Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance

https://lemmy.world/post/4133901

Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance - Lemmy.world

Good!

Anti-nuclear is like anti-GMO and anti-vax: pure ignorance, and fear of that which they don’t understand.

Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change.

We’ve had the cure for climate change all along, but fear that we’d do another Chernobyl has scared us away from it.

imagine how much farther ahead we would be in safety and efficiency if it was made priority 50 years ago.

we still have whole swathes of people who think that because its not perfect now, it cant be perfected ever.

So uh, turns out the energy companies are not exactly the most moral and rule abiding entities, and they love to pay off politicians and cut corners. How does one prevent that, as in the case of fission it has rather dire consequences?

I mean it’s not the companies operating the facilities we put our trust in, but the outside regulators whose job it is to ensure these facilities are safe and meet a certain standard. As well as the engineers and scientists that design these systems.

Nuclear power isn’t 100% safe or risk-free, but it’s hella effective and leaps and bounds better than fossil fuels. We can embrace nuclearm renewables and fossil free methods, or just continue burning the world.

Don’t push nuclear power like it’s the only option though.

Where I live we entirely provide energy from hydro power plants and nuclear energy is banned. We use no fossil fuels. We have a 35 year plan for future growth and it doesn’t include any fossil fuels. Nuclear power is just one of the options and it has many hurdles to implement, maintain and decommission.

Honestly, if you can, hydro is brilliant. Not many places can though — both because of geography and politics. Nuclear is better than a lot of the alternatives and shouldn’t be discounted.
And what do YOU know about radioactive waste disposal?
I know it’s a damn lot easier than carbon recapture, if we’re talking waste products. It’s not ideal, but there is no such thing as perfect, and we shouldn’t let that be the enemy of good. Nuclear fission power is part of a large group of methods to help us switch off fossil fuels.
“Easier”? Are you aware of the fact that radioactive waste tombs are meant to stand for millions of years? It requres a lot of territory, construction and servance charges, and lots of prays for nothing destructive happens with it in its “infinite” lifetime.
Have you tried capturing gas? As difficult as radioactive waste tombs are, they’re easier than containing a specific type of air lol.
Read about breathing if you want to know how to capture gas. Also, about photosynthesis.
If you want to buy the land to plant a second Amazon, be my guest. And breathing does the exact opposite of what we want.
I’d rather fill land with trees than with radioactive wastes.
You need a lot, lot more trees. Like several orders of magnitude. And growing trees takes longer than even building a nuclear power plant.

To be specific, growing the types of trees we would want for such a thing in such an amount that it would deal with the problems we have, assuming we stop growth of CO2 and assuming we stop burning the Amazon, would take around a hundred years.

nationalgeographic.com/…/how-to-erase-100-years-c…

“It could take more than a hundred years to add enough mature forest to get sufficient levels of carbon reduction. Meanwhile 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning fossil fuels are being added to the atmosphere every year, said Glen Peters, research director at Norway’s Center for International Climate Research.”

And need an area the size of the United States. I wasn’t joking about a second Amazon.

How to erase 100 years of carbon emissions? Plant trees—lots of them.

Increasing the Earth’s forests by an area the size of the United States would cut atmospheric carbon dioxide 25 percent.

National Geographic
I’d rather this as well, but we don’t have that many choices. The slower we act and the more we let perfect be the enemy of good, the more people die.