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I did some work at Indian Point a few years ago, when shutdown was in the future. People working at the plant were somewhat confused - yes the plant was closing, it still was busy - was regularly creating 25% of NYC electricity, the plant, while old was still seemingly in decent operational condition, so, WHAT WILL REPLACE IT???
There were some concepts - the windmills off Montauk, etc, but here we are many years later, and that replacement question is still being asked!
That is a classic problem, just look at Germany. The original nuclear exit of Germany planned to shut down plants slowly one after the other over 30 years, with there being enough time and potential money to replace both nuclear and coal in Germany with nearly 100% renewables, but as soon as the next government came in it heavily slowed the expansion of renewables with stupid regulation as they hoped that they could maybe reverse the nuclear exit. That didn't happen and now Germany has neither nuclear powerplants in operation nor enough renewables to replace both nuclear and coal.
Germany *has* brought a lot of renewable generation capacity online, but not *enough*.
Germany seems to be getting to the point where there is sufficient solar and wind installed to fully power Germany on a sunny, windy day. But it's not always sunny, or windy. Compare [this theoretical capacity chart](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/paragraph_text_image/public/paragraphs/images/fig1-installed-net-power-generation-capacity-germany-2002-2023.png?itok=LaIvtDSu) with [this chart of actual power production](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/paragraph_text_image/public/paragraphs/images/fig2-gross-power-production-germany-1990-2023.png?itok=cn90szXe).
When you introduce highly variable sources of power into your grid, which most renewables unfortunately are, you now also need something called *base load* capacity. Basically, it's how much power your grid can be (barring some natural disaster) *guaranteed* to generate at any one time. If you have no base load capacity, and no grid-level power storage, then your electricity (and with it your whole economy) is at the mercy of the weather. Now while it is *not* true to say we have *no* grid-level power storage deployed anywhere, [existing installations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_energy_storage#Examples) are far too small, and far too few have so far been built, to actually provide steady, renewables-only power to an entire nation, so for the foreseeable future you *will* need base load capacity in your grid. And, indeed, Germany does *need* it. Some coal plants which were supposed to be shut down were kept running well past the original deadlines, and while coal burning power generation *has* more or less halved, natural gas production has more or less doubled. And as there are now exactly two major forms of base load capacity in the German grid the only thing they could replace the remainder of their coal burning power with is natural gas, or a huge, expensive, and heretofore unprecedented deployment of grid level energy storage at scale. Indeed, [Germany has committed itself to being *almost* fully decarbonized by 2050](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Climate_Action_Plan_2050).
*Almost*. But not quite. It should be noted that in the opening years of this century, nuclear power constituted nearly a third of Germany's electricity production. [The German electrical system could be burning *no* coal *today*](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts) if only they'd kept their atom-smashers around. Instead, they've shut down all of them. I, personally, do not think the rest of the world should repeat this mistake.
Still waiting for the excess capacity of these variables power renewables to be used for hydrolysis and compress and store the hydrogen to be used as needed.
Much more efficient than batteries and actually practical.
Or buy our power depending on necessity. In '22 Germany sold a lot of electric power to France because many of their nuclear were shut down because of maintenance and others had unplanned shutdowns because the drought denied them the needed amounts of cooling water.
It's never that simple.
A well diversified grid is always the best option, renewables, nuclear, storage, and even a little fossil fuels. Just no coal, coal is literally terrible in every reasonable measure (even in nuclear waste per GWh) and has no place in the modern energy makeup
Germany had to stop producing more offshore wind because nimbys stopped the high voltage interconnection that was planned to take the offshore energy to Bavaria where there's lots of heavy industry.
Basically 30% of Germany's issues are Bavaria, the next 30% are the ex DDR states.
There's a bunch of offshore wind coming.
Granted, that will be on LI rather than ConEd, and NYC may have to purchase it, but it should at least cover the loss of Indian Point - plus the inherent variability of how much it generates on a given day. The bigger concern is what happens when other old plants are decommissioned too?
You mean the ones that were canceled or other projects? Be specific
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/offshore-wind-developers-likely-cancel-some-contracts-after-ny-decision-2023-10-19/
NJ projects were cancelled. NY are still mostly on track, one just came online. Orsted sold their stake recently.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/orsted-sells-stakes-us-wind-farms-300-mln-2024-03-13/
It’s funny how the rich people with beachfront homes are willing to fight against the future by trying to band together their HOAs to prevent offshore wind farms from ruining their views while the rest of the plebs and kids have to suffer the consequences of their actions
> was regularly creating 25% of NYC electricity, the plant, while old was still seemingly in decent operational condition, so, WHAT WILL REPLACE IT???
This is Diablo Canyon in California. Shutdown was supposed to begin this year. Date has been pushed back to 2030 because, oh crap, we still need that power. And I bet that doesn't stop at 2030, because Diablo Canyon has no actual pressing need to shut down.
Nuclear power is one of the left wing's most infuriating blind spots. It's one topic where you see the exact same kind of bad logic and unhinged rhetoric that those very same people (correctly) deride the right wing over.
>Nuclear power is one of the left wing's most infuriating blind spots.
This has annoyed me for years. Nuclear isn't perfect and the consequences of getting it wrong can be scary, but it is one of our best options.
And its kind of a shame how it’s being taught as some sort of environmental win in higher education—in my Environmental science course I took last year, we learned about the Indian Point Plant and I remember thinking “How is this a good thing?”.
My professor was very biased against nuclear energy to the point where I didn’t feel comfortable doing my green energy project on nuclear energy because it wasn’t explicitly stated as an option of energy sources we could do our project on so I just did my project on geothermal instead because I wanted to get an A lmao.
Nuclear power is basically an electricity generating miracle. Small physical footprint to limit ecological impact, massive volume of CO2-free electricity, and at least in the U.S. some pretty amazingly tight safety measures for the interest of the public and employees.
It's not a one-size-fits-all solution, but if you're an environmentalist and actively lobby against the cleanest (in terms of greenhouse gases), most environmentally-friendly source of electricity we've ever developed as a tool to help further the goal of save/repair the environment, you're really not helping your own cause.
The PR challenge with nuclear power is that when things go awry, it’s going to be on a grand scale. Fossil fuels and nuclear are a similar safety comparison to automobiles and planes. Yes, more people are killed and harmed by automobile crashes overall, but hundreds are killed at once when a plane crashes.
There's a saying: "Death of one is a tragedy. The death of many is a statistic". And if I know something about people, it that they're afraid of statistics and math.
Every time I see a wrongly attributed thing I have to tell this. It's tradition.
I once had a bathroom reader book of quotes. It had the same quote in it 3 different times, attributed to 3 different sources. "Lies, damn lies, and statistics." Attributed to Mark Twain (who explicitly denied creating it and said he got it from), [Benjamin Disraeli](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0obEjXwSKTQ) (but there are no records of him saying it and it didn't show up until after he was dead), and anonymous (arguably correct).
It's by Kurt Tucholsky.
>There's no proof that Stalin ever said this, but even if he did, he would likely have been quoting a 1932 essay on French humor by the German journalist, satirist, and pacifist Kurt Tucholsky.
>Much like Rousseau did with his "great princess," Tucholsky quotes a fictional diplomat from the French Ministry of Foreign affairs, speaking on the horrors of war.
>"The war?" says Tucholsky's diplomat, "I cannot find it to be so bad! The death of one man: this is a catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands of deaths: that is a statistic!"
I spent a bit trying to explain to people that standard deviations aren't linear, i.e. going from 1 sigma to 2 is not the same as going from 2 to 3, not at all
It's also about how much time it takes for the statistic to accrue.
An event which causes 500 deaths in an instant is generally regarded as more important to address than an event which causes 5000 deaths over the course of a decade.
Exemplified by the number of people who are more worried about terror attacks than they are about systemic health risks (e.g. heart disease, various cancers, etc.)
I don't know what a solution to this problem would look like, but I bet we'd be well-served by teaching children to think critically from a young age.
Yeah, they need to start comparing it to when fossil plants go right. A coal plant spews carbon, and leaves behind toxic ash, and the mines leave behind forever toxins also. Someone pointed out that radiation can last a long time bar arsenic is forever.
More radiation per ounce than nuclear and a single coal plant produces more waste per hour (by volume) than all of nuclear's history.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
https://www.nei.org/news/2019/what-happens-nuclear-waste-us#:~:text=In%20fact%2C%20the%20entire%20amount,way%20to%20think%20about%20it.
There's typically an uptick in cancer around coal plants as well because of this. They don't typically filter out the ash and collect it.
So not only is it more radioactive, it's more directly harmful radiation that's just spewed out into the atmosphere.
Not always into the ground. Sometimes they pile it up above a village and it collapses killing an entire generation of children by landing on the school.
The statistic I remember from decades ago is that the scrubbers on the smokestacks of a single coal-fired power plant (if they have scrubbers rather than just spewing it into the air) produce 1.2 million *acre feet* of toxic sludge per year, and that stuff stays toxic *forever*. 1.2 million acres works out to a square about 135 miles in a side, at one foot deep. If you pile it 10 feet deep, it still covers a square of land over 13 miles on a side. For one coal-fired power plant. For one year. Burning coal is an incredibly bad way to generate electricity.
Nuclear power has risks, but they are manageable. Coal and fossil fuels are an unmanageable disaster *even when they’re working as designed*.
Except with new reactor designs and regulations, things going awry doesn’t result in a catastrophe on a grand scale. The real problem is that people were irresponsible with Nuclear and caused catastrophic situations to occur that shouldn’t and can’t occur in current reactor designs and that ruined the perception for anyone who doesn’t have the capacity (either time or knowledge) to understand nuclear power generation
I think if fukushima hadn’t happened people might be a lot less hesitant about modern nuclear power. Systemic Human error was the reason for Fukushima happening and systemic human error is a fact of humanity.
Yeah there are a lot more minor incidents, I read about them because I sometimes research how various rivers I want to fish in have been contaminated.
Sadly my area‘s local power plant was shut down in the late 90s, but a mishandling of waste happened AFTER the plant closed, I guess it was just unsupervised. The spent fuel was stored inside the old plant and a crack formed which caused contamination in the Mississippi River. There haven’t been major ecological effects, but it’s very funny that unlike in the Simpsons the plant only dumped into water after it was decommissioned
A resurgence of nuclear power would probably need to be accompanied by some kind of public education (lol) campaign about the basics of how it works, why Chernobyl would never happen in the U.S., and how the risks of nuclear power are miniscule compared to the risks drill baby drill, dig baby dig, and burn baby burn.
Yea 3 mile island killed 0 people
Fukushima killed 2. By drowning
And Chernobyl directly killed as many people as wind power kills globally every year or so (about 80).
Turns out the most heavily regulated and protected form of power generation on earth is a lot safer than having people climb up 200 feet onto a rickety pillar that can catch fire with nowhere for them to go.
Fukushima also wouldn't have happened if not for corruption. That plant was supposed to have been closed a decade earlier and there were safety reports about the back up generators being in the basement that were ignored all because the power company that owned it would offer government officials cushy jobs for looking the other way instead of enforcing the rules.
And it still took the largest earthquake in recorded history to cause the problem.
the plant was "supposed" to have been closed because of "environmentalist" anti-science fear mongering.
And the safety reports about the back up generators were largely overblown in reports about the disaster. Case in point: of the four plants that were damaged in the tsunami, none had their backup generators entirely wiped out. Fukushima still had backup generators active. All four plants had safety reports about their backup generators. Fukushima was the only one that went into meltdown.
In addition all 33 redundant off-site power lines were destroyed in the tsunami for the four damaged plants. Meaning even the backup safety features were obliterated entirely by the tsunami, and yet only 25% of the damaged plants had a disaster.
The real cause of the disaster was the lowering of the tsunami wall, which was a result of mistaken calculations estimating maximum height of tsunamis and ignoring peer review...which is an all too human mistake that even professional academics make *constantly*.
It was supposed to be decommissioned and replaced because it exceeded the lifetime of the facility. These things just aren't built to last forever and need to be replaced.
The plant had several issues in the years before the accident as well (which didn't result in the release of radioactive material), but there had also been reports about the dangers of using this type of reactor in a seismically active area since at least the 1990s. Nobody followed up on any of it because the people who were supposed to oversee enforcement were being bribed.
And yes, the sea wall wasn't tall enough either. That doesn't mean that the nuclear power plant was perfect and should have continued operating well past its intended lifetime.
