Cue the nuclear shills that will handwave away any legitimate concern with wishful thinking and frame the discussion as solely pro/anti fossil, conveniently pretending that renewables don’t exist.

ETA:

Let’s look at some great examples of handwaving and other nonsense to further the nuclear agenda.

Here @danielbln@lemmy.world brings up a legitimate concern about companies not adhering to regulation and regulators being corrupt/bought *cough… Three Mile Island cough*, and how to deal with that:

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?

So of course the answer to that by @Carighan@lemmy.world is a slippery slope argument and equating a hypothetical disaster with thousands if not millions of victims and areas being uninhabitable for years to come, with the death of a family member due to faulty wiring in your home:

Since you can apply that logic to everything, how can you ever build anything? Because all consequences are dire on a myopic scale, that is, if your partner dies because a single electrician cheaped out with the wiring in your building and got someone to sign off, “It’s not as bad as a nuclear disaster” isn’t exactly going to console them much.

At some point, you need to accept that making something illegal and trying to prosecute people has to be enough. For most situations. It’s not perfect. Sure. But nothing ever is. And no solution to energy is ever going to be perfect, either.

Then there’s the matter of misleading statistics and graphs.
Never mind the fact that the amount of victims of nuclear disasters is underreported, under-attributed and research is hampered if not outright blocked to further a nuclear agenda, also never mind that the risks are consistently underreported, lets leave those contentious points behind and look at what’s at hand.

Here @JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works shows a graph from Our World in Data that is often thrown around and claims to show “Death rates by unit of electricity production”:

Seems shocking enough and I’m sure in rough lines, the proportions respective to one another make sense to some degree or another.
The problem however is that the source data is thrown together in such a way that it completely undermines the message the graph is trying to portray.

According to Our World in Data this is the source of the data used in the graph:

Death rates from energy production is measured as the number of deaths by energy source per terawatt-hour (TWh) of electricity production.

Data on death rates from fossil fuels is sourced from Markandya, A., & Wilkinson, P. (2007).

Data on death rates from solar and wind is sourced from Sovacool et al. (2016) based on a database of accidents from these sources.

We estimate deaths rates for nuclear energy based on the latest death toll figures from Chernobyl and Fukushima as described in our article here: https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-chernobyl-and-fukushima

We estimate death rates from hydropower based on an updated list of historical hydropower accidents, dating back to 1965, sourced primarily from the underlying database included in Sovacool et al. (2016). For more information, see our article: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Fossil fuel numbers are based on this paper which starts out by described a pro-nuclear stance, but more importantly, does a lot of educated guesstimating on the air-pollution related death numbers that is straight up copied into the graph.

Sovacool is used for solar and wind, but doesn’t have those estimates and is mainly limited to direct victims.

Nuclear based deaths is based on Our World in Data’s own nuclear propaganda piece that mainly focuses on direct deaths and severely underplays non-direct deaths.

And hydropower bases deaths is based on accidents.

So they mix and match all kinds of different forms of data to make this graph, which is a no-no. Either you stick to only accidents, only direct deaths or do all possible deaths that is possibly caused by an energy source, like they do for fossil fuels.

Not doing so makes the graph seem like some kind of joke.

I wonder what Greta’s take on nuclear is.

To those of you who propose 100% renewables + storage. In cases with no access to hydro power. How much energy storage do you need? How does it scale with production/consumption? What about a system with 100TWh yearly production/consumption?

It’s moot now. Economics is the main anti nuclear force at the moment. Large scale nuclear will remain a “it would have been nice”, a “why didn’t they just”.

Anti-nuclear people in here arguing about disasters that killed a few k people in 50 years. Also deeply worried about nuclear waste that won’t have an impact on humans for thousands of years, but ignoring climate change is having an impact and might end our way of life as we know it before 2100.

They’re bike-shedding and blocking a major stepping stone to a coal, petrol and gas free future for the sake of idealism.

The biggest enemy of the left is the left

This thread: nuclear is far better than fossil fuels

Everyone else: nuclear is not as good as renewables

This thread: nuclear is far better than fossil fuels

Crickets

I’m pretty sure I’ve read that nuclear power plants are the most expensive source of electricity. Might as well just use solar + wind + storage for cheaper?

Meh … so the nuclear lobby astroturfing campaigns we know from reddit have arrived on lemmy now. That we have to decide between coal or nuclear is propaganda. Nuclear is an old fashioned concept just like coal - decentralized renewables are the future - fuck the nuclear lobby and their feeble lies!

I mistook this as being pro nuclear weapon instead of pro nuclear power lol.

Cause once again no one can see the potential advancements nuclear technology can have if it had proper investment. Everyone see’s Chernobyl and Fukushima and then they switch off.

Yes Renewables are better than nuclear for the moment but to demonize and not even discuss it is just burying your head in the sand

deleted by creator

removed by mod

Wind and solar > nuclear > fossil fuels

Nothing really against nuclear except how it is being weilded as a distraction from better, cleaner, energy. We need to be going all in on converting everything to wind and solar, with batteries and other power storage like water pumping facilities filling the gaps.

Nuclear needs a few more issues figured out, like how to actually cheaply build and get power from all those touted newer cleaner reactor styles.

Apparently the nemesis of the left is the left. Watching it sink with my popcorns 🍿

deleted by creator