Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance

Uninhabitable by humans. Chernobyl created a nature preserve in an instant. The coal pollution you've inhaled has affected you more than all 3 of these nuclear disasters.

There aren't "large swaths of thr earth" that aren't inhabitable because of nuclear. Nuclear kills less people than coal mining - where hundreds of people dying during one catastrophe happens. Renewables aren't a solution for every country either and cover large swaths of land you mentioned. Hydro also has a huge effect on the environment, despite being the "most green" solution (unless you count the concrete needed to build dams).

Nuclear should be the default. It's not "profitable" for the people building them who think short term.

There are currently 401 operational nuclear power plants worldwide, and you've managed to list three (with three mile island not even breaching facilty containment) accidents in 70 years of nuclear energy exploitation. If that doesn't vouch for safety and reliability of nuclear, I don't know what does. Unlearn cold war hysteria.

Are we forgetting about airplane catastrophes every time we fly? Or do we live in fear of flying, despite the risk of getting injured being significantly less than when driving a car?

Well..

Chernobyl right now is an awesome nature preserve thanks to humans being gone. The entire area has been slowly moving back to its original state with even wolves moving back. That last bit is important as wolves have a huge influence on stability in natural habitats.

I know, silver linings, but still.

To the point: nuclear energy doesn't need to be that bad. Well designed reactor are pretty much safe, and toxic end products are relatively little and manageable in comparison to gas and coal reactors. Chernobyl just was a shit reactor managed by idiots.

Ironically, because of their desig, nuclear power plants do not emit any radiation while coal and oill reactors do emit radiation coming from their fuels. That adds to all the other pollution classic power plants emit.

Then there are other fuels that could / should be used to avoid the "we don't want people to have plutonium" issue.

Then the two big alternative energy generators wind and solar both have their own issues. No wind? No power. Night? No power. Clouds? No power. Wind farms kill birds. Solar panels require replacement every x amount of years because they degrade. The "no power" problem require huge batteries, or if you're lucky, an entire lake to store that energy but now that late basically can't be used for anything else and won't be able to sustain any life.

Then finally: in comparison, nuclear energy generates enormous amounts of power where wind and solar generates very little. Humanity needs huge amounts of power to live.

Nuclear power plants take a long time to build but then give us huge amounts of power for as long as we need it to. If we really want to move away from CO2 emitting power generation, which we really really really do, I really think we can't ignore nuclear energy

All of these items are accounted for when feasibility studies are conducted for new plants (and even old plants up for license renewal). Chernobyl was due to the type of reactor (which doesn't exist in the US), 3 Mile Island resulted in no adverse effects to health or environment and led to more stringent training and equipment upgrades, and Fukushima was built in a poorly selected location.

Of course there's risk involved with nuclear, but we mitigate those risks appropriately. We don't stop driving cars because of deadly accidents - we engineer safety systems to mitigate risk.

Ironically, burning fossil fuels is actually making large swaths of the earth uninhabitable. Even if you include nuclear disasters nuclear is outrageously safe

https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/

And when operating properly coal plants irradiate their surroundings significantly more than nuclear plants

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/

And we actually can plan for natural disasters. Fukushima was avoidable https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-preventable-pub-47361

Also it’s worth noting that most of the world has the luxury of not building nuclear plants on seismically active, volcanic islands.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but coal powered plants have caused more cancer than any of those events on their own and when operated safely to modern standards they have a very low to no risk of release whereas coal plants release pollutants by design. Nuclear waste is in a solid state so it's far easier to dispose of underground vs coal which immediately gets put into the atmosphere

The safety of a region is fairly predictable even if the individual disasters aren't as predictable. If you don't build on fault lines, earth quakes aren't generally going to be a risk. If you don't build in tornado alley, or on the coast, tornadoes and hurricanes aren't going to be a risk. If you build at higher elevations, flooding isn't going to be a risk, etc.

And even with those nuclear disasters (that we've now learned from and can design reactors to prevent), nuclear has a far, far, far lower death rate per kWh of energy than all fossil fuels. The cost of continued fossil fuel use is already killing the planet, and already too high of a cost. We need to be switching away as fast as we possibly can, and nuclear is a viable alternative among many.