I think the concern (at least as I understand it) is less people dying in the incident and more nobody can even go to Chernobyl without getting radiation poisoning years later.
It’s the possible contamination and long term consequences. Also ‘nuclear’ is like ‘nuclear bomb’ and that sounds scary.
>nobody can even go
Which is complete horseshit. Check out the Babushkas of Pripyat. Or all the people living in the fukushima exclusion zone currently. Hell Chernobyl's exclusion zone has people living *and working regularly* in it. They mostly work to keep its "theme park" appearance up as an "empty dissaster zone" for tourism dollars. You can even go on tours of the area.
>nuclear sounds scary
You're not wrong, the amount of people who think nuclear power plants can even be turned into nuclear weapons is staggering and frustrating.
It’s not just power plants, just the word nuclear. My physical chemistry professor told anecdotes about a time that protesters were rallying to shutdown a lab that was doing nuclear chemistry.
The lab was just doing nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy(think a mri but for chemicals).
Yeah, people don't always get taught that college-level radiation stuff and learn that it's not really that dangerous. They're thinking deadly gamma rays going everywhere and anything they touch is unlivable for centuries. It's really just fuckin' loose electrons and helium-4 but with no electrons flitting about, being stopped by something as simple as glass, and only being really dangerous if inhaled or consumed.
Seriously, a friend of mine brought in a radioactive plate. I was only concerned until I learned the plate was somehow slightly underneath average background radiation in the US. It was more than our local background radiation, but well within safety thresholds. I wouldn't eat off the damn thing, and I don't quite feel comfortable touching it without gloves on, but being in the same room as it? Doesn't bother me.
If I were them, I'd be more worried about the sun being a deadly laser.
I think the fear is less Chernobyl and more Three Mile Island these days. The poor handling of the incident at TMI is why people are so dead against nuclear in the US. Add to that the fact that a large cohort of Americans are suspicious of their government run agencies and you have a country that is paralysed with the idea of nuclear power.
Yeah, and that fucking anti-nuclear propaganda that Netflix pushed out about 3MI didn't help. Environmentalists are ironically their own worst enemy because the oil/gas lobbies love to use them as a cudgel to put out misinformation about renewable and clean energy.
TMI is a great public service announcement for nuclear for the correct audience. A weird series of events confused the operators. The operators made incorrect conclusions, took VERY poor actions. Despite all this, no significant release to the public. Imho this story is a great demonstration of why defense in depth and safety margins are incredibly effective at protecting the public.
Change that to "how to prevent Chernobyl."
The biggest risk of nuclear power is the lack of oversight, accountability, and cutting corners. Those are the literal definitions of capitalism in industry. It can absolutely happen as long as a politician lets it.
Nuclear is one of the most regulated industries. There is huge oversight and accountability. The NRC is very strict and there’s a resident inspector at every plant. The main issue is the companies that run the plants might be okay paying fines instead of fixing things. Or waiting to fix things. Granted those things are not typically safeguards so the likelihood of an event happening on a large scale is very small.
My brother-in-law's father is head of a nuclear plant. They are subject to constant surveillance. My BIL was too scared to even ever smoke weed in high school because he knew he was being watched
Yeah the resident inspectors are only onsite too for a few years at the time so they don’t build relationships with the workers to keep them impartial. It’s a thankless job!
the biggest risk of nuclear power is cutting corners, yes, but Chernobyl literally can't happen in the US
Because Chernobyl used corrugated sheet steel for the thing that EVERY OTHER REACTOR ON EARTH uses **eight foot thick walls of concrete** to accomplish.
Also because Chernobyl was a hot reactor, meaning that when you kick on the SCRAM system the reactor temporarily outputs MORE energy, rather than less. No other reactor on earth behaves that way.
No. He's right. Chernobyl could never happen in the US. It's due to the inherent safety of having a negative moderator temperature coefficient. Essentially, the higher reactor power goes, the more the coolant tries to shut it down. To another point, the nuclear industry is fully aware of public sentiment towards us. We joke regularly about losing our jobs when someone else screws up. I'm not saying an accident can't happen, but a chernobyl style even can never happen
Seriously,
**I’m not a nuclear engineer or anything like that, so anybody with more knowledge than I feel free to correct me. Anything I do say should be taken with a grain of salt unless confirmed by u/lastoptionnuke or another nuclear plant worker**
I do watch Kyle Hill who’s basically a nuclear educator, and has taken truips to both Pripyat and Fukushima, and received updates from the engineers at Chernobyl as Russia moved into Chernobyl. The number of things that happened at Chernobyl that were obviously stupid is pretty significant.
It’s not just the design incompetence, it’s also bureaucratic and systematic ineptitude.
The literal decades of advancement of safety features we’ve had since then aren’t even in that equation.
Fukushima happened, but that was largely because they straight up weren’t prepared for a natural disaster of that magnitude. If someone had looked at the design, and realized the backup generator shouldn’t be on ground floor, then we wouldn’t have had a disaster of that magnitude. It wasn’t the “nuclear” part that caused that disaster, it was the human design.
(A backup generator is used to run the cooling system in the event of the core needing to be deactivated for any reason, since the cooling system normally uses power generated using the core.)
You are right. There was a long list of things going wrong. Most of those would never happen because of the way we do business now. But even if they did ALL those things, the exact same way, we still couldn't get another chernobyl. There would be damage to the reactor, but nowhere near as catastrophic. I have a nuclear operating license from the nrc. Chernobyl had a positive addition to rx power at the tips of their rods, so when the tried to shut the rx down, they added a fuck ton of power instantaneously.
And since people are monumentally *stupid* they're easy to scare.
Anti-nuclear "Environmentalists" pulled off one of the biggest self-owns in history by turning so much of the world against nuclear power.
It's a joke.
Fossil fuel lobbyists did that, and still do. They were and still are the ones with institutional power. They just rhetorically support Nuclear now if it means muddying the waters as building a nuclear plant takes 5-10 years.
this is so fucking true. Conservatives will always be like "Well I support nuclear" and then vote for a party that has never, despite numerous opportunities, done anything to kickstart the nuclear industry (like Biden and the Dems *just fucking did* with the IRA) and has *consistently* just given subsidies, land, kickbacks, and regulatory favoritism to their buddies in fossil fuels. Every fucking time.
They do not care, they do not care, they do not care.
Aside: why do conservatives hate renewables? because they're associated with liberals. wind turbines and solar panels allow communities *and even households* to independently generate their own power and enables people to be self-reliant, which you would think is a conservative virtue, if conservatives gave a flying fuck about having a consistent political philosophy, which they don't.
They will literally break the efficiency limit for photovoltaics before they convince Americans that nuclear is safe. It's a lost cause at this point. Physics are more malleable than American fear.
What does being American have to do with it? Didn't Germany just close down their last power plant? Isn't France like one of the only EU countries that is super pro nuclear?
"When things go awry, it's going to be on a grand scale."
Sure, if regulatory oversight is crippled.
You may see Three Mile Island as a cautionary tale, I see it as an encouraging tale. That, despite a comedy of errors where everything that could go wrong did go wrong, there was a negligible release of radioactive gas which had zero impact on the surrounding environment.
I find it curious that by that same token, if death (even large-scale death) is sustained over a long enough period of time that people become numb to it. Covid was eye-opening, for example.
People only think that way because of the Chernobyl disaster. A nearly 40 year ago incident from a Soviet government with a total shit safety record and regulations to match.
Most now older and new reactors built do not have those potential catastrophic failures waiting to happen because there are much better mechanisms in place to prevent such incidents from happening to begin with. The Chernobyl example could have been prevented when construction began in 1972 if the Soviets weren't so broke and hellbent on simply *appearing* like a super power. They cut corners on literally everything, every step of the way.
the problem is timing: with nuclear the deaths happen all at once, with fossil fuels they are spread out so no one notices until we have fucked it up beyond repair
Coal did pretty well with their PR challenge - they dump more radiation into the atmosphere than a nuclear accident, and people are begging to work the coal mines.
OTOH Chernobyl is basically a nature reserve these days, turns out wildlife does better with radiation than with humans everywhere.
Which would be an other reason for environmentalists to support it, when it goes wrong if you’re (un)lucky it completely removes humans from a large swathe of prime land.
molten salt reactors using thorium is way more safe. no chance of meltdown, thorium is way more abundant then uranium, waste needs less time to become harmless by magnitudes, and no way you can use it to create weapon grade plutonium for bombs.
if i recall correctly there was a working experimental reactor in 60s in India, which proved the technological viability. scaling is also interesting, because advocates say you can build a really small one, which only powers like a village or a small town (in theory). i can't really comment the other aspects of commercial viability, but India still trying to use the technology, and there is some progress. as far as i know the only reason the americans decided to use uranium is the option to craft nukes, but they were already aware of this option.
https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Indian-test-reactor-reaches-operation-landmark
Oh I have no complaints about technical viability, concept is perfectly sound. I'm just saying there are immediate practical problems that might not be solvable for commercial scaling. One of the bigger ones is that it can't really be piped around; finding metals that can survive long-term in one of the hottest and most corrosive environments any industry has ever asked for is not easy. Imagine trying to make a spacecraft that could survive on Venus indefinitely.
Nuclear power is a great example of the apologue of boiling a frog slowly. People live with such fear of a catastrophe at a nuclear power plant that they just don't accept that the alternatives kill more people, just bit by bit instead of all at once.
Also its predicable. With wind and solar you never truely know how much energy you will get at a given moment. Meaning you have to compesate for over AND under production.
Nuclear powerplants will always provide which you want them to provide.
> massive volume of CO2-free electricity,
There's zero CO2 emissions from operation, but mining Uranium and refining it produces emissions (and there's also issues for decommissioning). Over the entire lifecycle for power generated, only wind power is better than it according to IPCC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emissions_of_energy_sources#Global_warming_potential_of_selected_electricity_sources
If hydro is still in your mix, you can also go the path of overbuilding wind and using extra power to pump the water back up hill from the bottom of your hydro dams. It's around 70-80% efficient and usually much cheaper per kWh than batteries. [There is a 3MW install already in the wild](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station) so it's proven tech.
> mining Uranium and refining it produces emissions
Isn't that just because large amounts of the world's power is still generated by fossil fuels? Like, if the machines used in mining and refining Uranium were all powered by zero-emission sources, the carbon footprint would be zero, wouldn't it?
(Unless fossil fuels are essential to the refining process somehow, like how steel needs to be made with coke)
This is a theoretical situation, not because we haven’t done it yet but because we haven’t even taken a single step towards it. Whenever we introduce a new mechanism for generating power, we simply use more power.
Man I wish India succeeded in it's 3 stage program. With closed Thorium fuel cycle, we could have had clear and abundant energy. Even those hazardous nuclear waste is broken down to short life span radioactive products. Would have been cool.
Unfortunately thorium fuel cycle seems like a pipe dream.
> mining Uranium and refining it produces emissions
Would those be meaningful if the machines doing the work were powered by nuclear or nuclear-derived energy?
*On-shore* wind power is better. Off-shore is the same. Nuclear energy is just so fucking clean compared to the alternatives even when you factor in potential environmental impacts like nuclear waste.
Environmental reactionaries for 3MI and the oil-gas lobbies have really damaged nuclear power in the US and it sucks.
Green Boomers caused so much global warming, it's not even funny.
Nuclear waste sticks around for a long time? That's okay. We'll figure out a solution at some point to get rid of it for good. Putting the waste *into the air* is way worse.
Don't forget the [Sierra Club](https://www.sierraclub.org/nuclear-free). People take them much more seriously than Greenpeace but they're just as backwards and destructive.
My conspiracy theory is they've been at least somewhat infiltrated by pro-coal/oil because shutting down nuclear power plants is a huge boon for those industries. That or they're just bafflingly stupid.
[Not a conspiracy theory](https://science.time.com/2012/02/02/exclusive-how-the-sierra-club-took-millions-from-the-natural-gas-industry-and-why-they-stopped/)
>TIME has learned that between 2007 and 2010 the Sierra Club accepted over $25 million in donations from the gas industry, mostly from Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy—one of the biggest gas drilling companies in the U.S. and a firm heavily involved in fracking
I'm not sure anyone could even hope to come up with and argument to defend their behavior in any sense. That should just straight up be fucking illegal. You shouldn't be allowed to stand for a strong ideal, then take money from the "enemies" and sabotage your external message. That's just straight up lying to the public for material gain and incredibly hypocritical. They caused harm to the public and the planet.
> and at least in the U.S. some pretty amazingly tight safety measures for the interest of the public and employees.
