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Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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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.
People tend to overrate the harms from potential changes, while simultaneously vastly underrating the harms that already exist that they’ve gotten used to.
This is the most wise thing I've read today. We all know it, but it needs to be said more.
A lot of the anti-nuclear sentiment comes from the 80s when the concerns were a lot more valid (and likely before half the pro-nuclear people in this thread were born).
But blaming people on social media for blocking progress on it is a stretch. They're multi-billion dollar projects. Have any major governments or businesses actually proposed building more but then buckled to public pressure?
Anyway, I'm glad this conversation has made it to Lemmy because I've long suspected the conspicuous popularly and regularity of posts like this on Reddit was the work of a mining lobby that can't deny climate change anymore, but won't tolerate profits falling.
At least part of the billion dollar cost is the endless court fights and environmental impact reports before you can even break ground.
Like every other piece of infrastructure. Are you actually advocating that people should just be able to build power plants wherever they want?
No, I'm saying the opposition to nuclear plants is uniquely strident. It's almost easier to get a new coal plant built. And it shouldn't be.
Okay sure, I can see how that would plausibly be true, even if I haven't bothered to check it genuinely is.
But why were "environmental impact reports" lumped in with your criticism of the process?
Usually the only people throwing tantrums over those are property developers upset they can't bulldoze forests full of endangered species or heritage buildings and replace them with high density housing.
An EIR covers the effects to the human environment as well as the wild. So the effect to land value and perceived fear of the neighbors are part of that, regardless of any actual risk.
I saw one article which said a company spent $500 million just on the design and bureaucracy to file an application. Before a single shovel of dirt was moved.
Yes, I am aware of what an EIR is and what it covers. I'm also aware of their shortcomings, but I'm also aware of exactly who would make hundreds of millions of dollars (and at whose expense) if they were scrapped.
How much did that company spend on articles complaining about how much they spent?
The poor little things clearly had $500 million to spend and still believed they could profit from the building despite that.
You also danced around how much of that was actually spent on an EIR and what the context of it was, so deliberately that it makes me wonder if it's in your self interest to spread FUD.
What exactly does "design and bureaucracy" mean? Site selection, zoning approval, architectural design, engineering, EIRs, geotechnical surveys, legal fees for contracts and submissions could all fall under that extremely broad category.
My parents, who are boomers, are vocally anti nuclear because when they were children through young adulthood, had weekly nuclear drills. Stop, drop and roll. They thought it was ridiculous, and believe that all nuclear technology should be destroyed as it leads to nuclear weapons. They also strongly believe that the human race will make itself extinct in a nuclear war any moment now.
Mining lobby? You realize that most of what is mined are the roughly 2 billion tons of iron ore annually. While uranium mining is what... 50,000 tons a year?
There is no version of Earth where mining executives say "It's fine, our profits are already profitable enough".
Astro-turf is cheap and uranium is expensive -- something you conviently left out to focus purely on tonnage, which bears little relation to profitability.
The biggest enemy of the left is the right, it's just that everyone on the left can agree that they're terrible so it doesn't come up in discourse too much, whereas the people who are on your side but want to do things a different way will take up much more of your attention.
How do you plan to reach 80% non-carbon-based energy by 2030? That's the current stated goal by the Biden Admin, and it's arguably not aggressive enough. Nuclear plants take a minimum of 5 years to build, but that's laughably optimistic. It's more like 10.
SMR development projects, even if they succeed, won't be reaching mass production before 2030.
The clock has run out; it has nothing to do with waste or disasters. Greenpeace won.
And in doing so, helped doom us all together with big oil, gas and coal.
This is why I'm very wary of groups that are environmentalists vs groups of scientists. I have strong distaste for the former as woo woo people who only follow the science when it's convenient.
10 years from now, you might be in a situation where the grid is unstable and capacity is insufficient in front of demand. You will also be facing potential renewal of existing solar panels, wind farms, batteries storage, etc.
If you lack capacity, any attempt at industry relocation locally will be a pipe-dream.
And at that time, you'll say either "it's too late to rely on nuclear now" or "fortunately we're about to get these new power plants running". You're not building any nuclear power plan for immediate needs, you're building for the next decades.
Meanwhile, one country will be ready to take on "clean production" and be very attractive to industrial projects because it already planned all of that years ago and companies will be able to claim "green manufacturing". That country is... China!
Except we know how to avoid that. The wind often blows when the sun isn't shining. We have tons of historical weather data on the lulls in between. That gives us how much capacity we need to ride out those lulls.
Doing 100% wind+solar+storage is a tall order. Fortunately, we don't need to, at least not right away. There's some non-linear factors at work; going down to 95% or so means you need a fraction of the storage capacity for a reliable grid. The extra 5% is taken up by fossil fuel plants, and then only running as needed (something that's hard to do with nuclear, which is why adding it in a hybrid model isn't feasible). Since we're aiming for 80% non-carbon by 2030, this is basically what we're doing, anyway. Ramping up to 100% renewable from there is completely achievable.
China has macro level problems with the legacy of its one-child policy. It's going to have to support an aging population with too few young people in the factories. This will also hit over the next decade.
I really don't get this "nuclear as stepping stone" argument. Nuclear power plants take up to ten years to build. Also (at least here in Germany) nuclear power was expensive as hell and was heavily subsidized.
We have technology to replace coal and gas: Wind, solar, geothermal, etc. Why bother with nuclear and the waste we can't store properly...?
Because none of those (except hydro and geothermal, but those are both extremely location dependent) will deal with the baseload power generation we need. And don't just say we will make more batteries, lithium is already getting more expensive, and there may be global shortages in the next few years.
Is this the problem though? I mean: The sun is shining somewhere at all times and the wind is blowing somewhere at all times. Energy is being produced. The problem is either storing it (okay, batteries are expensive, I get it) or better: distributing it.
In Germany we have the problem that we are producing a surplus of wind energy in the north but currently we are not able to distribute the energy into the south of Germany which results in needing gas power plants in the south while at the same time shutting down wind generators in the north. This is obviously bad.
Upgrading our grid would solve this problem and would vastly reduce our need for gas energy. This is costly but is far from impossible.
Until we got a worldwide grid and cheap superconductor distribution, there will be gaps in coverage if you rely on just solar and wind. Of course there are many times when we have too much supply, but it's not all the time.
That's a little out of nowhere and I don't get what you're saying, but I totally agree with the rest
Yes, so we need change FAST. Not in 15 years when the nuclear plant is finally built, not in 20 years when it starts producing commercial power, not in 25 years when it finally offsets the carbon cost of the concrete to build it, not in 30 years when it breaks even on the cost and the company can think about building another, not in 35 years when it offsets the cost in money and carbon to decommission the thing in the future. Now, so we should be building windfarms, that are MASSIVELY cheaper per MW than nuclear and can be built in 6 months and have less of a carbon impact.
Any way you run the numbers, any metric you look at wind beats nuclear.
I used to be very very pro nuclear, then one day I tried to argue against someone and did the calculations myself.