No, I agree–but Deeg was making the extreme claim that they “will brook no compromise.” That’s inaccurate. They’re clearly laying out a negotiating position, not taking an absolutist one.
And given that this position was originally written in the 1970s, it was a pretty reasonable one. I might wish they’d update it to more fully reflect modern nuclear capabilities; but given the complete lack of political will to push nuclear power across our country, it’s hard for me to fault them too much for not prioritizing this.
I dunno, maybe I can. Senorbeef is somewhat right that climate change is so much bigger than the dangers of nuclear power, maybe I should fault them more than I do.
But they’re not taking the uncompromising position Deeg accuses them of.
Well, this is a direct quote from their website: “The Sierra Club remains unequivocally opposed to nuclear energy.”
That sounds pretty strong to me. I don’t want to quibble over definitions so I’ll back off a little and say they accept very little compromise. The base argument still stands: strong opposition is almost exclusively from the left.
A reasonable objection. Is there a cite of examples of strong anti-nuclear lobbying with just Republicans? My guess is that they give anti-nuke money to both sides but I don’t know that.
Huh. Their website is, shall we say, inconsistent.
I give a lot of credit to people who fought against the nuclear power plants of the 1970s and 1980s. But I’m far less convinced that it’s a reasonable fight today.
This is where I strongly disagree. We’d be largely carbon-free now if we had started ramping up nuclear power when HIGW became accepted in the scientific community.
The problem was that the plants then really weren’t as safe as they are now. Fighting against unsafe plants was thoroughly reasonable, given the devastation caused by a nuclear meltdown. Those fights led to the safety of modern plants.
What’s needed is a push for more modern plants. I don’t see the political will anywhere on the spectrum for that.
I do agree however with the point made earlier that the supporter of right wing candidates, the fossil fuel industry, is also manipulating things to muddle the waters and put the blame elsewhere.
That bit of the private power companies propping out Natural Gas power plants while decommissioning its Nuclear power plants, because Natural gas is cheaper, (thanks to not assigning the real costs to releasing CO2 in to the atmosphere) and having the right wing media blame just the environmentalists is not a coincidence IMHO.
Even so they were way better than what we did: continue to spew pollution directly into the atmosphere. With electric cars on the verge of being viable for most of the population we could be down to something like 10% of our current emissions. I’d take that with a Three Mile Island disaster every 10 years.
No, that is not the problem. INL built an very safe reactor, EBR-II, which twice shut itself down internally when they cut off the cooling system at full power and did nothing else. That was some fifty years ago. But for some reason, that design was never used commercially.
“Some reason”. The first nuclear reactors in the US were built for making 239Pu, a vital element for weapons. Apparently, the EBR-II design was not very good at making bomb material, so it got shelved.
Nuclear power plants are expensive and difficult to build. DoD has been a major player in nuclear development in the US. No new plants have been completed since the end of the Cold War. I do not believe that is a coincidence.
Who’s taking that stance? The environmental groups that are anti-nuclear are also anti-fossil-fuel and particularly anti-coal and anti-pipeline. I get emails from Sierra Club (alright, I sent them some money even though I’m pro-nuclear) and they’re always discussing their efforts to close coal power plants (“Beyond Coal”) and block pipeline development.
Is the anti-nuclear sentiment on the left really “anti-science?” What’s being rejected is, for the most part, the risk assessment that goes along with nuclear power. I guess there’s a bit of anti-science bias in saying, “I don’t care about your numbers, nuclear power is scary and I don’t want it near me,” but that feels significantly different from the sort of science denialism we see on the right. People aren’t opposing nuclear power because they think that nuclear fission is a hoax.
Yeah, those environmental groups are pretty extreme, and represent the fringe of left wing positions. They are not against nuclear, they are against anything that would allow an increase in population and energy use.
They are on the left because some of their positions align with those on the left, and none of them align with the right.
As far as Bernie goes, he’s a bit fringe too. He may have been taken seriously, but he was also rejected twice by democratic voters in the primaries. I disagreed with him on a few of his economic positions, but it was his position on nuclear that made me entirely withdraw any support.
I was actually planning on being a one issue voter in the primaries, and voting for the candidate that was most for nuclear power. By the time I had a chance to vote though, my options were a bit limited. My favored was Yang, as he certainly had the best position on nuclear power. Not just a basic idea of keeping it as part of our portfolio of power generation, but actually excited about developing and implementing new generation nuclear plants.
We need to have someone like him in charge of the DOE.
I read a little blurb that said “In the US, more people are killed every year by solar power than have been killed by nuclear power over the entire history of nuclear power in the US”
What’s anti-science is really anti-data. Nuclear power is scary but it hasn’t killed people, not many anyway. The safety protocols are actually pretty good.
My mother, a very staunch Republican, is very anti-nuke. In one of our discussions about it, she said, “You don’t know what it was like to live through 3 Mile Island.”
Well, that is correct, I was to young to know anything at the time. However, she doesn’t either, as it didn’t actually effect her in any way. The only thing that she was contaminated with was fear.
And decades later, she still carries that fear, for no rational reason.
Different analayses draw the box around different parts of the process, but when we look at technologies that have very little downstream harm, most of the deaths end up associated with upstream segments like feedstock production, fabrication, and installation.
You get somewhat different and smaller numbers with a tighter box, e.g. restricted to things like installers falling off the roof, etc
I think this is actually the stat they’re working with. People working on roofs fall all the time, and given how few people actually die from nuclear power accidents, it’s easy to see how more installers and repairmen fall off roofs than die in nuclear accidents.
The problem is that old-school reactors had the potential to go really, really bad. And I’m talking about the ones that were actually built, not the ones that could have been built.
Your risk of death from shark attack is about 1 in 8 million. Your risk of death from an asteroid/comet strike is about 1 in 250,000. On average, every year, more than thirty times as many people die in asteroid strikes than in shark attacks. Why, then, do we put so much more energy into preventing the latter than the former?
People dismiss the cataclysmic possibility because it hasn’t yet occurred. We’re really bad at intuiting the danger of extremely rare, extremely bad events, when those events haven’t happened yet.
In both cases, older nuclear plant designs were a huge part of the risk, and it’s likely that the reason we haven’t had much worse cases in the world is in part that there was a strong anti-nuclear-power movement in the latter half of the twentieth century.
We should, I agree, be ramping up nuclear power now, based on modern designs. But we shouldn’t minimize the cataclysmic potential of older designs; rather, we should thank our lucky stars that the gun’s chamber kept coming up empty.
Asteroid, not meteorite! Meteorites are far less dangerous.
And yes, no deaths have been recorded from an asteroid strike, either. It is a cataclysmic event: each year, either zero people die from asteroid strikes, or a few billion do. So far we’ve been lucky. Thus the analogy with cataclysmic nuclear plant failures.
The environmental groups that are anti-nuclear are also anti-fossil-fuel and particularly anti-coal and anti-pipeline. I get emails from Sierra Club (alright, I sent them some money even though I’m pro-nuclear) and they’re always discussing their efforts to close coal power plants (“Beyond Coal”) and block pipeline development.