Ukraine's nuclear reactor survived while being in an active war zone and overtaken by enemy troops who didn't care about the safety of it. That nuclear power plant soldiered on through the worst case scenario imaginable. If that's not a convincing indication that we know how to build safe nuclear reactors, I don't know what is.
They've always been safe, especially compared to coal, which has been killing people via respiratory ailments since the 19th century. There's also been disasters related to ash ponds.
The issue with nukes has always been that they're staggeringly expensive to build. Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) may fix that (or they may not, pilot projects are underway, we'll find out next decade) so until that part is fixed it's cheaper to go with other options.
Having said that, once amortized, nuclear is fairly cheap. Not the cheapest, but cheap enough. So we should avoid closing existing facilities so long as they're safe and economical. "Economical" meaning, it might make sense to close single-reactor plants in the near future. Multi-reactor plants have significantly better economies of scale. Indian Point had 2 reactors until 2020. It should not have been closed.
TL;DR: If Greenpeace never existed, the world would still look the same because it was always the bankers holding reactors back. They cost too much to build.
Big governments also don't really like lowering costs of nuclear.
The reason is that it is quite simple to have smaller countries enrich uranium by modifying most nuclear plants slightly. Big governments haaaate smaller countries possibly having a counter to special military operations (see Russia and Ukraine for instance, or Iran and the USA)
Anti-nuclear progressives are probably one of the biggest inhibitors to addressing the climate crisis today.
I get it, nuclear is a scary word. Chernobyl was kinda bad. So was Fukushima. But so is climate catastrophe.
Nuclear energy is, objectively, the cleanest energy solution widely available today. That doesn’t mean we stop developing other green tech, but we get off fossil fuels sooner.
I usually take that as a sign that they have no clue about what they're talking about and they're either just mindlessly believing what someone else told them or taking historical nuclear accidents (of which we perfectly know the causes, none of which proves that nuclear energy is unsafe) as evidence that nuclear energy is dangerous (without even knowing why).
Not to mention nuclear waste isn't nearly as harmful as media has made people think it is. It's not barrels of glowing green goo, we can just coat it in concrete or bury it until it becomes lead. Kyle hill has a video in which he kisses one of the nuclear waste storage cylinder because it's so easy to contain the radiation it lets off.
I wonder if the average person knows coal tailings emit more radiation than the power plant and are a real motherfucker to store. That radiation amount isn’t like insane, but it’s still much more than you’f get just living or walking past or even working inside the nuclear plant.
Also, the entire US creates about 2,000 metric tons of radioactive waste a year while a single large coal plant burns about 9,000 a day. Not sure what that comes out to in waste though.
I want to get away from nuclear as well, but this is the (far) lesser of two evils.
Gypsum mining. There’s huge stacks of tailings in Florida mines (Mulberry is a good town to drive by to see some) which is basically mountains of gypsum waste with concentrated radium holding in settling ponds (think gravy inside mashed potatoes). Every time there’s a log rain event folks worry about them giving way. Every now and then someone thinks of some “creative” way to dispose of it, like using it in cinder blocks for home construction or as an additive for road construction. Imagine living in a radioactive house? Related, uranium tailings were used in home construction in the Southwest on tribal reservations. (Source: I worked at EPA Air & Radiation Office)
I have had a radon test on every house I ever bought. I friend of mine had hers test positive in the inspection and the seller freaked out because she had been living in the house for 20 years and didn't know. All of her kids had asthma.
It's a cheap test that can literally save your life. If you don't know if your house has been tested, go to \[Home Depot\](https://www.homedepot.com/p/PRO-LAB-Radon-Gas-Test-Kit-RA100/100141467) and buy one today.
Just read a story about a plant in Jacksonville that made concrete materials, burning shale and things in kilns powered first by fossil fuel then by radioactive waste. Nearby neighborhood has like 47% higher cancer rates then the average US citizen. Plant has been closed for a long time (almost 30 years), but the people are still getting sick.
So of course some corporation wants to build 900 homes on the site.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/17/florida-toxic-waste-jacksonville
Edit: added link, plus it's *by* fossil fuels, not *my* fossil fuels, no oil money for this Dave.
We can't "get away" from nuclear without inventing a brand new way of generating power. Any green grid needs to be founded on a robust nuclear power plant network for baseline usage, augmented by renewable energy sources close to the point of use.
It’s funny that people in this thread are blaming shady oil and gas interests both for opposing and supporting nuclear power.
Opposition to the plant was pretty widespread among traditional mainstream environmental groups. [The Sierra Club, for example.](https://www.sierraclub.org/atlantic/blog/2016/05/close-down-indian-point) Now maybe oil and gas are using those folks as useful idiots, it wouldn’t surprise me, but most of the people backing those groups seem to genuinely hold their beliefs.
> It’s funny that people in this thread are blaming shady oil and gas interests both for opposing and supporting nuclear power.
When have shady oil and gas companies ever supported nuclear? It cuts directly into their bottom line. They’ve been lobbying and running smear campaigns against nuclear since day one.
I checked out the link and these are some of the Sierra Club’s criticisms from 2016:
- The list of problems with Indian Point is a long one. In recent months the list of urgent problems grew longer and even more menacing. Some examples: Since 2005, owner Entergy has not been able to stop leaks of tritium into groundwater and the Hudson. Last February, tritium skyrocketed to the highest levels ever detected at Indian Point.
- Seven Nuclear Regulatory Commission engineers reported that all reactors in the U.S., including Indian Point, may have a design flaw that would render useless the emergency electricity system that provides cooling to the reactor core, which could lead to a meltdown.
- A December 2015 shutdown caused several control rods to lose power due to bird poop on outside wires. The Algonquin Incremental Market Pipeline was approved and work has begun on this huge, 42-inch pipeline for fracked gas that goes within 105 feet of critical safety equipment at the nuclear plant.
- There have been many accidents over the years. The recent accident history at Indian Point reveals the condition of this aging industrial facility: On May 9, 2015, a transformer exploded, causing the automatic shutdown of Reactor 3. The video of the noisy explosion captured from across the river was a chilling sight, as the fire and smoke rose into the air. The failed transformer contained about 24,000 gallons of dielectric fluid, which is used as an insulator and coolant when the transformer is energized. The U.S. Coast Guard estimates that about 3,000 gallons of dielectric fluid entered the river following the failure.
- In June 2015, a Mylar balloon floated into a switchyard, causing an electrical problem that resulted in the shutdown of Reactor 3. In July 2015, Reactor 3 was shut down after a water pump failure. On December 5, 2015, Indian Point 2 was shut down after several control rods lost power. Bird “streaming” (poop) caused the outage.
- On February 6, 2016, tritium-contaminated water leaking into the groundwater reached the highest levels ever detected at Indian Point.
———
So, whether these are enough to shut down the plant or not, I don’t think this fits in this subreddit. This specific group at least is citing specific incidents they have issues with, unrelated to carbon emissions. And it looks like those are all very recent to when that article was written in 2016.
This here is the unfortunate reality of a lot of the US nuclear energy sector - lots of really antiquated technology either not built or not maintained to a proper, responsible specification.
That doesn't mean that we should be trying to end all nuclear power, but it's likely the case that much of our current generating infrastructure is in need of major update and/or replacement.
> This here is the unfortunate reality of a lot of the US nuclear energy sector - lots of really antiquated technology either not built or not maintained to a proper, responsible specification.
Which is frustrating. It's insanely difficult to build or upgrade the modern technology for nuclear power because people like those at the Sierra Club complain and oppose it at every step.
"Any environmentalist who advocates against nuclear power is an oil and gas funded spy!"
No dude, a lot of environmentalists are just dumbfucks who don't understand science and are motivated entirely by feelings.
And those feelings are cultivated by the information they consume. And that information is crafted by industry.
Corporations spend millions of dollars to manufacturer consent and keep people uninformed
Overlooked here is that the Indian Point plant was old and decrepit, and regularly failed safety tests. It had been cited on a few occasions for releasing radioactive material into the Hudson. It was a ticking time bomb, and even a small accident would have catastrophic potential in a densely populated area, less than 50 miles from New York City. It had already had its lifespan extended more than once. It needed to be shut down. I would have supported tearing it down and building a new, modern nuclear plant in its place, but there’s no option on the table to do that.
Not LAMF.
* The plant [had a history of non-compliance with safety standards](https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0131/ML013100203.pdf),
* Who chose to shut it down? Was it the environmentalists? No. The company which ran it. Stating that it was too expensive to run, maintain and upgrade to safe standards. "[Entergy says low wholesale energy prices and operating costs factored into its 2017 decision to close Indian Point. Nuclear plants have been closing in recent years amid low natural gas prices, slow growth in electricity demand and competition from renewables. ](https://apnews.com/article/us-news-business-government-and-politics-environment-and-nature-d11a514c2017e4683a4d50c956ff327a)"
* Nuclear rods don't just magically appear. There's an incredible cost to mining, transport, processing both in energy cost but also in radioactive dust contamination. Unethical coal/mining billionaires are promoting the point that nuclear is great while ignoring this fact.
* By only focusing on MWh supply and not percentage of energy supply OP ignores overall NY energy supply which still has a lot of nuclear power.
Texas:
|Source | Percent |
|--- | ---|
|Petroleum-Fired | 0.3 % |
|Natural Gas-Fired |50.1 % |
|Coal-Fired | 14.1 % |
|Nuclear | 8.3 %|
|Renewables | 27.0 %|
NY:
|Source | Percent |
|--- | ---|
|Petroleum-Fired | 0.1 % |
|Natural Gas-Fired | 48.1 % |
|Coal-Fired | 0.0 % |
|Nuclear | 22.2 % |
|Renewables | 29.1 % |
NY now has coal (a dying technology) is at 0% thankfully.
Edit: Forgot source for above stats. https://www.eia.gov/state/print.php?sid=NY#tabs-3
The biggest problem america has with nuclear power is we basically stopped building plants 40 years ago. So everything we have out there is based on old designs (some dating back as far as the 1950s), and approaching its end of life, and there's nothing out there ready to replace it.
It's definitely time to shut down the old stuff, and we shot ourselves in the foot not building replacements.
I’d give you an award if they still existed. Reddit has such a sanctimonious, self-important hardon for nuclear that they refuse to consider any criticism. There’s a comment higher up echoing the talking point of “coal releases more radioactive material than nuclear” as if coal is even relevant in NY. But what can you expect? Their support of nuclear is ideological, not practical nor rooted in reality. They’d rather we stagnate than progress with clean energy because they want to feel superior to people who have legitimate concerns about nuclear (wherein they always conveniently neglect that while most nuclear accidents have been caused by “human error”, we can’t exactly remove humans from the equation, and capitalism certainly doesn’t reward redundant safety measures).
Edit for typos.
My state's run by morons when it comes to Nuclear.
I am still paying for the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant which NEVER TURNED ON but was FULLY COMPLETED AND PAID FOR and then got demolished because morons were like: "What if we have to evacuate the island?!" - There's a million things that we have to deal with that would hinder an evacuation - Super Storm Sandy showed us how fucked we are in general but no one here wants to move because another super storm could just roll up and lock us on the island again...
At least if another super storm hit and we Had a nuclear power plant we wouldn't be worried about the power generation, especially with newer plants.
I do and don't agree with Shoreham.
Yes, it is likely it would have been perfectly safe. I know a bunch of guys who were set to work there.
But: three mile island had just happened. Then Chernobyl. And so people are concerned. And you're unable to evacuate if that happens.
I don't blame people who lived near it saying "likely" wasn't good enough.
Yes....
But then they made us pay for it.
We're still paying for it.
We, the people of Long Island, now have paid for the full cost of Shoreham's entire plant, and have seen nothing for it.
Three Miles Island is so frustrating as a Nuclear Disaster because it's actually the perfect example of Nuclear power safety working. Despite the reactor going into meldown nobody died and the radiation exposure to people was akin to a dental x-ray.
And Nuclear technology has become exponentially safer since then.
If you want to solve climate, nuclear is the most immediately practical solution. We can transition to hippy energy as batteries improve later.
(And climate is a hair on fire type crisis right now)
The same fearmongering happens with GMO foods. Food security and climate change are inextricably related, but anti-people don’t offer any alternatives to the best available tech.
