[CptFribble]

The problem is education. Most people are afraid of the word "nuclear," reacting with knee-jerk fear and dismissal. Most people don't understand how radiation works or the difference between different kinds of waste.

Even people who have a reputation for "knowing better" spread misinformation, like John Oliver, who did a video on nuclear power with a bit essentially saying, "Look at all this nuclear waste we have! It covers a whole football field to three stories!" Without any context of other waste from solar panel manufacturing, or even easy ones like the X billion tons of particulate matter we breathe out of the coal plants.

The other problem is humans are famously bad at estimating risk, combined with the "everything is a profit-investment" mindset we all have. When people say "nuclear is so expensive" what they really mean is "it's hard to turn a profit before twenty years, I want my money back sooner than that, lets build some more gas wells."

We need some kind of national organization, with lots of capital, to take on the initial financial risk and spread it around so no one person is left on the hook in a life-destroying way. Imagine if that organization had a department with decades nuclear operations experience.

(I'm talking about the government, and the Navy, btw)

[jointpdf]

I was hoping to dig up some stats that showed nuclear is more popular than you might think, but...yeah, no. Based on this poll, it looks as though the Fukushima incident knocked ~10% off of public support for nuclear energy.

I wonder what the best way to shift the conversation on nuclear would be. In particular, I wish that environmentalists (and I consider myself one) would adopt a proper risk-based view of nuclear power.

[0] http://www.pewinternet.org/2018/05/14/energy-climate-appendi...

[cjarrett]

I took a course on Rhetoric and Public Policy at CMU. The topic that year was Nuclear Energy, and we had a fantastic mix of engineers, nuclear scientist PhD candidates, and humanities students. This was during the actual Fukushima crisis, I believe that Fall Semester.

It was very sobering going through and comparing the Fukushima writing to writing from the 70s. It's been a long time since the course, but I'm not surprised by the results whatsoever.

[jointpdf]

Assigning credit where it's due--it looks like the Union of Concerned Scientists and Nature Conservancy have recently changed their position on this:

https://www.apnews.com/1af69ea110484f8f9fe26b79559e4d88

[makerofspoons]

We should rebrand it- people forget that the original name for an MRI scanner was an NMR scanner- nuclear magnetic resonance. Of course nuclear scared people so in response to patient concerns nuclear was dropped from the name and now people line up to stick their appendages in them. Instead of nuclear we should be saying 'Molten Salt Reactors' and similar accurate (but less scary) names for what we want to have built.

[Wingman4l7]

It always boils down to rebranding, doesn't it.

[e3b0c]

Comparing nuclear waste with other waste like those from manufacturing solar panels does not help. You don't need to build the facilities like the Yucca Moutain Project to contain the waste from making silicon chips. (Yes, comparing the waste from making silicon chips to solar panels makes more sense)

[SlowRobotAhead]

The never ending irony is that many of the people scared of nuclear are hippies that talk about how concerned with the environment they are.

Edit: ha, don’t be mad at me! I want nuclear, I care about the environment.