I'm not sure if it's what you meant, but your post just reeks of "Lets keep doing the things we always did because it was so much better then", while discounting the massive amounts of damage we were doing then.
This is on those activists who blindly followed anti-nuke dogmatism. Thanks guys and gals.
This is why the public should by and large disregard opinions by celebrities who have no expertise in what they are advocating.
She could have used her activism to promote better processes for example, or incremental improvements rather than kill the industry.
Blaming the lack of nuclear power on a celebrity for her activism and not the fact that decision makers saw the results of real catastrophic failure seems wrong. Sure, Jane Fonda didn’t help nuclear energy. But we should have started by never letting any of the major nuclear failures happen. If we can’t do that, we should work on solving that problem and not blaming critics.
TMI had little to no impact on the environment and public.
Chernobyl was the result of a corrupt political system which skimped on safety (e.g., no containment building/vessel) because of costs—something that isn't present in any developed country.
That leaves Fukushima.
I'll take the low odds of maybe one incident in 60+ years of industry over the certainty of climate change. And I say this as someone who lives 50km from a nuclear power plant.
Our skewed perception of threats is maybe one of the most destructive psychological quirks of humanity. It makes fighting gradual events like climate change or disease outbreaks incredibly difficult.
We should make sure that maintenance is handled with the understanding of the human lives depending on it, and managers and politicians need to respect the powerful natural forces of both water and nuclear bonds. That said, stopping to use either in favor of fossil fuels is bad for the planet and bad for the people living on it. Living near a nuclear plants or downstream of a hydroelectric power plants is preferable compared to living near a fossil fueled power plants, and its the role of advocates, learned people and politicians to inform the public of this fact.
Critics should be held to blame for misleading the population, just as politicians should be when they chose to build fossil fueled power plants in favor of safer technologies.
Fonda et al. have blood on their hands, albeit invisible blood. The best kind, I guess.
Guessing dependency on oil and gas would be much much lower which also frees up a large chunk of the military budget.
A fair amount the second world war can be told purely in attempts to control access to fuel:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_campaign_of_World_War_II
You are correct by pointing out the intermittency of some renewable sources of energy. These are constraints of the technology that have engineering solutions.
I don’t think activists are to blame for what we see. They are a convenient scapegoat. Think about who would benefit from having us all sit quietly at home waiting for our leadership to make the right decisions for us.
[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/drilled/id1439735906?i...
I personally blame the status quo, and think that if fewer people had stayed home and let things be we would be a far better position.
Your politics say sit at home and let the world end -- I have never and will never do that. I'm an activist in every part of my life.
Meanwhile neither the wars have stopped nor did the climate change. It is easy to say that is because no one is doing enough and everyone should be an activist. But then if everyone is continuously doing activisty thingies, they are not even expounding the same ideas or even worried about the same things. The result is meaningless placard holding protests and pulling in a million directions. It's difficult to take anyone to take the climate activists seriously when on one hand they say we are heading towards catastrophe and at the same time say Eww to nuclear.
Nuclear Energy powered electric cars only cuts emissions by about 50%, we need a lot more than that. You have an easy solution to a complex problem -- you're as bad as any activist you're bad mouthing now.
I think for some of us, it's less about 'eww' and more about how foolish is it have near active fault lines or below sea level (like Fukushima, SONGS, Dablo Canyon etc...) where they KNEW it was an issue but did nothing about it. I've lived through the cluster** that was SONGS refurbishment, and eventual decommissioning, it's not something I'd want anyone to have to go through and it was only possible an unmonitored effluence event (typical for that time in 2011) that coincided with the Fukushima disaster.
I've come around the idea that I'm less anti-nuclear and more anti-20th Century Nuclear and it's headlong methods that was backed by GE and it's American Century at all costs type of thinking. Because for years we've been told Thorium reactors were the stopgap between Fusion which was always 'just around the corner' by Nuclear proponents, while many anti-nuclear people (like myself) were helping install PV, smart meters and volunteering where ever possible to decentralize the power grid in order to avoid what has happened in the last 2-3 years in CA with it's repeated outages due to climate change.
I've lived in an anti-nuclear border town in Germany along Alsace, where the roofs are covered in state subsidized PV (it's where I got my first experience with installing it) which is still a net importer of French electricity so I'm well aware of the hypocrisy in some of these cases; what I'm afraid is that with agencies like the NRC and it's poor storage solutions (pay to bury in NV, until they refuse and we have leave it on site in decommissioned plants) it's more a repulsion towards the lack of insight when it comes to regulating and maintaining these plants.