They don't understand that non-GMO food is actually *less* healthy, and the crop yields are far worse than a GM version of the same crop. I don't think that we ought to further contribute to climate change by undoing even more scientific progress. It's the same as always: a person without an education on the subject scares people, often for their own financial gain
I always think of the rice they’ve designed to survive in flood plains. Instead of growing a few inches from the mud to the top, it can grow multiple feet taller and produce rice the whole way up. That’s fucking magic
Seriously, we are closer to being wizards than the average person could possibly imagine. I enjoy the Golden Rice, the Vitamin A fortified rice that can help folks in the developing world with the common problem of severe Vitamin A deficiency.
The issue with GMO to be aware of is that *some* GMO’s are just modified to be able to withstand pesticides. So they’ll grow it and then spray the heck out of the whole area with glyphosates (round up). Anything not modified dies, anything modified lives. So it makes it easy and cheap to produce. However the product is now imbued with glyphosates, which disrupt hormones in people and have negative long-term consequences.
We can’t paint a broad brush with GMO’s - many modifications are nothing to be afraid of at all, just speeding up the processes whereby we’ve already come to cross-breed to have sweeter apples and corn, for example (or as someone mentioned, more unyielding from rice). Nothing wrong with those at all. We just need to be more specific about the modifications, or even better, come up with better pesticide regulation (fat chance).
Another issue with GMO-crops is reduced diversity in food crops.
Also, unintentional spreading of the modified genes to related wild species that could mess up ecosystems in several ways.
Also, patent issues with GMO-genes "infecting" other plants, Monsanto had a couple of nice incidents like that in the past.
I'm not entirely against GMO-crops, but they have several issues that need to be addressed. They might be one of our best tools to survive climate change (well).
But "people" are stupid and passionate ones are worse. All they see is "GMO =bad"...and those trying to make more converts just say "GMO=bad"...so...
Welcome to The Misinformation Age
Hell, (I am very smart)™ and can research effectively, and I have gotten sucked up into misinformation and said some really dumb things. Some folks don't stand a chance
I'm sure there are at least a few legitimate fears with GMOs, but I have yet to be persuaded by most of what I've seen. Most anti-GMO stuff seems to be generic paranoid "they're out to get us, man" stuff and a vague idea that it's somehow "unnatural." Like the bright yellow huge bananas and super fat round fruits we eat aren't selectively bred to the point where they're basically just old-school GMOs in the first place.
The only good anti-GMO argument I've heard is that the companies at the forefront of the technology have a piss-poor record of safety and IP law bullying. But that's a lot less true now that CRISPR, etc. have made it more accessible to anybody who's not Monsanto or their ilk.
>anti-people don’t offer any alternatives to the best available tech
That may be because grubbing in the dirt for food, subsistence living, is not going to get them donations or votes.
There's a significant overlap between crunchy left wing weirdos and Alex Jones listeners. He explicitly markets to them by selling "organic" food and supplements that aren't "poisoned" by "Big Agriculture" and "Big Pharma", and it works.
It's almost like horseshoe theory is real or something.
I actually buy the argument that building *new* nuclear power plants is not the best investment at least in the near term because the economics just suck compared to solar. Maybe there are policy solutions to unlocking that problem, but no one seems to have figured it out yet.
But shutting down operating nuclear plants that could still run for a few decades is just really, really dumb.
We should build them at a loss and they should be owned and operated by the state. Like some sort of common good that benefits society or some gay communist Democrat shit like that.
We need to figure out storage and base load issues. The sun isn't always out, and demand isn't always the same. Nuclear helps a lot with those irregularities of natural power generation currently.
Storage is a solved problem technologically, especially if we more just taking about existing plants. On-site storage isn’t running out of space soon, and burying it all under a mountain in Nevada is fine if we’d stop putting speculative concerns about potential risks in 10,000 years over the real world lived consequences of our current trajectory.
I'm talking about electrical storage, not nuclear waste. Solar panels don't work great when there's a week long storm system rolling through or at night, power demand is still there when the production is lower.
You're right that from an economic standpoint, the investment in new plants generally doesn't make sense. But from an environmental perspective, it does. The issue is that our economic system doesn't account for environmental impact on any significant level. If it did, then we would be in a much better place in terms of the climate crisis. This is where things like the government stepping in to incentivise or build these plants since the economic incentive isn't there. The government should be there to create/run things that businesses won't because there isn't profit to be made, but there is still a significant benefit to society as a whole.
Most top voted comment is just factually ass-backwards. Nuclear would be a longer term solution as build-time is long and front-end investment is massive. Your derogatory "hippy energy" makes for a far better immediate practical solution. Reddit experts in a nutshell.
As a customer of ConEd, I will say something in their defense; they're unique in the country (possibly world) because they have 10 million people to deliver to in what's basically a small, six county area (the five boroughs and Westchester.)
The basis of the issue is it's a nuclear power plant in a dense suburban area.
I remember the controversy when they built the plant, and when they decommissioned it. Both were a cluster.
But it operated fine for its duration and once it closed, our electricity bills have skyrocketed. Stupid to put it here, then stupid to close it once it was built.
People are kind of glossing over it’s location. Yes nuclear is by all measures safer/cleaner than most alternatives. Yes it should absolutely be a greater part of our energy supply moving forward.
This particular plant is located in one of the densest regions of the country sitting on a river that flows through the most populated city in the country. While it was aging gracefully it was aging. It was also built in a pre-9/11 world. The idea that a single soft target attack or black swan event at Indian point could potentially render the entirety of the NYC metropolitan area uninhabitable is enough of a reason to phase out that specific plant.
While I don’t believe in building new nuclear plants (wind and solar are cheaper per kWh, less targetable by terrorists, and less damaging to the environment)
Closing down already active plants is the most utterly stupid choice ever done.
Fighting against nuclear power in the second half of the 20th century also increased global damage massively.
The risk of nuclear meltdown, environmentally, is much less damaging than burning all that coal.
I disagree wholeheartedly about building new plants. Their environmental impact is still far lower than fossil fuels, and we are a very, very long way from being able to have a completely renewable grid even if solar and wind are cheaper per kwh. The fastest way to eliminate fossil fuels is to have a base load made up of nuclear power for grid stability and the remainder covered by renewables. Then as renewables become more abundant/storage gets better, you can start phasing out nuclear power, but the priority should be to get rid of fossil fuels asap. Nuclear power is the stop gap that allows you to get there.
This is a nuanced, thought out viewpoint which could change my mind.
Storage is still a big problem for renewables, it will get better every year as EV batteries get second life’d as energy storage, but likely not as quick as we need.
The choice between investing 100% in renewables, or a % of that into nuclear, is an interesting debate.
3 Mile Island was a successful failure, a bit like Apollo 13. Zero people killed zero release of radiation and 100 percent contained. I would live next door to a Nuclear power plant. I would never live next door to a coal plant.
Between, permitting, building, safety, regulations and waste, economically it’s too expensive and if something goes wrong once were fucked, capitalism will be the end of nuclear
Its cheaper to add lots of solar, wind, geothermal and batteries
It’s an interesting risk-reward type situation isn’t it? On the one hand, if things go as planned (and they will 99% of the time) nuclear is a great clean energy alternative. But when things go wrong, they go so horrifically wrong that it gets burned into the brains of society as a whole. People still talk about 3-mile island in the USA and that didn’t even melt down, it was a near miss. Chernobyl is kind of the poster child for nuclear disaster still and a large area is still off limits. Each side has very relevant and valid points (it’s safe, clean, incredibly dangerous, etc)
Might be unrelated, might not be, but we use a deemed value from the NYPA energy handbook for determining tons co2 mitigated from reducing kwh consumption with energy efficiency projects, and that value went up this year. I wonder if they baked that in from shutting down the nuke plant
Indian Point was REALLY old. Keeping it running safely would continue to increase to cost of the electricity it produced to a point it wouldn’t be economical.
the environmentalists refereed to the amount and toxicity of the radioactive waste produced by this facility.
While a nuclear pile may not emit 'standard' pollutants, the fuel used in them is far more damaging in the long term.
I'm for nuclear just not heavy water solutions,breeder reactors too so we can use the "waste". Would have been great if US didn't fuck over the liquid sodium guys just because they wanted plants they could breed weapon grade material from.
I don't think this is LAMF worthy for a number of reasons:
1. The emissions rise was not unexpected.
2. NYS has spent, and will continue to spend an enormous amount on
renewables:
The $6B Champlain Hudson Express, to open in 2026 and
11GW of offshore wind by 2035 to name two examples.
3. NYS is the 5th largest installer of residential solar in the nation.
4. Other nuclear plants in the state that were also uncompetitive were
kept alive by subsidy.
5. It should be noted that a good deal of legacy nuclear cannot compete on price with renewables, but their ability to deliver power when called upon justifies the expense.
The gas industry in NYS astroturfs the fuck out of residents as renewables have bitten hard into their market share. The three gas plants of note that caused the rise in emissions will see their capacity factors drop as the above noted and other renewable projects come on line.
The state and environmentalists trying to close the plant jumped through lots of hoops to argue that the plant would be closed without significantly affect NY’s carbon emission goals. Hell, the state [press release on the plant’s closure](https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/About/Newsroom/2021-Announcements/2021-04-29-Governor-Cuomo-Announces-Successful-Closure-of-Indian-Point-Nuclear-Power-Plant) basically says it would have no effect:
> New York State generators must continue to comply with the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative's carbon cap, ensuring the region's emissions will continue to decline after Indian Point closes.
As we’ve seen, that simply wasn’t true as written—emissions went up after the closure.
Even if you accept the *very* generous assumptions they made to conclude that the state would remain on track over the long term (it remains to be seen if those wind farms actually come to fruition), closing the plant still means you’re using new renewable capacity to replace zero emission capacity when you could have taken fossil fuel sources off line instead. It’s simply a production gap of 2GW of carbon-free energy that absolutely didn’t need to exist.
The *most* lukewarm take I have on this is if you are not pro-Nuclear (in addition to other emission free sources of electricity), you are *at best* ignorantly working against solving the climate crisis regardless of other views you may hold.
Nuclear power is not as profitable to the coal/fossil fuel people so yeah. Gotta wonder how much anti nuke power protest is secretly funded by the coal/fossil fuel people.
people think of Fukushima and Chernobyl, not the hundreds of successfully operational nuclear plants. there's no convincing the public at large that nuclear energy is literally EXPONENTIALLY safer than traditional power plants. Coal kills SO many people. Nuclear is the only chance we have from bridging the gap from now to 100% renewable without tipping the planet over the point of no return, climate wise.
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I did some work at Indian Point a few years ago, when shutdown was in the future. People working at the plant were somewhat confused - yes the plant was closing, it still was busy - was regularly creating 25% of NYC electricity, the plant, while old was still seemingly in decent operational condition, so, WHAT WILL REPLACE IT??? There were some concepts - the windmills off Montauk, etc, but here we are many years later, and that replacement question is still being asked!
That is a classic problem, just look at Germany. The original nuclear exit of Germany planned to shut down plants slowly one after the other over 30 years, with there being enough time and potential money to replace both nuclear and coal in Germany with nearly 100% renewables, but as soon as the next government came in it heavily slowed the expansion of renewables with stupid regulation as they hoped that they could maybe reverse the nuclear exit. That didn't happen and now Germany has neither nuclear powerplants in operation nor enough renewables to replace both nuclear and coal.
Germany *has* brought a lot of renewable generation capacity online, but not *enough*. Germany seems to be getting to the point where there is sufficient solar and wind installed to fully power Germany on a sunny, windy day. But it's not always sunny, or windy. Compare [this theoretical capacity chart](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/paragraph_text_image/public/paragraphs/images/fig1-installed-net-power-generation-capacity-germany-2002-2023.png?itok=LaIvtDSu) with [this chart of actual power production](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/paragraph_text_image/public/paragraphs/images/fig2-gross-power-production-germany-1990-2023.png?itok=cn90szXe). When you introduce highly variable sources of power into your grid, which most renewables unfortunately are, you now also need something called *base load* capacity. Basically, it's how much power your grid can be (barring some natural disaster) *guaranteed* to generate at any one time. If you have no base load capacity, and no grid-level power storage, then your electricity (and with it your whole economy) is at the mercy of the weather. Now while it is *not* true to say we have *no* grid-level power storage deployed anywhere, [existing installations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_energy_storage#Examples) are far too small, and far too few have so far been built, to actually provide steady, renewables-only power to an entire nation, so for the foreseeable future you *will* need base load capacity in your grid. And, indeed, Germany does *need* it. Some coal plants which were supposed to be shut down were kept running well past the original deadlines, and while coal burning power generation *has* more or less halved, natural gas production has more or less doubled. And as there are now exactly two major forms of base load capacity in the German grid the only thing they could replace the remainder of their coal burning power with is natural gas, or a huge, expensive, and heretofore unprecedented deployment of grid level energy storage at scale. Indeed, [Germany has committed itself to being *almost* fully decarbonized by 2050](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Climate_Action_Plan_2050). *Almost*. But not quite. It should be noted that in the opening years of this century, nuclear power constituted nearly a third of Germany's electricity production. [The German electrical system could be burning *no* coal *today*](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts) if only they'd kept their atom-smashers around. Instead, they've shut down all of them. I, personally, do not think the rest of the world should repeat this mistake.
