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.
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.
> 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
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