Just Solar alone is a larger part of the energy market share than nuclear from SONGS and DC combined in CA at it's peak [0], and they are having to turn off production (foolish decision) due to having a larger supply than demand. What I think is needed is an entire paradigm shift as to what and how to utilize the energy sources we do have, and consider Nuclear an option of last resort due to the heavy costs, time, and resources it requires. But it should be an option where coal, gas, or other harmful sources are being used and cannot be recaptured. CA is not one of these places given it's wide array of solar, wind and hopefully soon wave energy like in Scotalnd.
0: https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/solar/c...
1. That you've overstated the extent to which activism has been ineffective.
2. That your post doesn't have a valid logical structure (in the syllogistic logic sense) and you're not justifying your claims with evidence.
3. That the mathematics of learning combined with the complexity of reality lead to a situation wherein the diversity of ideas and agendas which you're opposing is our chief advantage and the entire reason that we're smarter than other species.
The first two points are suggestive that you might want to question your own confidence in your statements or re-word to better support your case.
The third though is a direct refutation of the core idea.
Getting into things:
> Meanwhile neither the wars have stopped nor did the climate change.
Yes, there have been wars that have been stopped. To use an example, we are not currently at war with Vietnam. Moreover, there are events like the destruction of the ozone layer which have been stopped. There are currently tax breaks and incentives designed to encourage our market forces to adopt renewable energy. You're trying to make the case that activism is ineffective, but nuclear power adoption isn't widespread as many wish in part due to activism. Slavery isn't legal anymore, but once was. Civil rights are more universally applied than they were in formed years as well. I'm certain there are more examples of activist success.
> But problem is every new generation thinks they are the only revolutionaries to have suddenly discovered activism.
You seem like you are claiming that new generations are so stupid they know nothing at all about history pertaining to the activities they engage in. but it isn't true hat modern activists don't know about other activists. Modern activists have attended history classes and activist activities, when popular, are more likely to be covered in history classes than events which weren't noteworthy. Education has become more common, not less common, as time has gone on. Moreover, when people are effective, they generally have learned from others. Since former activism is a potential source of learning, effective activists are almost certain to have learned lessons from former efforts.
Notice that my first sentence made a claim. Then my following sentences provided justification for that claim. Contrast that with your own post. Lets move to your next sentence:
> For previous to previous generation it was about stopping wars and killing nuclear power.
This point doesn't logically follow your previous point. Your previous point made the case that you consider activists to be stupid. This statement doesn't build credibility for that claim by providing evidence. It instead switches to a new topic. That new topic, summarized without any sentiment attached is: different people at different times cared about different things.
It is perfectly reasonable for different people to care about different things. This is all the more true when you consider you don't even need to have different people in order to have different cares. Time alone is sufficient. Even over the course of a single day time alone can make a person care about different things: a person in the morning cares about getting up out of bed, but the person in the evening flip flops and now cares about getting into bed. Time, even over the course of the day, can completely invert desires. So how much more so is it appropriate for time over the course of a generation to lead to different desires? Especially when the person who is doing the desiring is different?
> The result is meaningless placard holding protests and pulling in a million directions.
You've failed to establish a link between different people wanting different things and the results of that being a bad thing rather than a good thing. There are many many reasons to expect that different people wanting different things is good.
In ML an ensemble of models which are good for different reasons tends to outperform any single model in the ensemble. This reality of mathematics isn't just a reality of mathematics, but manifests in practical ways. There is a phenomenon known to statisticians and referred to as the wisdom of crowds wherein groups of diverse people giving an estimate of an unknown quantity like the number of jelly beans in a jar have a better estimate than any one person. The practical consequence of this most people will see very frequently is that top-performing organizations often prioritize diversity.
But let's dig deeper, because you're just wrong here, and I want to drill down into the math so you can see that you're wrong.
There is a tension when learning: you have to get data in order to learn but you also have to do the thing that is in your best interest. In literature you'll find this discussed in the context of multi-armed bandit problems. This core tension is discussed in terms of explore versus exploit tradeoffs. Our best ML systems like MuZero are explicitly designed so as to balance these twin concerns.
Reality is incredibly complicated. From a logistics perspective it isn't actually possible for a single person to fully explore the solution space. There is a fundamental need to trade off against exploration and exploitation, but the complexity of the world is so exceedingly vast that it isn't actually tractable to do this for a single individual.
Since we have to explore and we have to exploit, but we also don't have the capacity to explore everything ourselves we should therefore be very unintelligent. Except we aren't, because we are social. While one person explores one area, another person explores a different area, and the sum of our knowledge is now better than it was before even though we both took different actions because we update our update functions such that the next explorer gets a new plan to build off.
So rather than diversity being an example of nothing get done it's actually absolutely essential and one of the most defining and important aspects of what makes humans more intelligent than other species.
Your sentiment, without providing sources actually sounds a lot like the talking points of lobby groups fighting against the increased usage of renewable energy.