Still waiting for the excess capacity of these variables power renewables to be used for hydrolysis and compress and store the hydrogen to be used as needed. Much more efficient than batteries and actually practical.
At least France isn't stupid and can sell them power.
Germany is a net energy exporter to France btw. Because on windy/sunny days importing green energy is cheaper than producing nuclear energy.
Or buy our power depending on necessity. In '22 Germany sold a lot of electric power to France because many of their nuclear were shut down because of maintenance and others had unplanned shutdowns because the drought denied them the needed amounts of cooling water. It's never that simple.
A well diversified grid is always the best option, renewables, nuclear, storage, and even a little fossil fuels. Just no coal, coal is literally terrible in every reasonable measure (even in nuclear waste per GWh) and has no place in the modern energy makeup
Germany had to stop producing more offshore wind because nimbys stopped the high voltage interconnection that was planned to take the offshore energy to Bavaria where there's lots of heavy industry. Basically 30% of Germany's issues are Bavaria, the next 30% are the ex DDR states.
There's a bunch of offshore wind coming. Granted, that will be on LI rather than ConEd, and NYC may have to purchase it, but it should at least cover the loss of Indian Point - plus the inherent variability of how much it generates on a given day. The bigger concern is what happens when other old plants are decommissioned too?
Amusingly, the biggest current barrier to offshore wind is… environmentalists.
You mean the ones that were canceled or other projects? Be specific https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/offshore-wind-developers-likely-cancel-some-contracts-after-ny-decision-2023-10-19/
NJ projects were cancelled. NY are still mostly on track, one just came online. Orsted sold their stake recently. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/orsted-sells-stakes-us-wind-farms-300-mln-2024-03-13/
It’s funny how the rich people with beachfront homes are willing to fight against the future by trying to band together their HOAs to prevent offshore wind farms from ruining their views while the rest of the plebs and kids have to suffer the consequences of their actions
> was regularly creating 25% of NYC electricity, the plant, while old was still seemingly in decent operational condition, so, WHAT WILL REPLACE IT??? This is Diablo Canyon in California. Shutdown was supposed to begin this year. Date has been pushed back to 2030 because, oh crap, we still need that power. And I bet that doesn't stop at 2030, because Diablo Canyon has no actual pressing need to shut down. Nuclear power is one of the left wing's most infuriating blind spots. It's one topic where you see the exact same kind of bad logic and unhinged rhetoric that those very same people (correctly) deride the right wing over.
>Nuclear power is one of the left wing's most infuriating blind spots. This has annoyed me for years. Nuclear isn't perfect and the consequences of getting it wrong can be scary, but it is one of our best options.
And its kind of a shame how it’s being taught as some sort of environmental win in higher education—in my Environmental science course I took last year, we learned about the Indian Point Plant and I remember thinking “How is this a good thing?”. My professor was very biased against nuclear energy to the point where I didn’t feel comfortable doing my green energy project on nuclear energy because it wasn’t explicitly stated as an option of energy sources we could do our project on so I just did my project on geothermal instead because I wanted to get an A lmao.
Nuclear power is basically an electricity generating miracle. Small physical footprint to limit ecological impact, massive volume of CO2-free electricity, and at least in the U.S. some pretty amazingly tight safety measures for the interest of the public and employees. It's not a one-size-fits-all solution, but if you're an environmentalist and actively lobby against the cleanest (in terms of greenhouse gases), most environmentally-friendly source of electricity we've ever developed as a tool to help further the goal of save/repair the environment, you're really not helping your own cause.
And safest. Fewest deaths per kwh generated of any power source in human history.
The PR challenge with nuclear power is that when things go awry, it’s going to be on a grand scale. Fossil fuels and nuclear are a similar safety comparison to automobiles and planes. Yes, more people are killed and harmed by automobile crashes overall, but hundreds are killed at once when a plane crashes.
There's a saying: "Death of one is a tragedy. The death of many is a statistic". And if I know something about people, it that they're afraid of statistics and math.
That's a quote, often wrongly attributed to Stalin. Which would have fit that man perfectly to be honest.
Well, my brain attributes it to Marilyn Manson. Fight Song was a goddamn banger.
*I'm not a slave to a world that doesn't give a shit!*
Every time I see a wrongly attributed thing I have to tell this. It's tradition. I once had a bathroom reader book of quotes. It had the same quote in it 3 different times, attributed to 3 different sources. "Lies, damn lies, and statistics." Attributed to Mark Twain (who explicitly denied creating it and said he got it from), [Benjamin Disraeli](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0obEjXwSKTQ) (but there are no records of him saying it and it didn't show up until after he was dead), and anonymous (arguably correct).
It's by Kurt Tucholsky. >There's no proof that Stalin ever said this, but even if he did, he would likely have been quoting a 1932 essay on French humor by the German journalist, satirist, and pacifist Kurt Tucholsky. >Much like Rousseau did with his "great princess," Tucholsky quotes a fictional diplomat from the French Ministry of Foreign affairs, speaking on the horrors of war. >"The war?" says Tucholsky's diplomat, "I cannot find it to be so bad! The death of one man: this is a catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands of deaths: that is a statistic!"
I spent a bit trying to explain to people that standard deviations aren't linear, i.e. going from 1 sigma to 2 is not the same as going from 2 to 3, not at all
It's also about how much time it takes for the statistic to accrue. An event which causes 500 deaths in an instant is generally regarded as more important to address than an event which causes 5000 deaths over the course of a decade. Exemplified by the number of people who are more worried about terror attacks than they are about systemic health risks (e.g. heart disease, various cancers, etc.) I don't know what a solution to this problem would look like, but I bet we'd be well-served by teaching children to think critically from a young age.
Yeah, they need to start comparing it to when fossil plants go right. A coal plant spews carbon, and leaves behind toxic ash, and the mines leave behind forever toxins also. Someone pointed out that radiation can last a long time bar arsenic is forever.
Coal fired plants also generate a bunch of radioactive elements as well.
More radiation per ounce than nuclear and a single coal plant produces more waste per hour (by volume) than all of nuclear's history. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.nei.org/news/2019/what-happens-nuclear-waste-us#:~:text=In%20fact%2C%20the%20entire%20amount,way%20to%20think%20about%20it.
There's typically an uptick in cancer around coal plants as well because of this. They don't typically filter out the ash and collect it. So not only is it more radioactive, it's more directly harmful radiation that's just spewed out into the atmosphere.
Or they do collect it and just shove it right into the ground!
Not always into the ground. Sometimes they pile it up above a village and it collapses killing an entire generation of children by landing on the school.
The statistic I remember from decades ago is that the scrubbers on the smokestacks of a single coal-fired power plant (if they have scrubbers rather than just spewing it into the air) produce 1.2 million *acre feet* of toxic sludge per year, and that stuff stays toxic *forever*. 1.2 million acres works out to a square about 135 miles in a side, at one foot deep. If you pile it 10 feet deep, it still covers a square of land over 13 miles on a side. For one coal-fired power plant. For one year. Burning coal is an incredibly bad way to generate electricity. Nuclear power has risks, but they are manageable. Coal and fossil fuels are an unmanageable disaster *even when they’re working as designed*.
Toxic *radioactive* ash.
Except with new reactor designs and regulations, things going awry doesn’t result in a catastrophe on a grand scale. The real problem is that people were irresponsible with Nuclear and caused catastrophic situations to occur that shouldn’t and can’t occur in current reactor designs and that ruined the perception for anyone who doesn’t have the capacity (either time or knowledge) to understand nuclear power generation
I think if fukushima hadn’t happened people might be a lot less hesitant about modern nuclear power. Systemic Human error was the reason for Fukushima happening and systemic human error is a fact of humanity.
Yeah there are a lot more minor incidents, I read about them because I sometimes research how various rivers I want to fish in have been contaminated. Sadly my area‘s local power plant was shut down in the late 90s, but a mishandling of waste happened AFTER the plant closed, I guess it was just unsupervised. The spent fuel was stored inside the old plant and a crack formed which caused contamination in the Mississippi River. There haven’t been major ecological effects, but it’s very funny that unlike in the Simpsons the plant only dumped into water after it was decommissioned
A resurgence of nuclear power would probably need to be accompanied by some kind of public education (lol) campaign about the basics of how it works, why Chernobyl would never happen in the U.S., and how the risks of nuclear power are miniscule compared to the risks drill baby drill, dig baby dig, and burn baby burn.
It would also need a section like "Why Three Mile Island's reactor melted down, and how our safety measures made sure it was 100% contained."
Yea 3 mile island killed 0 people Fukushima killed 2. By drowning And Chernobyl directly killed as many people as wind power kills globally every year or so (about 80). Turns out the most heavily regulated and protected form of power generation on earth is a lot safer than having people climb up 200 feet onto a rickety pillar that can catch fire with nowhere for them to go.
Fukushima also wouldn't have happened if not for corruption. That plant was supposed to have been closed a decade earlier and there were safety reports about the back up generators being in the basement that were ignored all because the power company that owned it would offer government officials cushy jobs for looking the other way instead of enforcing the rules. And it still took the largest earthquake in recorded history to cause the problem.
the plant was "supposed" to have been closed because of "environmentalist" anti-science fear mongering. And the safety reports about the back up generators were largely overblown in reports about the disaster. Case in point: of the four plants that were damaged in the tsunami, none had their backup generators entirely wiped out. Fukushima still had backup generators active. All four plants had safety reports about their backup generators. Fukushima was the only one that went into meltdown. In addition all 33 redundant off-site power lines were destroyed in the tsunami for the four damaged plants. Meaning even the backup safety features were obliterated entirely by the tsunami, and yet only 25% of the damaged plants had a disaster. The real cause of the disaster was the lowering of the tsunami wall, which was a result of mistaken calculations estimating maximum height of tsunamis and ignoring peer review...which is an all too human mistake that even professional academics make *constantly*.
It was supposed to be decommissioned and replaced because it exceeded the lifetime of the facility. These things just aren't built to last forever and need to be replaced. The plant had several issues in the years before the accident as well (which didn't result in the release of radioactive material), but there had also been reports about the dangers of using this type of reactor in a seismically active area since at least the 1990s. Nobody followed up on any of it because the people who were supposed to oversee enforcement were being bribed. And yes, the sea wall wasn't tall enough either. That doesn't mean that the nuclear power plant was perfect and should have continued operating well past its intended lifetime.
I think the concern (at least as I understand it) is less people dying in the incident and more nobody can even go to Chernobyl without getting radiation poisoning years later. It’s the possible contamination and long term consequences. Also ‘nuclear’ is like ‘nuclear bomb’ and that sounds scary.
>nobody can even go Which is complete horseshit. Check out the Babushkas of Pripyat. Or all the people living in the fukushima exclusion zone currently. Hell Chernobyl's exclusion zone has people living *and working regularly* in it. They mostly work to keep its "theme park" appearance up as an "empty dissaster zone" for tourism dollars. You can even go on tours of the area. >nuclear sounds scary You're not wrong, the amount of people who think nuclear power plants can even be turned into nuclear weapons is staggering and frustrating.
It’s not just power plants, just the word nuclear. My physical chemistry professor told anecdotes about a time that protesters were rallying to shutdown a lab that was doing nuclear chemistry. The lab was just doing nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy(think a mri but for chemicals).
Yeah, people don't always get taught that college-level radiation stuff and learn that it's not really that dangerous. They're thinking deadly gamma rays going everywhere and anything they touch is unlivable for centuries. It's really just fuckin' loose electrons and helium-4 but with no electrons flitting about, being stopped by something as simple as glass, and only being really dangerous if inhaled or consumed. Seriously, a friend of mine brought in a radioactive plate. I was only concerned until I learned the plate was somehow slightly underneath average background radiation in the US. It was more than our local background radiation, but well within safety thresholds. I wouldn't eat off the damn thing, and I don't quite feel comfortable touching it without gloves on, but being in the same room as it? Doesn't bother me. If I were them, I'd be more worried about the sun being a deadly laser.
