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.
Wind, solar, etc.
Which each have their drawbacks. Just as an example, though not representative of the majority, what do you do about months of no sun in the Arctic Circle for solar power? There is no single solution to this problem. Nuclear is better than fossil fuels by far, and we should not just throw it away out of fear.
Nuclear and radiation accidents and incidents - Wikipedia

And yet nuclear has killed less than even wind. Obviously death is not the only factor, which is why it should be a combination of both.

Again, it’s just an example. There are loads of situations where solar and wind just don’t work — and they are both inconsistent, without battery technology nearly good enough to work on the order of days for an entire national grid, which could be potentially needed in the event of a storm.

Nuclear waste is a problem, but one which is much more easily contained and much less dangerous than the CO2 that’s constantly being spewed into our air.