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
Good!
Anti-nuclear is like anti-GMO and anti-vax: pure ignorance, and fear of that which they don't understand.
Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change.
We've had the cure for climate change all along, but fear that we'd do another Chernobyl has scared us away from it.
Anti-nuclear people in here arguing about disasters that killed a few k people in 50 years. Also deeply worried about nuclear waste that won't have an impact on humans for thousands of years, but ignoring climate change is having an impact and might end our way of life as we know it before 2100.
They're bike-shedding and blocking a major stepping stone to a coal, petrol and gas free future for the sake of idealism.
The biggest enemy of the left is the left
do not let "perfect" be the enemy of "good enough"
edit: quick addendum, I really cannot stress this enough, everyone who says nuclear is an imperfect solution and just kicks the can down the road -- yes, it does, it kicks it a couple thousand years away as opposed to within the next hundred years. We can use all that time to perfect solar and wind, but unless we get really lucky and get everyone on board with solar and wind right now, the next best thing we can hope for is more time.
I am not sure when the narrative around nuclear power became nuclear energy vs renewables when it should be nuclear and renewables vs fossil fuels.
We need both nuclear and renewable energy where we try to use and develop renewables as much as possible while using nuclear energy to plug the gaps in the renewable energy supply
Greenpeace was founded to be an anti-nuclear organization. See, most of the founding members were members of the Sierra Club (another environmentalist organization) but the Sierra Club was actually pro-nuclear power. The Sierra Club was actually fighting against the installation of new dams due to the effect of wiping out large swaths of river habitat and preventing salmon runs and such.
Anyway, in 1971 there was an underground nuclear bomb test by the US government in an area that was geologically unstable. (there were a bunch of tests to see just how geologically unstable). Protesters thought that the test would cause an earthquake and a tsunami.
Anyway, the people who were unhappy with the Sierra club not actively protesting nuclear power, wanted to protest this nuclear bomb test too, so they formed an organization called the "Don't make a wave committee". They sued, the suit was decided in the US's favor, the test went off, and no earthquake happened (which is how the earlier tests said it would go).
At some point, the "Don't make a wave committee" turned into Greenpeace.
Also about this timeframe, Greenpeace started receiving yearly donations from the Rockefeller Foundation.
The Rockefeller Foundation is the charitable foundation created by the Rockefeller heirs that "uses oil money to make the world a better place" but they kind of don't. They've been anti-nuclear since the beginning, and even directly funded some radiation research in the 1950s that lied about safe exposure limits to radiation, claiming that there was no safe limit. That research went on to shape international policy, and by the time new research came out, the policy was already written and thus hard to change.
As a side note, another alumnus of the Sierra Club was approached by the then CEO of Atlantic Oil and directly paid a sum of something like $100k (in 1970 money) to found another anti-nuclear environmentalist organization called Friends of the Earth.
Why go nuclear when renewable is so much cheaper, safer, future proof and less centralised?
Don't get me wrong. Nuclear is better than coal and gas but it will not safe our way of life.
Just like the electric car is here to preserve the car industry not the planet, nuclear energy is still here to preserve the big energy players, not our environment.
Wind and solar > nuclear > fossil fuels
Nothing really against nuclear except how it is being weilded as a distraction from better, cleaner, energy. We need to be going all in on converting everything to wind and solar, with batteries and other power storage like water pumping facilities filling the gaps.
Nuclear needs a few more issues figured out, like how to actually cheaply build and get power from all those touted newer cleaner reactor styles.
One thing I don't see a lot of people talking about is how nuclear is probably better for the environment due to how you don't have to cut down a Forrest to generate a viable amount of electricity meanwhile nuclear only requires two factory sised buildings to generate more than enough electricity to be viable and that's assuming you have a sister breeder reactor to generate power from the waste
I don't really know anything about this topic, but I heard there are new designs of nuclear fission plants that are much safer and "unmeltdownable"? Called Molten Salt Reactors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
Cause once again no one can see the potential advancements nuclear technology can have if it had proper investment. Everyone see's Chernobyl and Fukushima and then they switch off.
Yes Renewables are better than nuclear for the moment but to demonize and not even discuss it is just burying your head in the sand
If the Great Filter theory is correct, climate change will most likely be our Great Filter.
Our species is simply not equipped with the ability to deal with the problems it created. Many people can, but they're not powerful to do anything, and there's too many uneducated people for the masses to rise up about this problem.
We think so short term, it's impossible for some people to think about the future and accept that we'll need to change the way we live now so that we can keep living then. They're hung up on Chernobyl because it was a big bang that killed lots of people at once and it was televised everywhere that has a society and TVs, but they are unable to see that in the long term coal and gas have killed and are still killing way more people than nuclear accidents, because it's a process that's continuous and kills people in indirect ways instead of a big blast.
The activist argues nuclear power is a crucial tool against climate change and disagrees with Greenpeace's concerns about its environmental impact. Greenpeace defends its position, emphasizing the importance of prioritizing renewable alternatives like solar and wind for cutting emissions.
Kyoto was in 1997. 2030 is 33 years, you can't seriously consider 1.5 generations is a sprint.