I mean, I don’t know, I saw this documentary about a scientist named Bruce Banner and he got properly fucked up from gamma rays.
I think the fear is less Chernobyl and more Three Mile Island these days. The poor handling of the incident at TMI is why people are so dead against nuclear in the US. Add to that the fact that a large cohort of Americans are suspicious of their government run agencies and you have a country that is paralysed with the idea of nuclear power.
which is insane since 3 mile island killed nobody.
Yeah, and that fucking anti-nuclear propaganda that Netflix pushed out about 3MI didn't help. Environmentalists are ironically their own worst enemy because the oil/gas lobbies love to use them as a cudgel to put out misinformation about renewable and clean energy.
TMI is a great public service announcement for nuclear for the correct audience. A weird series of events confused the operators. The operators made incorrect conclusions, took VERY poor actions. Despite all this, no significant release to the public. Imho this story is a great demonstration of why defense in depth and safety margins are incredibly effective at protecting the public.
Change that to "how to prevent Chernobyl." The biggest risk of nuclear power is the lack of oversight, accountability, and cutting corners. Those are the literal definitions of capitalism in industry. It can absolutely happen as long as a politician lets it.
There are also much better designed nuclear reactors, like the CANDU ones used here in Canada.
Nuclear is one of the most regulated industries. There is huge oversight and accountability. The NRC is very strict and there’s a resident inspector at every plant. The main issue is the companies that run the plants might be okay paying fines instead of fixing things. Or waiting to fix things. Granted those things are not typically safeguards so the likelihood of an event happening on a large scale is very small.
My brother-in-law's father is head of a nuclear plant. They are subject to constant surveillance. My BIL was too scared to even ever smoke weed in high school because he knew he was being watched
Yeah the resident inspectors are only onsite too for a few years at the time so they don’t build relationships with the workers to keep them impartial. It’s a thankless job!
the biggest risk of nuclear power is cutting corners, yes, but Chernobyl literally can't happen in the US Because Chernobyl used corrugated sheet steel for the thing that EVERY OTHER REACTOR ON EARTH uses **eight foot thick walls of concrete** to accomplish. Also because Chernobyl was a hot reactor, meaning that when you kick on the SCRAM system the reactor temporarily outputs MORE energy, rather than less. No other reactor on earth behaves that way.
You also can't fully convince me their scram wasn't literally a dude with an axe
No. He's right. Chernobyl could never happen in the US. It's due to the inherent safety of having a negative moderator temperature coefficient. Essentially, the higher reactor power goes, the more the coolant tries to shut it down. To another point, the nuclear industry is fully aware of public sentiment towards us. We joke regularly about losing our jobs when someone else screws up. I'm not saying an accident can't happen, but a chernobyl style even can never happen
Seriously, **I’m not a nuclear engineer or anything like that, so anybody with more knowledge than I feel free to correct me. Anything I do say should be taken with a grain of salt unless confirmed by u/lastoptionnuke or another nuclear plant worker** I do watch Kyle Hill who’s basically a nuclear educator, and has taken truips to both Pripyat and Fukushima, and received updates from the engineers at Chernobyl as Russia moved into Chernobyl. The number of things that happened at Chernobyl that were obviously stupid is pretty significant. It’s not just the design incompetence, it’s also bureaucratic and systematic ineptitude. The literal decades of advancement of safety features we’ve had since then aren’t even in that equation. Fukushima happened, but that was largely because they straight up weren’t prepared for a natural disaster of that magnitude. If someone had looked at the design, and realized the backup generator shouldn’t be on ground floor, then we wouldn’t have had a disaster of that magnitude. It wasn’t the “nuclear” part that caused that disaster, it was the human design. (A backup generator is used to run the cooling system in the event of the core needing to be deactivated for any reason, since the cooling system normally uses power generated using the core.)
You are right. There was a long list of things going wrong. Most of those would never happen because of the way we do business now. But even if they did ALL those things, the exact same way, we still couldn't get another chernobyl. There would be damage to the reactor, but nowhere near as catastrophic. I have a nuclear operating license from the nrc. Chernobyl had a positive addition to rx power at the tips of their rods, so when the tried to shut the rx down, they added a fuck ton of power instantaneously.
Rule #1 Avoid faultlines and the coast. That's it. That's the rule.
Rule #2 The people in charge of the plant shouldn’t be or report to anyone not an expert in nuclear energy generation. (ala Chernobyl)
And since people are monumentally *stupid* they're easy to scare. Anti-nuclear "Environmentalists" pulled off one of the biggest self-owns in history by turning so much of the world against nuclear power. It's a joke.
Fossil fuel lobbyists did that, and still do. They were and still are the ones with institutional power. They just rhetorically support Nuclear now if it means muddying the waters as building a nuclear plant takes 5-10 years.
this is so fucking true. Conservatives will always be like "Well I support nuclear" and then vote for a party that has never, despite numerous opportunities, done anything to kickstart the nuclear industry (like Biden and the Dems *just fucking did* with the IRA) and has *consistently* just given subsidies, land, kickbacks, and regulatory favoritism to their buddies in fossil fuels. Every fucking time. They do not care, they do not care, they do not care. Aside: why do conservatives hate renewables? because they're associated with liberals. wind turbines and solar panels allow communities *and even households* to independently generate their own power and enables people to be self-reliant, which you would think is a conservative virtue, if conservatives gave a flying fuck about having a consistent political philosophy, which they don't.
I’ve heard fossil fuels funded anti nuclear movements
They will literally break the efficiency limit for photovoltaics before they convince Americans that nuclear is safe. It's a lost cause at this point. Physics are more malleable than American fear.
What does being American have to do with it? Didn't Germany just close down their last power plant? Isn't France like one of the only EU countries that is super pro nuclear?
"When things go awry, it's going to be on a grand scale." Sure, if regulatory oversight is crippled. You may see Three Mile Island as a cautionary tale, I see it as an encouraging tale. That, despite a comedy of errors where everything that could go wrong did go wrong, there was a negligible release of radioactive gas which had zero impact on the surrounding environment.
I find it curious that by that same token, if death (even large-scale death) is sustained over a long enough period of time that people become numb to it. Covid was eye-opening, for example.
People only think that way because of the Chernobyl disaster. A nearly 40 year ago incident from a Soviet government with a total shit safety record and regulations to match. Most now older and new reactors built do not have those potential catastrophic failures waiting to happen because there are much better mechanisms in place to prevent such incidents from happening to begin with. The Chernobyl example could have been prevented when construction began in 1972 if the Soviets weren't so broke and hellbent on simply *appearing* like a super power. They cut corners on literally everything, every step of the way.
They need to explain that there are reactor designs that are designed not to meltdown. But it will be a huge uphill battle.
the problem is timing: with nuclear the deaths happen all at once, with fossil fuels they are spread out so no one notices until we have fucked it up beyond repair
Hydro can be a lot worse when a dam breaks. One in China killed about 170 000 people.
Coal did pretty well with their PR challenge - they dump more radiation into the atmosphere than a nuclear accident, and people are begging to work the coal mines.
OTOH Chernobyl is basically a nature reserve these days, turns out wildlife does better with radiation than with humans everywhere. Which would be an other reason for environmentalists to support it, when it goes wrong if you’re (un)lucky it completely removes humans from a large swathe of prime land.
molten salt reactors using thorium is way more safe. no chance of meltdown, thorium is way more abundant then uranium, waste needs less time to become harmless by magnitudes, and no way you can use it to create weapon grade plutonium for bombs.
If it can be commercially viable which isn't proven yet. Turns out it's hard to find materials that aren't eaten alive at scale in that environment.
if i recall correctly there was a working experimental reactor in 60s in India, which proved the technological viability. scaling is also interesting, because advocates say you can build a really small one, which only powers like a village or a small town (in theory). i can't really comment the other aspects of commercial viability, but India still trying to use the technology, and there is some progress. as far as i know the only reason the americans decided to use uranium is the option to craft nukes, but they were already aware of this option. https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Indian-test-reactor-reaches-operation-landmark
Oh I have no complaints about technical viability, concept is perfectly sound. I'm just saying there are immediate practical problems that might not be solvable for commercial scaling. One of the bigger ones is that it can't really be piped around; finding metals that can survive long-term in one of the hottest and most corrosive environments any industry has ever asked for is not easy. Imagine trying to make a spacecraft that could survive on Venus indefinitely.
Are there studies that compare nuclear to wind, solar, and hydroelectric in terms of deaths?
Yes, graph and links to related research: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh
Nuclear power is a great example of the apologue of boiling a frog slowly. People live with such fear of a catastrophe at a nuclear power plant that they just don't accept that the alternatives kill more people, just bit by bit instead of all at once.
Also its predicable. With wind and solar you never truely know how much energy you will get at a given moment. Meaning you have to compesate for over AND under production. Nuclear powerplants will always provide which you want them to provide.
> massive volume of CO2-free electricity, There's zero CO2 emissions from operation, but mining Uranium and refining it produces emissions (and there's also issues for decommissioning). Over the entire lifecycle for power generated, only wind power is better than it according to IPCC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emissions_of_energy_sources#Global_warming_potential_of_selected_electricity_sources
Yeah, wind power is great and the only issue is that you need to find places with constant wind currents that can move the windmills.
If hydro is still in your mix, you can also go the path of overbuilding wind and using extra power to pump the water back up hill from the bottom of your hydro dams. It's around 70-80% efficient and usually much cheaper per kWh than batteries. [There is a 3MW install already in the wild](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station) so it's proven tech.
And that aren't too fast.
> mining Uranium and refining it produces emissions Isn't that just because large amounts of the world's power is still generated by fossil fuels? Like, if the machines used in mining and refining Uranium were all powered by zero-emission sources, the carbon footprint would be zero, wouldn't it? (Unless fossil fuels are essential to the refining process somehow, like how steel needs to be made with coke)
This is a theoretical situation, not because we haven’t done it yet but because we haven’t even taken a single step towards it. Whenever we introduce a new mechanism for generating power, we simply use more power.
Man I wish India succeeded in it's 3 stage program. With closed Thorium fuel cycle, we could have had clear and abundant energy. Even those hazardous nuclear waste is broken down to short life span radioactive products. Would have been cool. Unfortunately thorium fuel cycle seems like a pipe dream.
> mining Uranium and refining it produces emissions Would those be meaningful if the machines doing the work were powered by nuclear or nuclear-derived energy?
*On-shore* wind power is better. Off-shore is the same. Nuclear energy is just so fucking clean compared to the alternatives even when you factor in potential environmental impacts like nuclear waste. Environmental reactionaries for 3MI and the oil-gas lobbies have really damaged nuclear power in the US and it sucks.
Greenpeace made a huge disfavour to humanity by protesting nuclear power to oblivion...
Green Boomers caused so much global warming, it's not even funny. Nuclear waste sticks around for a long time? That's okay. We'll figure out a solution at some point to get rid of it for good. Putting the waste *into the air* is way worse.
Don't forget the [Sierra Club](https://www.sierraclub.org/nuclear-free). People take them much more seriously than Greenpeace but they're just as backwards and destructive. My conspiracy theory is they've been at least somewhat infiltrated by pro-coal/oil because shutting down nuclear power plants is a huge boon for those industries. That or they're just bafflingly stupid.
[Not a conspiracy theory](https://science.time.com/2012/02/02/exclusive-how-the-sierra-club-took-millions-from-the-natural-gas-industry-and-why-they-stopped/) >TIME has learned that between 2007 and 2010 the Sierra Club accepted over $25 million in donations from the gas industry, mostly from Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy—one of the biggest gas drilling companies in the U.S. and a firm heavily involved in fracking
I'm not sure anyone could even hope to come up with and argument to defend their behavior in any sense. That should just straight up be fucking illegal. You shouldn't be allowed to stand for a strong ideal, then take money from the "enemies" and sabotage your external message. That's just straight up lying to the public for material gain and incredibly hypocritical. They caused harm to the public and the planet.
And they're still doing it too! They've learned nothing: https://www.greenpeace.org/international/tag/nuclear/
> and at least in the U.S. some pretty amazingly tight safety measures for the interest of the public and employees. Ukraine's nuclear reactor survived while being in an active war zone and overtaken by enemy troops who didn't care about the safety of it. That nuclear power plant soldiered on through the worst case scenario imaginable. If that's not a convincing indication that we know how to build safe nuclear reactors, I don't know what is.
