Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance
Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance
Swedish teenager Ia Anstoot says group’s ‘unscientific’ opposition to EU nuclear power serves fossil fuel interests
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I swear to god all these "Omg nuclear will save us from climate change bro! Small modular reactors are right around the corner, trust me" tech bro types are fossil fuel industry plants to try and distract people from building renewables and instead build nuclear reactors that will ensure some construction company's CEO gets a multi-million bonus every year for the next 15 years and not much else.
Yeah man all those fossil fuels burned in nuclear power plants... wtf?
No, all those fossil fuels burned in fossil fuels plants that we will have to keep using for 20 years while we wait for these nuclear plants to maybe get built.
It does not necessarily take nuclear power plants that long to make. Japan built theirs in less than 5 years and France built the majority of their plants needing only 5-8 years per plant.
That's only the construction time though, in addition comes design, planning and regulatory processes. And no one except a single plant in Finland have actually solved the issue of safely storing nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years, let alone just storing them safely against the natural disasters and wars that are likely to occur within decades or centuries.
But even France is having trouble building new plants now, so it seems to build these power plants to the level of safety that people talk about when they say how safe nuclear is, requires a long time and a lot of money.
Yea, so our focus should be both renewable and nuclear. Why does it have to be one or the other?
Because any money spent on nuclear is money not spent on renewables. Most of these projects are government funded or at least subsidised. So a couple billion spent on a nuclear reactor is a couple billion tied up in something that wont make power for 10-20 years. Whereas if we spent that money on wind farms you could be generating power in less than a year.
Sure, so cut government funding for fossil fuel sources.
That is a given, regardless. Let's use our limited research and development and infrastructure funding to advance renewables. Not high-cost, centralized tech tied to the nuclear bomb industry for it's refined uranium sources.
So your issue is actually that there's a lack of a full commitment to public transmission infrastructure that would allow nuclear power to displace coal, gas, and oil? Sounds like we agree then
no? i really dont get where you pulled that from. My issue (among others) is that nuclear takes decades to build, so if we invest in nuclear we're looking at 10 years at least before we see any kind of return on that investment. and so in the meantime we have to continue using fossil fuels, which is what the fossil fuel companoes want.
The only reason it takes longer than a few years is because of arbitrary regulatory barriers we've placed - so when we say "we should build more nuclear" part of the manifestation of that will be streamlining regulation to make it faster and cheaper.
Alternatively, we make coal, oil, and natural gas subject to the same externality-internalizing regulations and taxes and see how things shake out.
Weird that every country in the world others than China put up these same arbitrary regulatory barriers at around the same time. Can you describe what these barriers are and why they are unnecessary?
One is that nuclear power has to account for and financially compensate its passive radiation emissions. This is unique to nuclear power, even though passive emissions from nuclear plants are less than 10 times lower than radiation emissions from coal power plants. Clearly we don't care that much about the harmful effects of the radiation emissions, and if we do then coal should be charged for the current and past emissions.
Can you send me a link? Because I'm looking for this regulation and can't find it? Or at least tell me which country?