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:
@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
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.
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.
@kravietz
I'll ask a friend to provide resources about that but I had the opportunity to attend a lecture on improvements for recyclable PV. Did not understand most of the details, as I'm no chemist/environmental engineer.
@michiel