It's all pretty much been said already, but I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I read takes like yours.

You mention the possibility of things going wrong with nuclear, but you don't mention the things currently going wrong with fossil fuels. Coal is killing people right now, and actively "making large swaths of the earth uninhabital".

Depending on your source, nuclear is either the safest or second safest energy production method, even when including Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Nuclear is not the end goal of power generation, but it is the best we have right now.

My goal is not really to turn this into a discussion, but I feel like your concerns might be based on common misconceptions about nuclear energy.

Chornobyl (Ukrainian spelling) was such a big disaster because it was the first major nuclear disaster. The reactor was built without hands-on experience with the consequences of a nuclear disaster driving the design of the facility itself. We have since learnt a lot about proper design of nuclear reactors and about how to respond to any incidents.

The Fukushima reactor was designed with that knowledge in mind, but the event was a perfect shitstorm consisting of both an earthquake and a tsunami hitting the facility at the same time. And even though the local population might disagree, the disaster was arguably less serious than Chornobyl was. Due in large part to a better design and proper disaster response.

We're more capable than ever of modeling and simulating natural disasters, so I'd argue we acutally CAN plan for most of those. Any disaster we can't plan for nowadays is likely to also fuck up an area even worse than the resulting nuclear disaster would.

But probably the most important thing to mention is that nuclear power is a lot more diverse in the modern world. Gone are the days that uranium fission reactors are the norm. They were only popular because they serve a secondary purpose of creating resources for nuclear weapons, in addition to their power generation. With molten salt reactors, thorium-based reactors and SMR (small modular reactors) there's really not a good reason to build any more "classic" nuclear reactors other than continuing the production of nuclear weapons, which I hope we can just stop doing.

The best way to prevent large scale incidents is to prevent large scale reactors, which is why there's so much interest in SMR lately.

All in all, we likely can't fully transition to renewables fast enough without the use of nuclear power as an intermediary. But the actual dangers with modern designs are far fewer than they used to be and we should take care not to give in to irrational fears too much.

To put things into perspective: We currently have no way of stopping a major solar storm that would thouroughly disrupt all modern life, nor can we stop large asteroids heading our way. Both are potentially planet-ending disasters, but the possibility that they might occur doesn't stop us from trying to build a better earth for the future, right?

There are talks about civil war in the US and fears of a further escalation of the war in Ukraine, while Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is in the war zone right now.

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Nuclear power isn't even cheap anymore. Solar power is 5x cheaper per megawatt than it was 10 years ago. Wind power is half the price. Both are cheaper than nuclear, which has gone up in price despite a decade of research to make it cheaper.

There’s a lot of money in the nuclear industry and they spend a lot of money to shape public opinion about it. No doubt they use troll farms to manufacture consent too. For me, the biggest and most glaring problem with nuclear power is the human element that can’t be trusted long term. Governments and industry will go to any length to cut costs, to line their own pockets, to lie, and put their personal ambitions above anything else. That’s how you get Chernobyls and 3 mile islands and fukushimas. It’s also not financially viable without massive government subsidies and government insurance. It’s highly centralized, and easily controlled and monetized by capitalists. It requires a readily available and reliable source of water which is something that climate change will cause problems for. Plus they take forever to build and cost billions. The answer nuclear bros have to that is to cut red tape, but then you have the problem of Chernobyls and Fukushimas. The fact is, nuclear is not a solution. Capitalism and the idiotic need for endless growth and exploitation is the problem. We need de-growth and switch to a combination of wind, solar and other real clean energy.

we're not forgetting, we just know that theyvwern't that big a deal and new reactor designs can't have that happen

3 Mile Island had completely minimal impact. And Fukishima, despite being a cataclysmic combination of unfortunate events and poor planning on that possibly happening, the impact there was also extremely minimal, with the only negative effects more on the evacuation reaction being way wider than necessary.

And, of course, all of that is with decades old facilities that lack many of the mechanisms of modern technology that even further protect and minimize any possible negative impacts.

Heck, a thorium nuclear plant physically can't melt down.