[jmyeet]

I'm familiar with the argument that nuclear power is the answer to greenhouse gas emissions. Still, this article is the next level of pro-nuclear propaganda as it launches into quite the anti-environmentalist screed. For example:

> The postwar American environmental movement began as an outgrowth from the eugenaics movement.

and

> Having fallen out of favor during World War II due to its associations with Nazism, eugenics returned with gusto under the banner of “population control” after the war.

The pro-nuclear lobby has no argument against Chernobyl, which has created an absolute exclusion zone of (literally) 1,000 square miles nearly 40 years later with no end in sight, other than to simply ignore it as an outlier that isn't relevant because the USSR doesn't exist anymore.

Likewise, Fukushima, which along with Chernobyl is the only other level seven nuclear incident, is simply written off:

> No one was harmed by nor did anyone receive lethal doses of radiation.

All the same arguments against nuclear power still apply: nuclear waste from fuel processing, nuclear waste from fuel, transporting of fuel and waste, trusting people in corporations and governments to adequately build and maintain such plants and the very fact that not a single nuclear power plant in the world hasn't been built without significant government help (which is why the pro-nuclear lobby will focus on operational costs rather than capital or total costs).

[jdasdf]

>The pro-nuclear lobby has no argument against Chernobyl~

We could have a chernobyl every year for the next hundred years, and you would cause less environment damage, and human deaths than we did by operating fossil fuel plants in 2021.

There is no argument against chernobyl because chernobil is quite frankly irrelevant beyond an economic cost to cleanup and contain, both of which can be accounted for, and arguably are already accounted for to a far greater extent than the normal operation of fossil fuel plants.

[fundatus]

After Chernobyl clouds containing radioactive material where blown westwards by the wind and eventually those clouds rained down over parts of Germany. To this day if you go out hunting for example wild boards in those areas they have to be tested for radioactivity before they can be processed further, since their diet mostly consists of mushrooms and plants that contain a lot of Caesium-137 from that rainfall back in 1986.

[jjk166]

Hundreds of thousands of people dying per year vs mild inconvenience for wild boar hunters is hardly a difficult choice.

[fundatus]

my point obviously being that this still affects plants, animals and humans in a much larger area than just the surrounding area - which makes the argument "We could have a chernobyl every year for the next hundred years" not very compelling

[jjk166]

And my point is that the alternative also affects plants, animals, and humans in a much larger area (infact worldwide) and too such a significantly greater degree that the comparison is laughable. If there was a button that would cause us to have a chernobyl every day and eliminate fossil fuels immediately, every minute that button went unpressed would kill 15 people. The actual breakeven point is a chernobyl every 3 hours.

[erentz]

Nobody died in Germany from this. Yet tens of thousands have died in Germany and neighboring countries from the pollution form its coal plants that is delayed shutting down so it could shutdown nuclear sooner, and now tens of thousands more will die as Germany starts burning more of that that dirty coal again because it shut those NPPs down and even now in this crisis is hellbent on shutting down the remaining ones. But nobody cares about those deaths in Germany, nobody seems to look at those statistics when they think about their anti-nuclear legacy.

[jmyeet]

> ... irrelevant beyond an economic cost to cleanup and contain, both of which can be accounted for

In the US at least it's "accounted for" by shifting those costs onto the public [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

[throw827474737]

Yes, tell that those chernobyl children who still suffer visibly today?

Not every country has that much square meters for landfills or nuclear wastelands, too.

Nuclear won't save us from not realizing we cannot grow forever and resources are finite.

> arguably are already accounted

wtf?

[Swenrekcah]

I believe you missed the point. They acknowledged the terrible cost of Chernobyl but the point is it can happen every year for a long time before causing the same amount of harm and suffering that fossil burning did just last year.

[fallingknife]

> The pro-nuclear lobby has no argument against Chernobyl

> Likewise, Fukushima, which along with Chernobyl is the only other level seven nuclear incident, is simply written off

So let's not ignore Chernobyl. Let's say hypothetically that we build our entire power grid out of nuclear power plants that use the exact same design as the reactors at Chernobyl. Still better than using fossil fuels. And it's a stupid comparison because nuclear is only needed for base load, not the whole grid, and we have much better designs.

Fukushima, I absolutely do write off for the exact reason you quote "No one was harmed by nor did anyone receive lethal doses of radiation."