Which, by the way, there is almost no conceivable way we are going to meet the 2030 deadline to maintain 1.5C. We have to think longer term.
There still is no zero emissions technology for long haul airlines, shipping, or pouring concrete for infrastructure. Those are all huge emitters.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In April, the environmental campaign group announced it would appeal against the EU Commission’s decision to include nuclear power in its classification system for sustainable finance.
Ia Aanstoot, from Sweden, who for three years took part in the Friday school strikes movement started by Greta Thunberg, said Greenpeace’s legal challenge served fossil fuel interests instead of climate action.
This week, Aanstoot submitted papers to the EU court of justice asking to become an “interested party” in the upcoming legal battle between the European Commission and Greenpeace.
One of these, Julia Galosh, a 22-year-old biologist, said: “I’ve protested opposite Greenpeace in horror as they campaigned to stop Germany’s nuclear reactors – something which led to much more demand for coal.
A Greenpeace EU spokesperson said: “We have the greatest respect for folks who are worried about the climate crisis and want to throw everything we have at the problem, but building new nuclear plants just isn’t a viable solution.
Encouraging investments into nuclear energy by including it in the EU taxonomy risks diverting funding away from renewables, home insulation and support for people hit by extreme weather.
The original article contains 764 words, the summary contains 186 words. Saved 76%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
As a bit of a "young climate activist" myself (certainly more of a jaded, realistic one) , nuclear is still a bad idea. We don't need a overabundance of electricity, we need more sustainable energy. The last thing we should be doing as environmentalists is giving governments and capitalists more resources to weaponize- ntm more opportunities to critically fuck up our planet. Yes, nuclear energy CAN be produced totally safely. However, from a logistics standpoint this depends on keeping a number of factors in check and one has to account for the materials involved. Storage of nuclear waste is already a problem on planet earth. The U.S has bunkers full of this sludge that will kill anyone who gets close- Not to mention how unethical industry practices are when it comes to mining on a world wide scale!
Nuclear power is neither safe nor ecologically sustainable. The waste is immensely toxic for hundreds of thousands of years. The model is centralized so wealthy oligarchs own the power source and sell it to everyone else. Better to move toward distributed power generation that isn't massively toxic. Greenpeace must stay anti-nuke.
Permanently Deleted
Entities like Greenpeace and PETA have done more damage than good in the long run. They're stuck in the past and want to act like fascists of a different color
Amazing to me that on a platform that is the epitome of the power of decentralization we don't see the same advantages with energy production and storage.
I am not in favor of development of nuclear power for 2 reasons:
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Uncertain future costs. Building a nuclear reactor is very expensive and takes a long time. The cost curve for renewable production (solar, wind) as well as storage (batteries) has fallen so dramatically in the last decade it's impossible to make a financial commitment to building a nuclear plant. That's why there are very few applications in the US (https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/large-lwr/col/new-reactor-map.html) - nobody wants to financially back an investment that is likely a money loser.
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Grid security and stability. Having centralized power sources has exposed the US grid to inadequate security and protection from attack (https://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/problem-us-power-grid-its-too-vulnerable-attacks#:~:text=Regrettably%2C the electric grid is,matter of short-lived inconvenience.). The solution is decentralization, which occurs naturally when solar/wind and batteries are used for storage. For those arguing battery technology and deployment is inadequate and impossible for grid stabilization, there is an easy solution to this problem - VTG. We are deploying hundreds of thousands (soon to be millions) of EVs. Vehicle-to-Grid technology can solve the storage problem with renewables very easily and in parallel to the goal of transitioning to renewables.
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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.
Lets not trade in polluting the air with polluting the ground and water even more.
Meh, nuclear isn't anti-climate but anti-environment (not only waste but the production too).
The problems with nuclear power is not the waist affecting the environment just by sitting their, but by having humans gain access to that waist and doing nefarious things with it. I am all for breader reactors, but they output waist perfect for use in nuclear bombs. I have little faith that we could guard that waist sufficiently until it reaches a secure dump, and that faith scales down as the number of reactors scales up.
Cue the nuclear shills that will handwave away any legitimate concern with wishful thinking and frame the discussion as solely pro/anti fossil, conveniently pretending that renewables don’t exist.
ETA:
Let's look at some great examples of handwaving and other nonsense to further the nuclear agenda.
Here @danielbln@lemmy.world brings up a legitimate concern about companies not adhering to regulation and regulators being corrupt/bought *cough… Three Mile Island cough*, and how to deal with that:
So uh, turns out the energy companies are not exactly the most moral and rule abiding entities, and they love to pay off politicians and cut corners. How does one prevent that, as in the case of fission it has rather dire consequences?
So of course the answer to that by @Carighan@lemmy.world is a slippery slope argument and equating a hypothetical disaster with thousands if not millions of victims and areas being uninhabitable for years to come, with the death of a family member due to faulty wiring in your home:
Since you can apply that logic to everything, how can you ever build anything? Because all consequences are dire on a myopic scale, that is, if your partner dies because a single electrician cheaped out with the wiring in your building and got someone to sign off, "It's not as bad as a nuclear disaster" isn't exactly going to console them much.