Just one example to counter your "arguments" is the there are currently 50 nuclear reactors Being under construction world wide. With nuclear energy capacity increasing [1].
So care to provide some facts?
[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...
nuclear capacity increasing doesn't necessarily contradict the parent's claim that "nuclear is dead/dying". Nuclear power can be growing in absolute terms, but be falling in relative terms.
50 reactors for the world is not a lot. We’re clearly losing more reactors in the US than we’re gaining.
You say “capacity” is increasing, but is the percentage?
If this makes me a "funny" one, I gladly am. I don't like dealing with people throwing out unsubstantiated claims or dismissing others with ad hominems.
Btw. you could just provide a counter argument (I would be open to that in a empirical discussion) but you chose to do a counter question showing you actually have no interest in rational, fact based discussion culture.
To quote numbers:
Between 2013 and 2025, 14 nuclear plants are slated to shut down. As of July 2018, there are 99 operational plants in the country.[1]
I wasn't able to quickly find the number of reactors that compromise said plants.
But from a purely nationalistic perspective you are right. The US actually looses reactors. But I stated World wide numbers. I don't care about the US loosing reactors. I was looking at it from a global perspective and just providing one counter point to someone stating unsubstantiated stuff.
Btw. themain reason for the US not building new reactors in the same amount they are shutting down others seems to be economic, though. Other sources of energy are nowadays way cheaper to produce and atomic seems to have lost the status of cash cow for the industry. [1]
[1]: https://theconversation.com/the-demise-of-us-nuclear-power-i...
6 months from now if fertilizer prices are essentially normal and food supplies are just fine will you reconsider this view?
And where would the CO2 levels be if there had been no activism?
What happend since then? Fukushima, and Fukushima killed fewer people than a highway car pile-up.
My worry is that we have swung collectively towards the very opposite, towards a demand for unrealistical level of one hundred per cent safety, unparalleled in any other modern activity (flights, medicine, construction, food...)
Choosing your mode of transport is completely up to you as an individual, but power infrastructure is a common good and individual people should not be able to veto projects.
Even though you don't fly, a plane can still fall on you.
Wait! Hear me out -- in the entire history of the country, there have been a total of 13 fatalities as a result of accidents in nuclear plants in the U.S.[1], whereas aircraft falling from the sky killed:
* 23 people in Wichita when a B-52 stratofortress crashed into their homes in 1965 [2]
* 22 people died (including 12 children) when an F-86 Sabre crashed into a car and then slammed into an ice cream parlor in Sacramento in 1972 [3]
* 15 died when a DC-9 collided with a Piper mid-air and then slammed into a residential neighborhood in Cerritos, CA in 1986 [5]
* 13 died in 1967 in New Orleans when a DC-8 crashed into a private homes and a motel [6]
* 12 died in Evansville, Indiana when a C-130 crashed into the parking lot of JoJo's restaurant in 1992 [7]
* 10 people in an office building in Chicago in 1920 (but that was a dirigible)[8]
* 9 people on a freeway in Georgia 1977[9]
* 9 people in their homes in Chicago in 1959[10]
* 8 people in their homes in New Orleans in 1982[11]
* 7 people in their homes in New Jersey in 1972[12]
* 7 people in their homes in San Diego in 1978[13]
* 6 people in homes or parks in New York in 1960[14]
* 6 people in Miami in 1960 [15]
* 5 people in their homes in Queens in 2001 [16]
* 5 people in their homes in Minneapolis in 1956 [17]
* 4 people in an apartment building in New Jersey [18]
* 4 people on a bridge in D.C. in 1982 [19]
* 4 people in their homes in San Diego in 2008 [20]
* 4 people in their homes in Yorba Linda in 2019 [21]
* 3 people in a church in the San Fernando Valley in 1957 [22]
* 3 people in their homes in North Hollywood in 1962 [23]
* 3 people (two decapitated by helicopter blades and one crushed by aforementioned helicopter) in Hollywood in 1982 [24]
* 3 people who were attending a flight safety conference died when a cessna crashed into the conference building in Wichita in 2014 [25]
* 3 people in their homes in Gaithersburg, Maryland in 2014 [26]
* 2 people in a house in Minneapolist in 1950 [27]
* 2 people in their house died when a 737 crashed into a residential neighborhood in 1972 [28]
* 2 people in a trailer park died when a DC-10 crashed into them in 1979 [29]
* 2 people in car died when an MD-82 crashed into them in Michigan in 1987 [30]
* 2 people killed when a prop plane crashed into their home in New Jersey in 2013 [31]
And many, many other examples. So you see, not only is nuclear power safer than flying, it's much safer than being on the ground as well!
