They don't have ""reasonable"" concerns with scare quotes. They have legitimately reasonable concerns. Nuclear is prohibitively expensive, inherently dangerous (in terms of being high-stakes), difficult to oversee properly (particularly since reactors can outlive governments), and it requires disposal of some of the most toxic waste mankind has ever produced.

I have an answer to all of those concerns, but that does NOT mean they're any less reasonable.

Anti-vaxx on the other hand have completely UNreasonable concerns. Most of those I talk to in the anti-vaxx movement still think there's a risk of autism. Many think this is all a conspiracy by big pharma to sell more medicine. That's not reasonable. That's not even "reasonable". That's a conspiracy theory.

I think there's a fundamental difference here as well as a difference in scale. That's why I'm saying this is a terrible comparison.

They are unreasonable concerns because they're not in any way grounded in reality.

I can also argue that we don't need vaccinations, we just all have to go live in our own self-sustaining personal space stations in orbit, and I'd be right. You don't need disease prevention without a transmission vector. Seems like anti-vaccination can be reasonable and scientific, who knew?

Similarly, the practical effects of the public policy nuclear skeptics campaign for amount to support for energy sources that are way more harmful than nuclear power could ever be.

Nuclear power is only "prohibitively expensive" because CO^2 emitting energy sources somehow get a pass on the cost of scrubbing all that carbon from the atmosphere, and if we're going to talk about "inherently dangerous" I'd like to point you to the N=1 experiment we're currently running on the Earth with global warming. Similarly, I guess "toxic waste" doesn't count if you just disperse it in the atmosphere instead of putting it in barrels and store it at a nuclear power plant.

The anti-nuclear movement is not just in favor of having "more renewables" as you argue in another reply. First of all, that movement has been a major influence in public policy since the early late 70s to early 80s, way before renewables were a viable alternative for grid power.

Secondly, there's a lot of things which we'll still need something like nuclear energy for even if we assume a renewable grid, e.g. merchant ships which are a major worldwide source of carbon emissions. It's not viable to power those sorts of things on solar, wind or battery power.

I think you'll find that even "neo-anti-nuclear" folks (if we can call them that) don't generally hold the nuanced view that they'd rather have solar or wind powering their home, but that they're also fine with nuclear merchant shipping and fishing vessels.

> They are unreasonable concerns because they're not in any way grounded in reality.

This is incorrect. The issues of safety, cost, waste disposal, etc are problems that people have spent enormous time and money trying to solve. The fact that they don't remotely outweigh the downsides of not using nuclear doesn't make them unreasonable or any less real.

Also, renewable energy has been a thing since before the 70s and 80s.

The rest of your post is simply an argument against the anti-nuclear movement. As I've repeatedly said, I agree with the pro-nuclear arguments. That's not the distinction I'm making.

The article we're discussing has the title "Public's Dread of Nuclear Power Limits its Deployment".

Perhaps we're talking past one another. I'm commenting on how the public policy discussion in practice is talking about completely the wrong issues, leading to a conservatively estimated million deaths annually.

That doesn't mean those issues can't ever be discussed, there's obviously a time and place to discuss nuclear safety.

But it's important to understand that it's harmful in terms of public policy to put that at the forefront of the discussion, as tends to happen.

Just like if every public public health discussion about vaccines devolved into talking about the fringe bad effects from vaccines, with the end result being that nobody would get vaccinated.

Yes, renewable energy has in theory been a thing for 50 years, but in practice the countries that scaled back their nuclear deployments around that time didn't replace nuclear with renewable, they replaced nuclear with energy whose waste we're still breathing today.

Look at e.g. the grid development of Germany v.s. France for a good example. The only exceptions to this are countries like Norway and Iceland who could scale up hydropower, but that doesn't work for everyone.

So I'm not sympathetic to some theoretical spherical-cow-in-a-vacuum argument that the anti-nuclear dialog hasn't been massively harmful to humanity and the planet. If the guaranteed practical outcome of a certain type of public advocacy is a certain type of public policy I think it's meaningless to talk about the would-have-could-haves of it. People should be judged on the foreseeable outcomes of their actions, not their supposed good intentions.

You're getting downvoted, but I understand the sentiment. It's amazing to me that people talk about nuclear power as if it's something that we'd ideally be able to avoid outright. Nuclear is getting safer every year (and it's already safer than everything else we're currently using in terms of deaths caused and environmental damage per unit of energy, at least[1]), and people want to just shut it down? I can at least understand a sort of "nuclear isn't ready yet" stance, but I'm baffled by the idea that the end goal is to just not utilise this whole area of physics for energy production at all. You can understand the opposition in the 1970s/80s and even 90s when things were still being ironed out, but at this point, in 2019, it does seem like it's creeping towards anti-vax levels of science-denial.

[1] Kharecha Pushker A (2013)

How is nuclear getting safer when nearly all plants are at or past their design lifetimes? Seems to me like that would mean it's getting unsafer.

You're anti-old-nuclear. It's like being anti-old-aeroplanes, which isn't an interesting position. The article is about depoyment of new plants. You've replied to a bunch of different threads with empty comments like this. You shouldn't do that.

Reactors are wonderful when they're still in the CAD database. They become progressively less so as they encounter the real world.

The problem is that nuclear has become a loser technology. It's not failing because of the public thinks it's unsafe, it's failing because internally they can't compete (and excuses about regulation are just that, excuses.)

If nuclear were 1/3 its current cost we'd be building nuclear power plants left and right, protests be damned. But it's not, and we aren't, and we won't be. Deal.