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.
@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