Sources:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor_accidents_in_t...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_USAF_KC-135_Wichita_crash
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_Sacramento_Canadair_Sabre...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroméxico_Flight_498#Accident...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Air_Lines#Accidents_and_...
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evansville_Regional_Airport#Ma...
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingfoot_Air_Express_crash
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Airways_Flight_242
[10] https://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19591124-...
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_759
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_6780
[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Southwest_Airlines_Fli...
[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_New_York_mid-air_collisio...
[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominicana_de_Aviación#Acciden...
[16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587
[17] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_accidents_and...
[18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Airlines_Flight_101
[19] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Florida_Flight_90
[20] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_San_Diego_F/A-18_crash
[21] https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/221520
[22] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_San_Diego_F/A-18_crash
[23] https://dotlibrary.specialcollection.net/Document?db=DOT-AIR...
[24] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_Zone_accident
[25] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Wichita_King_Air_crash
[26] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_Phenom_100#Incidents_a...
[27] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Orient_Airlines_Flig...
[28] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_553
[29] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_191
[30] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Airlines_Flight_255
[31] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweed_New_Haven_Airport#Accide...
There is no reason fertilizers can't be made with unreliable solar and wind and carbon capture.
If methane becomes expensive, many ordinary things you might not expect will also become expensive. It is not helpful to naively make policy while oblivious to the consequences.
You can have a much smoother transition if you make it expensive by policy before it runs out. But no, short-sighted people will complain all the way until they kill their jobs and throw everybody into a crisis.
Or you know... just using grazing ruminants like we have for 1000s of years.
Yes there is. It's not just a matter of needing to use energy, natural gas itself it part of the process for making fertilizer.
"Nitrogen is a key component of most synthetic fertilizers. It is made by combining the nitrogen in the air with hydrogen in methane to produce ammonia (NH3). The ammonia is then used to create other forms of nitrogen including ammonium nitrate and urea (ammonia + CO2).
Natural gas is used to provide the methane and a heat source for the process."
You can't just replace that process with 'solar and wind'.
I actually didn't realize this myself until I started reading Countdown by Alan Weisman recently, about overpopulation, where he went over this process because it's the only reason why we're able to support and feed so many people today, is because we discovered this process for creating synthetic fertilizer and we're making so much of it today.
The Haber Process for making nitrogen fertilizer uses HYDROGEN as the feedstock for making ammonia, NOT methane! Natural gas steam reforming is just the cheapest source of hydrogen (usually), but before about 1950, we used electricity (usually from cheap renewables like hydro) to make hydrogen for ammonia. Easy peasy with wind and solar!
It does seem like most places don't currently have the infrastructure in place to do proper green hydrogen though, since only 0.1 percent of hydrogen produced as of Jan 2021 could be considered green hydrogen.[1]
So I don't think it's quite as 'easy peasy' as you're suggesting, probably a lot of money has to be invested and infrastructure has to be built to support it, but sure, I'm all for doing that.
It's just hard to build a thriving business around that when your competitor can dump CO2 into the atmosphere for free and leave someone else to pick up the tab.
Once the competitor starts using his profits to buy politicians and fake scientists it gets really complicated, but making lots of fertilizer with renewable energy is not only technically easy, it's actually one of the things that will help the uptake of renewable energy globally.
https://www.iberdrola.com/about-us/lines-business/flagship-p...
We will be seeing a lot more of these in the future. By making fertilizer out of air, water, and sun, a lot of places could gain more independence too.
This is true of most electrolytic industrial chemistry, for example the hydroxides used in many carbon capture schemes. What works for the small-scale needs of today for industrial chemistry are not intrinsically scalable. In software terms, industrial chemistry is not "embarrassingly parallel" for reasons that are not immediately obvious to the layman, so scaling is hard.
We also produce significantly more hydrogen than aluminum in any case.
And we don’t produce massively more hydrogen than aluminum. Global primary aluminum production is ~64 million tonnes per year. Hydrogen for ammonia production (which is the majority of hydrogen I think) is about 40 million tonnes per year out of about 75 million tonnes total pure hydrogen. Certainly the same order of magnitude.
But again, this is missing the point. Before around 1950 (when steam reforming became widely available), hydrogen for ammonia fertilizer was produced commonly by electrolysis, often using cheap hydroelectric power. It was done at massive scale and only stopped because steam reforming happened to be cheaper.
And what is your point, here, by saying we make more aluminum than hydrogen? “We can’t credibly do things that are any different, even if just different by degree, than what we happen to do right now.”?
Overall a perfect showcase of why activism in a lot of things end up hurting more than helping. And of course all this before whether we know or care how 'green' the renewables are in the first place as the equipment it self needs to be manufactured/mined/produced. Its the recycling debacle all over again.