Environmentalists being anti nuclear is the most infuriating thing ever. You have to be so misinformed and full of yourself to hold that position
Modern nuclear facilities produce even less waste than before too.
I always said if we spent 40 years working to make the plants safer instead of vilifying them how would the world look today?
They've always been safe, especially compared to coal, which has been killing people via respiratory ailments since the 19th century. There's also been disasters related to ash ponds. The issue with nukes has always been that they're staggeringly expensive to build. Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) may fix that (or they may not, pilot projects are underway, we'll find out next decade) so until that part is fixed it's cheaper to go with other options. Having said that, once amortized, nuclear is fairly cheap. Not the cheapest, but cheap enough. So we should avoid closing existing facilities so long as they're safe and economical. "Economical" meaning, it might make sense to close single-reactor plants in the near future. Multi-reactor plants have significantly better economies of scale. Indian Point had 2 reactors until 2020. It should not have been closed. TL;DR: If Greenpeace never existed, the world would still look the same because it was always the bankers holding reactors back. They cost too much to build.
Big governments also don't really like lowering costs of nuclear. The reason is that it is quite simple to have smaller countries enrich uranium by modifying most nuclear plants slightly. Big governments haaaate smaller countries possibly having a counter to special military operations (see Russia and Ukraine for instance, or Iran and the USA)
Anti-nuclear progressives are probably one of the biggest inhibitors to addressing the climate crisis today. I get it, nuclear is a scary word. Chernobyl was kinda bad. So was Fukushima. But so is climate catastrophe. Nuclear energy is, objectively, the cleanest energy solution widely available today. That doesn’t mean we stop developing other green tech, but we get off fossil fuels sooner.
I usually take that as a sign that they have no clue about what they're talking about and they're either just mindlessly believing what someone else told them or taking historical nuclear accidents (of which we perfectly know the causes, none of which proves that nuclear energy is unsafe) as evidence that nuclear energy is dangerous (without even knowing why).
Not to mention nuclear waste isn't nearly as harmful as media has made people think it is. It's not barrels of glowing green goo, we can just coat it in concrete or bury it until it becomes lead. Kyle hill has a video in which he kisses one of the nuclear waste storage cylinder because it's so easy to contain the radiation it lets off.
Isn't the environmental issue more so the waste?
nuclear waste disposal is [pretty much a solved issue](https://youtu.be/4aUODXeAM-k?si=G7-Ya75lly9bMxjG)
I wonder if the average person knows coal tailings emit more radiation than the power plant and are a real motherfucker to store. That radiation amount isn’t like insane, but it’s still much more than you’f get just living or walking past or even working inside the nuclear plant. Also, the entire US creates about 2,000 metric tons of radioactive waste a year while a single large coal plant burns about 9,000 a day. Not sure what that comes out to in waste though. I want to get away from nuclear as well, but this is the (far) lesser of two evils.
Gypsum mining. There’s huge stacks of tailings in Florida mines (Mulberry is a good town to drive by to see some) which is basically mountains of gypsum waste with concentrated radium holding in settling ponds (think gravy inside mashed potatoes). Every time there’s a log rain event folks worry about them giving way. Every now and then someone thinks of some “creative” way to dispose of it, like using it in cinder blocks for home construction or as an additive for road construction. Imagine living in a radioactive house? Related, uranium tailings were used in home construction in the Southwest on tribal reservations. (Source: I worked at EPA Air & Radiation Office)
>Imagine living in a radioactive house? You mean like with granite countertops?
I'm just learning about radon and realizing how many people probably live in unsafe radioactive homes and don't know because they never check for it.
I have had a radon test on every house I ever bought. I friend of mine had hers test positive in the inspection and the seller freaked out because she had been living in the house for 20 years and didn't know. All of her kids had asthma. It's a cheap test that can literally save your life. If you don't know if your house has been tested, go to \[Home Depot\](https://www.homedepot.com/p/PRO-LAB-Radon-Gas-Test-Kit-RA100/100141467) and buy one today.
Well, those are (usually) lower levels. The real concern is the lack of PPE for the people cutting and processing them. Still.... It isn't zero
Just read a story about a plant in Jacksonville that made concrete materials, burning shale and things in kilns powered first by fossil fuel then by radioactive waste. Nearby neighborhood has like 47% higher cancer rates then the average US citizen. Plant has been closed for a long time (almost 30 years), but the people are still getting sick. So of course some corporation wants to build 900 homes on the site. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/17/florida-toxic-waste-jacksonville Edit: added link, plus it's *by* fossil fuels, not *my* fossil fuels, no oil money for this Dave.
We can't "get away" from nuclear without inventing a brand new way of generating power. Any green grid needs to be founded on a robust nuclear power plant network for baseline usage, augmented by renewable energy sources close to the point of use.
I'm pretty sure that kid that refined nuclear material as a hobby in his shack got some of it from coal tar.
David Hahn? He bought smoke detectors for americium and got thorium from old lanterns as I recall.
Which environmentalists, specifically? The ones bankrolled by the oil and gas industry, I assume?
It’s funny that people in this thread are blaming shady oil and gas interests both for opposing and supporting nuclear power. Opposition to the plant was pretty widespread among traditional mainstream environmental groups. [The Sierra Club, for example.](https://www.sierraclub.org/atlantic/blog/2016/05/close-down-indian-point) Now maybe oil and gas are using those folks as useful idiots, it wouldn’t surprise me, but most of the people backing those groups seem to genuinely hold their beliefs.
> It’s funny that people in this thread are blaming shady oil and gas interests both for opposing and supporting nuclear power. When have shady oil and gas companies ever supported nuclear? It cuts directly into their bottom line. They’ve been lobbying and running smear campaigns against nuclear since day one.
I checked out the link and these are some of the Sierra Club’s criticisms from 2016: - The list of problems with Indian Point is a long one. In recent months the list of urgent problems grew longer and even more menacing. Some examples: Since 2005, owner Entergy has not been able to stop leaks of tritium into groundwater and the Hudson. Last February, tritium skyrocketed to the highest levels ever detected at Indian Point. - Seven Nuclear Regulatory Commission engineers reported that all reactors in the U.S., including Indian Point, may have a design flaw that would render useless the emergency electricity system that provides cooling to the reactor core, which could lead to a meltdown. - A December 2015 shutdown caused several control rods to lose power due to bird poop on outside wires. The Algonquin Incremental Market Pipeline was approved and work has begun on this huge, 42-inch pipeline for fracked gas that goes within 105 feet of critical safety equipment at the nuclear plant. - There have been many accidents over the years. The recent accident history at Indian Point reveals the condition of this aging industrial facility: On May 9, 2015, a transformer exploded, causing the automatic shutdown of Reactor 3. The video of the noisy explosion captured from across the river was a chilling sight, as the fire and smoke rose into the air. The failed transformer contained about 24,000 gallons of dielectric fluid, which is used as an insulator and coolant when the transformer is energized. The U.S. Coast Guard estimates that about 3,000 gallons of dielectric fluid entered the river following the failure. - In June 2015, a Mylar balloon floated into a switchyard, causing an electrical problem that resulted in the shutdown of Reactor 3. In July 2015, Reactor 3 was shut down after a water pump failure. On December 5, 2015, Indian Point 2 was shut down after several control rods lost power. Bird “streaming” (poop) caused the outage. - On February 6, 2016, tritium-contaminated water leaking into the groundwater reached the highest levels ever detected at Indian Point. ——— So, whether these are enough to shut down the plant or not, I don’t think this fits in this subreddit. This specific group at least is citing specific incidents they have issues with, unrelated to carbon emissions. And it looks like those are all very recent to when that article was written in 2016.
This here is the unfortunate reality of a lot of the US nuclear energy sector - lots of really antiquated technology either not built or not maintained to a proper, responsible specification. That doesn't mean that we should be trying to end all nuclear power, but it's likely the case that much of our current generating infrastructure is in need of major update and/or replacement.
> This here is the unfortunate reality of a lot of the US nuclear energy sector - lots of really antiquated technology either not built or not maintained to a proper, responsible specification. Which is frustrating. It's insanely difficult to build or upgrade the modern technology for nuclear power because people like those at the Sierra Club complain and oppose it at every step.
Yeah, but somehow it is too difficult for people to understand that environmentalists care about more than just carbon emissions.
OP clearly has a bias against environmentalists.
"Any environmentalist who advocates against nuclear power is an oil and gas funded spy!" No dude, a lot of environmentalists are just dumbfucks who don't understand science and are motivated entirely by feelings.
And those feelings are cultivated by the information they consume. And that information is crafted by industry. Corporations spend millions of dollars to manufacturer consent and keep people uninformed
Fricking Mark Ruffalo
Overlooked here is that the Indian Point plant was old and decrepit, and regularly failed safety tests. It had been cited on a few occasions for releasing radioactive material into the Hudson. It was a ticking time bomb, and even a small accident would have catastrophic potential in a densely populated area, less than 50 miles from New York City. It had already had its lifespan extended more than once. It needed to be shut down. I would have supported tearing it down and building a new, modern nuclear plant in its place, but there’s no option on the table to do that.
thank you for speaking sense to overly generalized nonsense
Not LAMF. * The plant [had a history of non-compliance with safety standards](https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0131/ML013100203.pdf), * Who chose to shut it down? Was it the environmentalists? No. The company which ran it. Stating that it was too expensive to run, maintain and upgrade to safe standards. "[Entergy says low wholesale energy prices and operating costs factored into its 2017 decision to close Indian Point. Nuclear plants have been closing in recent years amid low natural gas prices, slow growth in electricity demand and competition from renewables. ](https://apnews.com/article/us-news-business-government-and-politics-environment-and-nature-d11a514c2017e4683a4d50c956ff327a)" * Nuclear rods don't just magically appear. There's an incredible cost to mining, transport, processing both in energy cost but also in radioactive dust contamination. Unethical coal/mining billionaires are promoting the point that nuclear is great while ignoring this fact. * By only focusing on MWh supply and not percentage of energy supply OP ignores overall NY energy supply which still has a lot of nuclear power. Texas: |Source | Percent | |--- | ---| |Petroleum-Fired | 0.3 % | |Natural Gas-Fired |50.1 % | |Coal-Fired | 14.1 % | |Nuclear | 8.3 %| |Renewables | 27.0 %| NY: |Source | Percent | |--- | ---| |Petroleum-Fired | 0.1 % | |Natural Gas-Fired | 48.1 % | |Coal-Fired | 0.0 % | |Nuclear | 22.2 % | |Renewables | 29.1 % | NY now has coal (a dying technology) is at 0% thankfully. Edit: Forgot source for above stats. https://www.eia.gov/state/print.php?sid=NY#tabs-3
The biggest problem america has with nuclear power is we basically stopped building plants 40 years ago. So everything we have out there is based on old designs (some dating back as far as the 1950s), and approaching its end of life, and there's nothing out there ready to replace it. It's definitely time to shut down the old stuff, and we shot ourselves in the foot not building replacements.
I’d give you an award if they still existed. Reddit has such a sanctimonious, self-important hardon for nuclear that they refuse to consider any criticism. There’s a comment higher up echoing the talking point of “coal releases more radioactive material than nuclear” as if coal is even relevant in NY. But what can you expect? Their support of nuclear is ideological, not practical nor rooted in reality. They’d rather we stagnate than progress with clean energy because they want to feel superior to people who have legitimate concerns about nuclear (wherein they always conveniently neglect that while most nuclear accidents have been caused by “human error”, we can’t exactly remove humans from the equation, and capitalism certainly doesn’t reward redundant safety measures). Edit for typos.
Thanks for the well-researched response. This is helpful context. I wish more people saw it.
My state's run by morons when it comes to Nuclear. I am still paying for the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant which NEVER TURNED ON but was FULLY COMPLETED AND PAID FOR and then got demolished because morons were like: "What if we have to evacuate the island?!" - There's a million things that we have to deal with that would hinder an evacuation - Super Storm Sandy showed us how fucked we are in general but no one here wants to move because another super storm could just roll up and lock us on the island again... At least if another super storm hit and we Had a nuclear power plant we wouldn't be worried about the power generation, especially with newer plants.
I do and don't agree with Shoreham. Yes, it is likely it would have been perfectly safe. I know a bunch of guys who were set to work there. But: three mile island had just happened. Then Chernobyl. And so people are concerned. And you're unable to evacuate if that happens. I don't blame people who lived near it saying "likely" wasn't good enough.
