Post #3984981

the reasons why we are not in favour of nuclear power are poorly understood. what people think we believe: we're afraid of nuclear accidents, nuclear waste disposal, and nuclear weapon proliferation. granted, all of those are guaranteed to come up in a capitalist society due to the wrong incentives for any industry—put a pin on that—but no one believes these things are more of a problem than the consequences of coal and gas. coal pollution alone already cancers more people than radiation including the accidents, and that's not starting with, you know, global warming. if these were all the options we had, nuclear power would be harm reduction. closer to the mark but still not quite it: the nuclear math doesn't math. contra the narrative that nuclear power advocates like to advocate, the cost per watt compares poorly to wind, solar, and situational alternatives like geo and hydro. the uptime investment is large and the time of deployment is too slow, and all this add up to concentration of (literal and metaphorical) power, whereas wind and solar hold the potential for distributed grids well-suited to federative models and collapse resiliency. it is much easier for third-world countries to address energy issues with modern power sources than with expensive, slow nuclear plants. the actual problem: hopium. the narrative of nuclear power is that with just a one-time investment here and there we can magically produce all the energy we need, where "we" means "first world people" and "we need" means "to continue living a capitalist consumerist lifestyle". a capitalist consumerist lifestyle is what is destroying the planet in the first place, and there is no way to get out of this situation other than a revolution in cultural values, ethical norms and socioeconomic structures towards a society that values maintenance, leisure, and quality of life over production, work, and competition—in a word, degrowth. nuclear abundance in the way imagined by nuclear stans will never happen, but the promise of nuclear power acts as hopium of a technological solution for global warming to postpone any radical transformation; yes "AI" datacentres consume so much energy but it's no big deal, we'll just build a few more nuclear plants, eventually, and go on ticking. we can do whatever, energy is infinite. keep working, keep buying. in short, the biggest issue with the nuclear industry is narrative; the narrative inflicts a type of pervasive damage that far outshadows all the Fukushimas put together. the narrative defuses climate justice discussions from what they should be focusing on, the issues that can actually solve the ecological polycrisis: colonialism, capitalism, degrowth, cultural values etc. nuclear plants are a red herring. I'm summarising this in toot format because it's hard to get people to read Nuclear Is Not The Solution https://www.versobooks.com/products/3013-nuclear-is-not-the-solution or The Solutions Are Already Here https://www.plutobooks.com/product/the-solutions-are-already-here/ . But if you do better with podcast formats, Final Straw Radio has just put out a full-length episode on the topic https://thefinalstrawradio.libsyn.com/a-long-and-deadly-con-nuclear-power-and-weapons-with-mv-ramana (if you want to use this thread to argue in favour of nuclear power: don't. this is my personal feed not energy source debate club, I already read all of your arguments before, they failed to convince me, and I'll ignore you :dont_at_me: if you want to argue with someone go read Ramana's book then write him a letter.)