Never understood the freakout over nuclear … when you measure up the long term statistics
Gas/Oil/Coal have killed more people over the past 100 years than nuclear ever did (even if you threw in the bombing deaths in Japan in WWII)
The deaths caused by gas/oil/coal are just not as dramatic … all those people died from global pollution, poisoning, early death, shortened lives, lung problems, bad health … and all by the millions
The problem is that the world needs a giant energy source as we transition in between … before we get to the point of using fully or primarily wind/solar/batteries, the world has to use several decades or a century or more of some big source of energy and most governments and industries are just banking on forcing everyone to stay on fossil fuels
It makes no sense at all to use this argument to reason in favor of building out energy generation that needs a decade+ to come online and which only ever works with massive corporate and state support.
Solar starts to work at the scale where a random dude in Pakistan screws a couple of panels on their roof without any permits. Nuclear starts to work at the scale where either a corporate behemoth (like GE or Siemens or Hitachi) or a multi-billionaire-financed startup sells a concept to a state-subsidized utility and then they collectively go through years of permits and construction.
Even if solar were a little more expensive per kWh at scale (which is mostly a matter of tuning the calculations the way you prefer), it’s just so! much! easier! to roll out.
And no, we don’t need an ever-increasing supply of power. What we actually need is for people to have a standard of life that they’re happy with. Which has some relation to use of energy but unlike what the article suggests, that correlation is nowhere near linear. People in the US don’t have proper healthcare, they live in sad places cut apart by vast car infrastructure, their cities are still suffering from the aftermath of redlining, etc. — their energy consumption is higher than in many parts of the EU, yet their standard of living is, on average, a lot lower.
Never understood the freakout over nuclear … when you measure up the long term statistics
Gas/Oil/Coal have killed more people over the past 100 years than nuclear ever did (even if you threw in the bombing deaths in Japan in WWII)
The deaths caused by gas/oil/coal are just not as dramatic … all those people died from global pollution, poisoning, early death, shortened lives, lung problems, bad health … and all by the millions
The general populace isn’t looking at statistics, they’re looking at scary news stories
The public is never good at stats, or complex ideas that cannot be converted into a good old fashioned sound bite.
Maths hardly ever change major policy by themselves. Often it’s only an accident of political necessity when policy is backed by statistics or science
The general public is one thing, but that doesn’t excuse the positions of activist organizations like Greenpeace that should’ve been better-informed.
Often, but not as a rule, progressive organizations age badly
And the article image of a screaming person.
I think all of us here agree that fossil energy sucks. Please instead compare against wind/solar/batteries, not fossil energy.
The problem is that the world needs a giant energy source as we transition in between … before we get to the point of using fully or primarily wind/solar/batteries, the world has to use several decades or a century or more of some big source of energy and most governments and industries are just banking on forcing everyone to stay on fossil fuels
It makes no sense at all to use this argument to reason in favor of building out energy generation that needs a decade+ to come online and which only ever works with massive corporate and state support.
Solar starts to work at the scale where a random dude in Pakistan screws a couple of panels on their roof without any permits. Nuclear starts to work at the scale where either a corporate behemoth (like GE or Siemens or Hitachi) or a multi-billionaire-financed startup sells a concept to a state-subsidized utility and then they collectively go through years of permits and construction.
Even if solar were a little more expensive per kWh at scale (which is mostly a matter of tuning the calculations the way you prefer), it’s just so! much! easier! to roll out.
And no, we don’t need an ever-increasing supply of power. What we actually need is for people to have a standard of life that they’re happy with. Which has some relation to use of energy but unlike what the article suggests, that correlation is nowhere near linear. People in the US don’t have proper healthcare, they live in sad places cut apart by vast car infrastructure, their cities are still suffering from the aftermath of redlining, etc. — their energy consumption is higher than in many parts of the EU, yet their standard of living is, on average, a lot lower.