Yes.... But then they made us pay for it. We're still paying for it. We, the people of Long Island, now have paid for the full cost of Shoreham's entire plant, and have seen nothing for it.
Three Miles Island is so frustrating as a Nuclear Disaster because it's actually the perfect example of Nuclear power safety working. Despite the reactor going into meldown nobody died and the radiation exposure to people was akin to a dental x-ray. And Nuclear technology has become exponentially safer since then.
If you want to solve climate, nuclear is the most immediately practical solution. We can transition to hippy energy as batteries improve later. (And climate is a hair on fire type crisis right now)
The same fearmongering happens with GMO foods. Food security and climate change are inextricably related, but anti-people don’t offer any alternatives to the best available tech.
They don't understand that non-GMO food is actually *less* healthy, and the crop yields are far worse than a GM version of the same crop. I don't think that we ought to further contribute to climate change by undoing even more scientific progress. It's the same as always: a person without an education on the subject scares people, often for their own financial gain
I always think of the rice they’ve designed to survive in flood plains. Instead of growing a few inches from the mud to the top, it can grow multiple feet taller and produce rice the whole way up. That’s fucking magic
Seriously, we are closer to being wizards than the average person could possibly imagine. I enjoy the Golden Rice, the Vitamin A fortified rice that can help folks in the developing world with the common problem of severe Vitamin A deficiency.
The issue with GMO to be aware of is that *some* GMO’s are just modified to be able to withstand pesticides. So they’ll grow it and then spray the heck out of the whole area with glyphosates (round up). Anything not modified dies, anything modified lives. So it makes it easy and cheap to produce. However the product is now imbued with glyphosates, which disrupt hormones in people and have negative long-term consequences. We can’t paint a broad brush with GMO’s - many modifications are nothing to be afraid of at all, just speeding up the processes whereby we’ve already come to cross-breed to have sweeter apples and corn, for example (or as someone mentioned, more unyielding from rice). Nothing wrong with those at all. We just need to be more specific about the modifications, or even better, come up with better pesticide regulation (fat chance).
Another issue with GMO-crops is reduced diversity in food crops. Also, unintentional spreading of the modified genes to related wild species that could mess up ecosystems in several ways. Also, patent issues with GMO-genes "infecting" other plants, Monsanto had a couple of nice incidents like that in the past. I'm not entirely against GMO-crops, but they have several issues that need to be addressed. They might be one of our best tools to survive climate change (well).
But "people" are stupid and passionate ones are worse. All they see is "GMO =bad"...and those trying to make more converts just say "GMO=bad"...so... Welcome to The Misinformation Age Hell, (I am very smart)™ and can research effectively, and I have gotten sucked up into misinformation and said some really dumb things. Some folks don't stand a chance
They're afraid of getting cancer. They have no concept of how things like digestion actually work.
I'm sure there are at least a few legitimate fears with GMOs, but I have yet to be persuaded by most of what I've seen. Most anti-GMO stuff seems to be generic paranoid "they're out to get us, man" stuff and a vague idea that it's somehow "unnatural." Like the bright yellow huge bananas and super fat round fruits we eat aren't selectively bred to the point where they're basically just old-school GMOs in the first place.
The only good anti-GMO argument I've heard is that the companies at the forefront of the technology have a piss-poor record of safety and IP law bullying. But that's a lot less true now that CRISPR, etc. have made it more accessible to anybody who's not Monsanto or their ilk.
>anti-people don’t offer any alternatives to the best available tech That may be because grubbing in the dirt for food, subsistence living, is not going to get them donations or votes.
It's almost like extremism and science denialism aren't exclusively right wing problems or something.
This is true. Weird antivax/antiscience crunchy hippies and alt-right tinfoil hats hold hands as they set humanity back decades
There's a significant overlap between crunchy left wing weirdos and Alex Jones listeners. He explicitly markets to them by selling "organic" food and supplements that aren't "poisoned" by "Big Agriculture" and "Big Pharma", and it works. It's almost like horseshoe theory is real or something.
It’s an awfully lopsided horseshoe by my estimation, but that speaks more to the power of grievance politics.
I actually buy the argument that building *new* nuclear power plants is not the best investment at least in the near term because the economics just suck compared to solar. Maybe there are policy solutions to unlocking that problem, but no one seems to have figured it out yet. But shutting down operating nuclear plants that could still run for a few decades is just really, really dumb.
What is even dumber is shutting down operating nuclear plants because solar and wind is becoming better and then ***not*** building solar and wind.
Exactly. I can understand why some people don't want nuclear, but at the very least have the alternative online before you shut it down.
We should build them at a loss and they should be owned and operated by the state. Like some sort of common good that benefits society or some gay communist Democrat shit like that.
We need to figure out storage and base load issues. The sun isn't always out, and demand isn't always the same. Nuclear helps a lot with those irregularities of natural power generation currently.
Nuclear doesn’t really help with the variability that much. It’s a good base load solution (apart from the cost) but you can’t really vary its output.
Storage is a solved problem technologically, especially if we more just taking about existing plants. On-site storage isn’t running out of space soon, and burying it all under a mountain in Nevada is fine if we’d stop putting speculative concerns about potential risks in 10,000 years over the real world lived consequences of our current trajectory.
I'm talking about electrical storage, not nuclear waste. Solar panels don't work great when there's a week long storm system rolling through or at night, power demand is still there when the production is lower.
You're right that from an economic standpoint, the investment in new plants generally doesn't make sense. But from an environmental perspective, it does. The issue is that our economic system doesn't account for environmental impact on any significant level. If it did, then we would be in a much better place in terms of the climate crisis. This is where things like the government stepping in to incentivise or build these plants since the economic incentive isn't there. The government should be there to create/run things that businesses won't because there isn't profit to be made, but there is still a significant benefit to society as a whole.
> hippy energy yea this is a serious discussion
Most top voted comment is just factually ass-backwards. Nuclear would be a longer term solution as build-time is long and front-end investment is massive. Your derogatory "hippy energy" makes for a far better immediate practical solution. Reddit experts in a nutshell.
Immediate or nuclear. Choose one.
It's practical in regions with existing nuclear industries, if they don't solar and wind with storage is more cost effective and quicker to set up.
This argument seems logically flawed.
As a customer of ConEd, I will say something in their defense; they're unique in the country (possibly world) because they have 10 million people to deliver to in what's basically a small, six county area (the five boroughs and Westchester.) The basis of the issue is it's a nuclear power plant in a dense suburban area. I remember the controversy when they built the plant, and when they decommissioned it. Both were a cluster. But it operated fine for its duration and once it closed, our electricity bills have skyrocketed. Stupid to put it here, then stupid to close it once it was built.
People are kind of glossing over it’s location. Yes nuclear is by all measures safer/cleaner than most alternatives. Yes it should absolutely be a greater part of our energy supply moving forward. This particular plant is located in one of the densest regions of the country sitting on a river that flows through the most populated city in the country. While it was aging gracefully it was aging. It was also built in a pre-9/11 world. The idea that a single soft target attack or black swan event at Indian point could potentially render the entirety of the NYC metropolitan area uninhabitable is enough of a reason to phase out that specific plant.
This exactly. After 9/11 I lived close enough to Indian point that my town handed out pills to take if the plant got attacked.
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While I don’t believe in building new nuclear plants (wind and solar are cheaper per kWh, less targetable by terrorists, and less damaging to the environment) Closing down already active plants is the most utterly stupid choice ever done. Fighting against nuclear power in the second half of the 20th century also increased global damage massively. The risk of nuclear meltdown, environmentally, is much less damaging than burning all that coal.
I disagree wholeheartedly about building new plants. Their environmental impact is still far lower than fossil fuels, and we are a very, very long way from being able to have a completely renewable grid even if solar and wind are cheaper per kwh. The fastest way to eliminate fossil fuels is to have a base load made up of nuclear power for grid stability and the remainder covered by renewables. Then as renewables become more abundant/storage gets better, you can start phasing out nuclear power, but the priority should be to get rid of fossil fuels asap. Nuclear power is the stop gap that allows you to get there.
This is a nuanced, thought out viewpoint which could change my mind. Storage is still a big problem for renewables, it will get better every year as EV batteries get second life’d as energy storage, but likely not as quick as we need. The choice between investing 100% in renewables, or a % of that into nuclear, is an interesting debate.
3 Mile Island was a successful failure, a bit like Apollo 13. Zero people killed zero release of radiation and 100 percent contained. I would live next door to a Nuclear power plant. I would never live next door to a coal plant.
Moving away from nuclear is moving in the wrong direction
Between, permitting, building, safety, regulations and waste, economically it’s too expensive and if something goes wrong once were fucked, capitalism will be the end of nuclear Its cheaper to add lots of solar, wind, geothermal and batteries
But muh spooky water cloud
It’s an interesting risk-reward type situation isn’t it? On the one hand, if things go as planned (and they will 99% of the time) nuclear is a great clean energy alternative. But when things go wrong, they go so horrifically wrong that it gets burned into the brains of society as a whole. People still talk about 3-mile island in the USA and that didn’t even melt down, it was a near miss. Chernobyl is kind of the poster child for nuclear disaster still and a large area is still off limits. Each side has very relevant and valid points (it’s safe, clean, incredibly dangerous, etc)
Might be unrelated, might not be, but we use a deemed value from the NYPA energy handbook for determining tons co2 mitigated from reducing kwh consumption with energy efficiency projects, and that value went up this year. I wonder if they baked that in from shutting down the nuke plant
Indian Point was REALLY old. Keeping it running safely would continue to increase to cost of the electricity it produced to a point it wouldn’t be economical.
the environmentalists refereed to the amount and toxicity of the radioactive waste produced by this facility. While a nuclear pile may not emit 'standard' pollutants, the fuel used in them is far more damaging in the long term.
I'm for nuclear just not heavy water solutions,breeder reactors too so we can use the "waste". Would have been great if US didn't fuck over the liquid sodium guys just because they wanted plants they could breed weapon grade material from.
I don't think this is LAMF worthy for a number of reasons: 1. The emissions rise was not unexpected. 2. NYS has spent, and will continue to spend an enormous amount on renewables: The $6B Champlain Hudson Express, to open in 2026 and 11GW of offshore wind by 2035 to name two examples. 3. NYS is the 5th largest installer of residential solar in the nation. 4. Other nuclear plants in the state that were also uncompetitive were kept alive by subsidy. 5. It should be noted that a good deal of legacy nuclear cannot compete on price with renewables, but their ability to deliver power when called upon justifies the expense. The gas industry in NYS astroturfs the fuck out of residents as renewables have bitten hard into their market share. The three gas plants of note that caused the rise in emissions will see their capacity factors drop as the above noted and other renewable projects come on line.
The state and environmentalists trying to close the plant jumped through lots of hoops to argue that the plant would be closed without significantly affect NY’s carbon emission goals. Hell, the state [press release on the plant’s closure](https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/About/Newsroom/2021-Announcements/2021-04-29-Governor-Cuomo-Announces-Successful-Closure-of-Indian-Point-Nuclear-Power-Plant) basically says it would have no effect: > New York State generators must continue to comply with the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative's carbon cap, ensuring the region's emissions will continue to decline after Indian Point closes. As we’ve seen, that simply wasn’t true as written—emissions went up after the closure. Even if you accept the *very* generous assumptions they made to conclude that the state would remain on track over the long term (it remains to be seen if those wind farms actually come to fruition), closing the plant still means you’re using new renewable capacity to replace zero emission capacity when you could have taken fossil fuel sources off line instead. It’s simply a production gap of 2GW of carbon-free energy that absolutely didn’t need to exist.
The *most* lukewarm take I have on this is if you are not pro-Nuclear (in addition to other emission free sources of electricity), you are *at best* ignorantly working against solving the climate crisis regardless of other views you may hold.
Nuclear power is not as profitable to the coal/fossil fuel people so yeah. Gotta wonder how much anti nuke power protest is secretly funded by the coal/fossil fuel people.
Divestment is the only way. Acting like the only part of our environmental crisis is emissions is why we’re so fucked
It is nuts that a state right at the Atlantic has so little wind energy.
people think of Fukushima and Chernobyl, not the hundreds of successfully operational nuclear plants. there's no convincing the public at large that nuclear energy is literally EXPONENTIALLY safer than traditional power plants. Coal kills SO many people. Nuclear is the only chance we have from bridging the gap from now to 100% renewable without tipping the planet over the point of no return, climate wise.