> nuclear waste from fuel processing, nuclear waste from fuel, transporting of fuel and waste

Don't care about the waste issue, because current power sources are dumping the waste into the atmosphere continuously. Don't care that it lasts 100K years. Don't care that someone in 10K years could be killed. I don't care because the alternative carbon based power is killing people right now, so nuclear is better than that.

> trusting people in corporations and governments to adequately build and maintain such plants

Don't care because of the aforementioned fact that nuclear meltdowns are much less harmful than global warming, which is the side effect of our current power generation system.

> not a single nuclear power plant in the world hasn't been built without significant government help

Don't care that it's more expensive and needs govt subsidies. Don't care because it's better than using fossil fuels and causing more global warming. Happy to have my taxes go up for this purpose.

But what about solar/wind/storage?

Don't care because doesn't exist (yet). Show me one reasonably sized area where this powers 100% of the grid (areas w/ hydro don't count), and then I'll care. Using existing tech now is the lower risk option. Don't care about predictions that large scale storage will be ready in X years because predicting when new tech will be ready is basically impossible.

[pfdietz]

> Don't care because doesn't exist (yet).

A nuclear powered world economy also doesn't exist yet (it couldn't use today's burner reactors unless we have massively larger uranium supplies, such as seawater uranium extraction that doesn't exist yet; it could use breeder reactors but they also don't exist yet in a form even competitive with burner reactors.)

The "it doesn't exist yet" argument condemns nuclear even more than it does renewables.

[jmyeet]

> Fukushima, I absolutely do write off

The only thing that prevented Fukushima from having a Chernobyl like impact was that the radiation leakage was into the ocean [1]. The ocean ironically is being treated as a dumping ground that can be ignored by the pro-nuclear lobby just as they claim the pro-fossial fuel lobby os treating the atmosphere.

[1]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/fukushima-radiation-con...

[fallingknife]

Your source contains no number for the amount of radiation released into the ocean in absolute terms or relative to Chernobyl. It only says that a higher percentage made it to the ocean, which is meaningless because Chernobyl is inland. It also doesn't say what tangible effects the radiation release had on the ocean.

[Georgelemental]

Chernobyl happened because the Soviet Union did insane things with an insane reactor design never used anywhere else. Nuclear reactors built and operated by organizations that are not as murderous and psychotic as the USSR literally cannot fail in the same way. We ignore it as an irrelevant outlier because it is one.

And even if we do not ignore Chernobyl, nuclear power is still by far the safest way to produce energy. Fossil fuels release deadly smog, dams can break, solar panels leach nasty chemicals. Every option has some risk, but nuclear has the least by far.

[throw827474737]

Yeah it is ridiculous, and this still completely ignores that e.g. France's plants age quicker than they can renew them, that nuclear will never be safe (not talking the ""normal safe"" but what's the threat in Ukraine right now), that Europe just learns that also nuclear is of not much help during heat and drought (lol, nuclear for base power load), and that whatever will need to happen that going nuclear fully is just not feasible, time-left-wise, economical-wise, supply-wise..

[hh3k0]

Boggles my mind how people can witness Russia taking Europe hostage by occupying a nuclear power plant and making vague threats that accidents just happen sometimes and think "you know, the world really needs more of those looming threats". Let alone that extreme weather events are potentially dangerous for nuclear power plants -- and extreme weather events are, thanks to climate change, happening more and more often.

[tomjakubowski]

I don't have a real opinion on this subject, but wanted to point out that 1,000 square miles is not really as big as it sounds: a square 31.6 miles on each side. About the size of Rhode Island's land area.

[jmyeet]

That depends on where the 1,000 suqare miles is. If it's in the Nevada desert, I might agree (although the fallout from Chernobyl did fall over Europe so the initial impact is well beyond the long-term 1,000 square miles) but that's not where you need to build nuclear power plants [1]:

> To obtain the best value from nuclear power stations, they should be built close to the cities

[1]: https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi...

[Turing_Machine]

> the very fact that not a single nuclear power plant in the world hasn't been built without significant government help

I'm curious. Which grid-scale renewable energy project was built without massive government subsidy? Any? I don't know of any.

[pyuser583]

The argument against Chernobyl is Deepwater Horizon.