Majority of the "environmental" activism organisations sadly joined an anti-scientific movement initiated primarily by Jeremy Rifkin ages ago, probably because it sold better.
This is why you have Greenpeace hiring Seralini for GMO reports and Greenpeace Energy in Germany selling fossil gas and preferring it over nuclear against all available scientific evidence, including IPCC 🤷♂️
@kravietz
I'm sorry, but this statement is as unscientific as you claim activists to be. Instead of disproving the precise claims of these people you accuse them of being related to a movement (which you did not prove btw). Even if it is like you say, this does not mean their claims are wrong (logical fallacy of guilt by association).
Aside from that: By directly providing sources for your claims in context, you can make a focused discussion easier.
@michiel
@kravietz @michiel
And I have to add, that using Greenpeace, a strongly hierarchical organization, as a representative example for calling all activists that do not agree with nuclear power unscientific is a bit of a small sample for the whole movement. There are bigger organizations like e.g. Friends of the Earth who call a lot of well recognized scientists their members and have high scientific standards (with the exception of a few wavies that had to be cast out).
All of their arguments come down to a number of false claims:
* we can't deal safely with nuclear waste
* nuclear accidents kill thousands of people
* nuclear power is very expensive
* nuclear power has very high greenhouse gas intensity
All of these are easily falsified by data. When confronted with data they usually simply ignore it 🤷 Or simply pretend it's not there - for example, find nuclear CO2 emissions on the infographic below:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
And if you read the lead, you will notice that even Germany right now runs *two* deep geologic repositories.
Fortunately, they only store extremely toxic arsenic, mercury and cyanide waste which doesn't lose toxicity over time, so it's fine.
@kravietz
So would you still consider this kind of storage safe? The incident is one of the reasons Germany started a program on finding long term storage in Germany, as the storage deemed safe turned out to be geologically unstable and the containers were damaged by leaks of water.
The government is of the opinion that a place for long term storage is still missing:
Unfortunately I only have the German website here, i'll take a look for an English version.
https://www.bge.de/de/endlagersuche/
@michiel
Are you suggesting that because Germany is unable to find *any* safe site for radioactive waste it's going to cancel all X-ray and radiation therapy for cancer in future as well? Because this was the waste that was kept in Gorleben and leaked.
https://www.dw.com/en/radioactive-waste-leaking-at-german-storage-site-report/a-43399896
1) Forget "nuclear". Industry produces thousands of tons of toxic waste, which needs to be stored. So you need storage anyway and a single nuclear power plant produces around 30 tons per year, a tiny fraction.
2) Nobody says you need a storage in Germany - that was the whole point of EU, wasn't it? Send it to France, Finland or Russia for storage.
Germany has no problem with outsourcing fossil gas extraction to Russia an after all.
@kravietz
Yes, we have a problem with that! Just because our government acts differently does not mean, we agree. The thing about outsourcing resource extraction is, that states are interested in doing extraction for money. Taking others waste is a bit less attractive, unless you pay a lot.
The other problem: who guarantees that they will have equal or better safety precautions? I agree this should ideally be done globally.
Politics unfortunately are complex and unreasonable.
@michiel
@kravietz
As nobody does it, we can't really tell. Most of the people think way worse about others than about themselves. But people are usually pretty decent. So it's not like I can force governments to work together on waste storage and I also can not do it myself. All I can do is vote, discuss and annoy people. And maybe advocate solutions.
@michiel
So as you can see, any news mentioning the topic of "radioactive waste" needs to be treated with extreme caution.
First, people don't understand that nuclear plants are not the only source of waste. Medicine and industry produce them just as well.
Not to mention coal mining, oil and gas mining, rare earth metals mining - basically anything you extract from the ground and concentrate usually contains uranium, radium, europium etc.
@kravietz
There are. Friends of the earth Germany has been suing K+S for contamination (allthough this is usually about less dangerous chemicals). Again I unfortunately only have German sources here: https://www.bund-hessen.de/pm/news/bund-beklagt-erweiterung-der-salzhalde-wintershall-von-k-s/
@michiel
The reason there are no protests is because the waste, be it chemical or nuclear, are generally safe there for millions of years.
Even if there are leaks (as in Asse), they happen at depths of hundreds of meters underground (950 m in case of Asse), the amount of leaks is tiny and it never reaches surface.
And again, this applies equally to chemical and nuclear waste, with the exception that the latter loses toxicity over time.
Careless storage is bad and this is precisely why we have the whole state supervision.
However, toxic waste is byproduct of any industrial process.
Want to manufacture PV panels, plastic windows, insulation foam and a billion of other advanced goods?
They all release toxic waste that has to be dealt with.
The only alternative is to outsource their production to less economically privileged countries where waste will be simply buried or dumped into rivers.
The problem with these debates is that it's presented as an opposition of "clean wind and solar" versus "dirty coal and nuclear" (fossil gas is somehow forgotten thanks to PR efforts of Gazprom, see below).
Nothing in advanced engineering is clean.
PV, wind, coal and nuclear all require thousands of tons of steel, alloys and rare earth metals. All mining releases toxic waste, including radioactive - especially rare earths, which are often co-mined with uranium.
So at the end of the day it's never choice between "clean" and "dirty" but between "more and less dirty". Therefore the only objective comparison is between specific engineering metrics, which are well described for all energy sources:
* lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions (how much CO2 per kWh)
* surface power density (how much area taken per kWh)
* capacity factor (how much time it works)
And then eventually you can look at price (LCOE).
It depends on how you define it. How about mortality per kWh?
But coal is literally the most deadly source of energy in use, yet we happily use it, and extend its usage for decades to come.
Don't we care about all the people killed by burning coal? Or 60'000 killed by a dam disaster in China in 1976?
Of course we do, but we also need 24/7 energy so we make compromises 🤷
@kravietz
Ha, did you know the sources before the kurzgesagt video? ;)
They are basically skipping the point of mortality by nuclear waste (which tbh is extremely hard to measure, as e.g. most of the Mayak stuff is still kept secret). And what I like about the video is, that it still shows renewable energies to be better in terms of mortality.
The point you made holds. It's not renewables vs. coal and nuclear. Coal is way worse. But renewables are safer than nuclear power.
@michiel
But Mayak has nothing to do with nuclear power, it's a plutonium processing facility for Russian nuclear weapons program.
And if we look back to 50's (when the massive Kyshtym leak happened) then it would be fair to compare it against 1976 Banquiao dam disaster which killed tens of thousands and contaminated thousands of hectares of land.
That's precisely why we count the mortality per TWh.
@kravietz
I wasn't claiming that Mayak had something to do with nuclear power. I was stating, that this is an example, why deaths by nuclear waste (which was the supposed cause of the explosions) are hard to measure. And therefore it's even harder to take it into account separately just for waste from nuclear power. But this does not mean it is relevant or irrelevant. It is an open question, demanding research. Therefore I'm a bit reserved about temporarily using NPPs against CC.
@michiel
> an open question, demanding research
That's a very clever eristic trick, probably learned by decades on academia 😂 You are basically postponing this discussion until never, rather than for example provide a reliable source to demonstrate otherwise.
I would again refer to this lecture by prof. Geraldine Thomas and you will be surprised how well researched it is:
@kravietz
But none of the claims you're talking about are visible in this infographic. You might be angry at their social media team for not including nuclear power, but that's a whole different topic. So let's start easy with the topic we disagree on: do you think there is a safe place to store highly radioactive nuclear waste? If yes, where do you think, this place is?
@michiel