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?
none, all the arguments are bullshit. far less people die in the operation of nuclear than any other energy industry. it also employs the least employees of any energy industry per watt, which is why capitalism doesn’t work great with it. if all of society was based on nuclear you could just unionize like 1000 guys to grind the system down.
The world couldn’t run on nuclear because we don’t have enough fissible material for that iirc.
rant about this back of the envelope math
spoiler
there 100% is, literally just uranium. “reserves” of minerals are measured by concentrations profitable to mine using current prices and extraction techniques. if all power was running off uranium it’d suddenly make a lot more sense and money to mine poorer deposits and use more expensive kinds of extraction. And guess what? people would explore more and find new deposits because uranium is pretty shit to speculate on with such low demand
but more importantly, nobody. ever. has proposed this. it’s like arguing against solar because the sun goes down
the thorium available in china could power it for 60,000 years at current capacity, and this is all produced as byproduct of current rare earth mining. long enough for us to come up with fusion, im sure