Climate activists are usually very against nuclear energy and I don’t think I understand why. Does anyone know?
Arguments I’m somewhat familiar with:
- sometimes it’s used as a cover for developing nuclear weapons
- nuclear waste is very bad for living things.
What are the main historical moral arguments?
I’ve also never understood why.
As best as I can tell, and if someone has evidence this is not the case then I’m happy to look, it’s a residual stance from I want to say ~1990s. Maybe the hysteria (somewhat justified but also definitely still hysteria) around Chernobyl and the nothingburger at Three Mile Island (in the US) drove people to forever go “the optics of supporting nuclear power is untenable.”
That’s my best guess anyway because the weapons thing is a red herring. Nuclear fuel used for energy plants is not compatible with creating weapons as far as I know. It requires a much higher percent of enriched uranium. Even if it was… it just sounds like some BS neocon talking point. Not anything for activists to actually hold up as “real.”
Waste disposal and storage it a legitimate issue but for a country like the US, Russia, China, any large nation basically, this seems to me like something which can be fairly easily handled. People seem to say a lot of hyperbolic stuff implying like “drums irradiated water will spill off trucks into your local river!” Yeah, maybe that can happen. Or maybe we can make that not happen. I know that sounds flippant but seriously incredibly dangerous and hazardous materials are transported daily all over the world including nuclear weapons and materials. Accidents can and will happen, but that’s why safety protocols need to exist. Regulations and proper punishments for those who break rules, etc.
I’m pretty sure China has recently built a bunch of nuclear power in their ongoing effort to move away from fossil fuels 100%. To me that seems like such common sense that it’s insane the US, Europe, every where aren’t already doing it decades ago. Well, they were… then they stopped. France famously built a bunch of nuclear plants then just sorta said “oh, just kidding, we love oil.” And shutdown then destroyed the plants (to my knowledge). That seems insane to me especially post-2000 where climate change was known to be a looming but solvable issue.
I can also suspect that our good ol’ boys like Chevron, Exxon, BP, etc. all said “nice nuclear power plants you got there. It’d be a real shame if something happened to undermine your government… unless you suddenly decided you actually want to burn oil and gas for power.” Who am I kidding? That’s probably the entire fucking reason for the shift.
I think you may be thinking of Germany. France has had issues of its own however. One is that climate change has increased the average temperature of the water sources near their plants needed for cooling and steam production, which in a nutshell is not good for reactors. The other is that Niger has retaken control over the uranium mining within their borders, which historically fuelled French reactors.
Hey, there’s east France and west France. Wtf is Germany? (This statement would probably bring glee to some fail grandson of Charlemagne)
Honestly rising water is something I hadn’t considered. It’s probably something people building reactors before like 2000 also didn’t consider. That sucks.