At some point, you need to accept that making something illegal and trying to prosecute people has to be enough. For most situations. It's not perfect. Sure. But nothing ever is. And no solution to energy is ever going to be perfect, either.
Then there's the matter of misleading statistics and graphs.
Never mind the fact that the amount of victims of nuclear disasters is underreported, under-attributed and research is hampered if not outright blocked to further a nuclear agenda, also never mind that the risks are consistently underreported, lets leave those contentious points behind and look at what's at hand.Here @JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works shows a graph from Our World in Data that is often thrown around and claims to show "Death rates by unit of electricity production":
Seems shocking enough and I'm sure in rough lines, the proportions respective to one another make sense to some degree or another.
The problem however is that the source data is thrown together in such a way that it completely undermines the message the graph is trying to portray.According to Our World in Data this is the source of the data used in the graph:
Death rates from energy production is measured as the number of deaths by energy source per terawatt-hour (TWh) of electricity production.
Data on death rates from fossil fuels is sourced from Markandya, A., & Wilkinson, P. (2007).
Data on death rates from solar and wind is sourced from Sovacool et al. (2016) based on a database of accidents from these sources.
We estimate deaths rates for nuclear energy based on the latest death toll figures from Chernobyl and Fukushima as described in our article here: https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-chernobyl-and-fukushima
We estimate death rates from hydropower based on an updated list of historical hydropower accidents, dating back to 1965, sourced primarily from the underlying database included in Sovacool et al. (2016). For more information, see our article: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Fossil fuel numbers are based on this paper which starts out by described a pro-nuclear stance, but more importantly, does a lot of educated guesstimating on the air-pollution related death numbers that is straight up copied into the graph.
Sovacool is used for solar and wind, but doesn't have those estimates and is mainly limited to direct victims.
Nuclear based deaths is based on Our World in Data's own nuclear propaganda piece that mainly focuses on direct deaths and severely underplays non-direct deaths.
And hydropower bases deaths is based on accidents.
So they mix and match all kinds of different forms of data to make this graph, which is a no-no. Either you stick to only accidents, only direct deaths or do all possible deaths that is possibly caused by an energy source, like they do for fossil fuels.
Not doing so makes the graph seem like some kind of joke.
I mistook this as being pro nuclear weapon instead of pro nuclear power lol.
Once the rest of the world finds our about Asia's Thorium and "Red Hydrogen" they are going to leave the West in the manufacturing dust pile.
"Red Hydrogen" is the process of using Helium instead of water to cool the Uranium reaction...reaching a tremendous 1000 Celsius temperatures.
This heat is useful to rapidly split water into hydrogen and oxygen to use as fuels later. (America has a process called "Blue Hydrogen" which does the same thing with natural gas)
Thorium is like a "Red Hydrogen" nuclear reactor in that it doesn't require water or being near water to control the "Speed" of the nuclear reaction. Thorium is much safer in regards to "runaway" reaction speeds and temperatures.
The point being, if you can sustain 1000+ Celsius temperatures you have a clean steel industry...mining industry...everything gets cleaned up with these high temperatures.
The West is working on HVDC (underwater electric cables) that Asia has to ship electricity nearly a 1000 miles...but, the West wants to use solar panels...
Also, nuclear can produce a plasma from the high temperatures and send the plasma through a magnet to produce electricity directly without using steam and turbines at all.
I think the issue has moved away from Nuclear...but, what the Woke globalists want with WEF, ESG, CBDC, FedNow, etc. It isn't about climate change or "Carbon"
The European Commission is being sued by environmental campaigners over a decision to include gas and nuclear in an EU guide to “green” investments.
Eight national and regional Greenpeace organisations including France, Germany and EU office in Brussels are asking the court to rule the inclusion of gas and nuclear invalid.
I totally support Greenpeace in this. Neither nuclear nor gas should be considered a "green" investment. Ia Aanstoot, the "18 year old climate activist", is wrong to support the European Commission's stance on this.
Why do I feel like the call for more nuclear power has just been another sneaky ass ploy by Russia to use resources as a source for power?
Edit: yup. Thanks for convincing me.
legalize nuclear bombs
I always feel like I'm taking fucking crazy pill when we talk about nuclear energy.
Are we forgetting Chernoble, 3 mile island, or even more recenlty fukishima?
Sure, nuclear energy is great, cheap and reliable.. but IF something goes catastrophically wrong, like I dunno.. earth quakes, hurricanes, tornados, floods, etc (IE things we can't really plan for) you run the risk of not being able to fix it easily...
I guess I"m not a huge fan of making large swaths of the earth uninhabital if shit goes sideways.
Not News. Not Reasonable.
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More pro nuke propagate while Japan dumps waste into the ocean. Perfect timing actually. to all the haters and downvaters I give you a link showing how solar and wind are cheaper and better. Of course you will ignore it. Who needs evidence when you're already sold amirite
KPFA - The Ralph Nader Radio Hour: The False Promise of Small Nuclear Reactors – The Ralph Nader Radio Hour – August 21, 2023
Episode webpage: https://kpfa.org/program/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour/
Media file: https://archives.kpfa.org/data/20230821-Mon1100.mp3