every few dozen years, when the alternative is a global climate crisis?
More people died in the evacuation of Fukushima than died fighting the meltdown, which was arguably 1.
The tsunami killed over 15,000 people. Awful disaster.
However, Japanese people are very anti-nuclear so their media made it seem that the impact was horrific when, aside from the exclusion zone, wasn’t all THAT bad. However, losing that land was a big hit to a small country.
I'd agree if our only two options were nuclear or coal/oil plants but we have many options that don't require everything be powered from centralized power plants.
I'm sure all the people and companies that exist in these areas. Land is finite and hospitable land is even more finite. Destroying these areas for decades to come isn't any more preferable that the occasional natural disaster rolling through over a few day period.
As I said I'm not against nuclear power and I would love to see more advancements come to fruition, but it doesn't need to be our main source of energy nor is it accurate to claim that the potential issues that come with it are solely overblown conspiracy theories pushed by oil/coal companies.
I mean, it's obvious.
Also historically some of Soviet-friendly left would present "capitalist" nuclear energy as apocalyptic-level dangerous and related to nuclear weaponry etc (cause USSR was, after discovery of reserves, selling oil and gas just like Russia does now, actually that was the reason for Brezhnev's time improvement in level of life and simultaneously rapid growth of corruption, also loss of hope of anything like the Thaw happening again).
Or, maybe people recognize that literally the majority of radioactive mining leaves irradiated lands that disproportionately effect minorities and oppressed communities. The Navajo are still suffering due to the mining of radioactives in their area. The same story is true for nearly every community near such facilities.
while that is certainly an issue, i very much doubt that it is a primary reason (or even remotely a concern) for the average anti-nuclear layperson.
Ah, those activists wouldn't talk about that mostly, they'd talk about boom and radioactive pollution in places their audience lived in.
Leftists caring about minorities and oppressed communities anyplace far from themselves are a notable rarity.
And since the replacements were coal, oil and gas, which are just as dirty, I'd say your argument isn't worth shit.
That’s funny.
So you’re willing to move within 1 mile of a uranium mine and live there and drink the well water from that property?
Or are you just willing to sacrifice others for your luxurious lifestyle?
There are alternatives other than continuing to expand our consumption of fossil or nuclear fuels. Hell, most of them don’t even require lifestyle changes from the majority of the population.
No, but it's the same with gold mines, copper mines, coal, ohoho, oil, ahaha, etc. Scale matters, and in scale for the same amount of energy nuclear gives the least pollution.
Also I invite you to live near a lithium mine.
Or check it, we don’t increase our consumption, so we don’t need more energy. We purposefully decrease it. We allocate resources by necessity.
Widget factories don’t need to operate 24 hours a day, and their owners don’t need to make 500x their employees wages. Kill two birds with one stone, the widget factory is only allocated enough energy to run a few hours a day, and the wages from its executives (who have proven they don’t deserve it by the very lack of care towards sustainability they have presented) go to the workers to ensure they continue to make the same amount despite the decrease in work time.
You do that with all of the industries in the world, and I guarantee we could cut emissions by 50% within a year. Obviously, global implementations are much more complicated than my comment would imply, but I think accepting an end to a system where the only limits placed upon industry is “how much money do you have?” Is necessary entirely to have even a fraction of a chance at beating climate change.
Then, once we’ve stopped wasting massive amounts of energy on inherently useless endeavors, then we can start to talk about the pollution caused by nuclear, but until then, it’s just replacing one extractive industry with another. Whether or not in theory nuclear is less damaging environmentally, our current Money = Right system precludes the possibility of such sustainable practices being put into place. There is always another country that can be corrupted to allow destructive, cheap extraction processes, like what happens in Mail, Burkina Faso, and Niger as we speak.