> Extinction rebellion have a page on her (NSFW warning for some nudity in the banner image
Controversial opinion: by scaremongering about nuclear power—which the west could have started adopting in the 1970s like France did—the naked tree huggers did as much to set back climate change mitigation efforts as the oil lobby.
At least with the oil folks, they were pushing a status quo that was likely to stand until today anyway, because renewables have only become cost competitive relatively recently. Even without lobbying by the oil industry people had powerful incentives until now to stick with the technology that didn’t require them to put on a sweater or pay more for energy.
The anti-nuclear movement by contrast knee-capped the last best hope for climate change mitigation. A technology that could have been deployed—and catalyzed electrification and energy storage efforts—decades ago when we had more runway.
> Controversial opinion: by scaremongering about nuclear power—which the west could have started adopting in the 1970s like France did—the naked tree huggers did as much to set back climate change mitigation efforts as the oil lobby.
I've always hoped they're secretly funded/friends with the oil lobby, because otherwise that's just pure sadness.
I'd like to also echo this. Best analysis of the history behind the anti-nuclear craze of the 60s and 70s is basically Russia infiltrated the Hippie Movement of the 60s to exploit the "government is bad" soft anarchism (=minarchism) in the movement to delay America from getting a leg up.
For the past 100+ years, Russia has been one of the largest energy players in the world, bigger than Saudi Arabia. You can see this today in the Russian Invasion in Ukraine, as Germany tries to comply with the international regulations and shut the Russian Nord Stream pipeline off and can't; Russia has a stranglehold on everyone on that side of the world.
So, given that, they feared an America that could meet its energy needs without pollution, heavy investment, and significant cost; while Russia was literally killing its own people to make the oil and gas flow as a cost of doing business. Thus, they slipped right in and used the Hippies to astroturf an anti-nuclear position.
Reagan may have torn down that wall, but Russia won the cold war; and then they made sure, post-Soviet, to make sure we'd never attain energy independence. The end result of that trainwreck is currently under investigation by the FBI as per the recommendations of the Jan 6th Committee.
Russia produce not only oil and gas but also is one of the biggest nuclear plant equipment exporters. If I were them I would rather sponsor articles on how it is hard to dispose of solar panels…
I agree and I think the damage to humanity that the anti-nuclear movement has done is incalculable. So many years of progress have been missed out on... and while some of it was due to greed (fossil fuel industry funding), most of it was just misplaced fear, whether propaganda induced or from an inability to see the full picture.
The anti-nuclear movement is also still alive and doing well
but at this point it's like arguing over spilled milk, the damage is mostly done and a lot of is irreversible. We can try to salvage nuclear but we've already regressed to further impure sources in some countries so progress seems unlikely.
I can't believe you're blaming "tree huggers" for this, when the clear beneficiary is the global fossil fuel industry, who've been lobbying against nuclear power since the 50s. Shit, many anti-nuclear groups have been funded by fossil fuel industry for decades. At best, their protests were political cover for governments to do what the oil industry paid them to do.
General nuclear paranoia stemming from Cold War M.A.D., Chernobyl and Three Mile Island seem to spring to my mind. Not so much your naked tree-hugger in a historical vacuum theory.
> Controversial opinion: by scaremongering about nuclear power—which the west could have started adopting in the 1970s like France did—the naked tree huggers did as much to set back climate change mitigation efforts as the oil lobby.
You would have thought that France would have supplied the European continent with electricity now that Russia cut its gas supply, but it turns out that France received electricity from Germany even during this time.
It turns out that even new builds of nuclear power plants take years to be completed. Getting safety right is a challenge, the more we know about engineering and material science for nuclear plants, the more we know about challenges in building them, the more we need to do to avoid these risks, the harder it is to build a safe power plant.
Our national energy company EDF has been the largest energy exporter in Europe for ages, in 2019 it was the largest in the world. In addition to that it's made us the cleanest country in the continent for close to 40 years (along with hydro-rich countries).
The notion that 2022 is a smoking gun for nuclear is ridiculous. All it reflects is the past 12 years of successive liberal governments writing laws and reforms to gut our nuclear fleet and EDF in favour of private companies.
Covid maintenance postponed + corrosion issues led to this bad timing; otherwise looks like it worked pretty well for decades.
France closed a working-order nuclear plant for political reasons just two years before, so we're not making exactly the brightest decisions here either.
France was strongarmed by Germany and by shitty election related deals to elect Hollande into massive nuclear power closures and reductions, coupled with presidents unable to see more than 5 years ahead means that nuclear plants both do not get renewed and also get closed for absolutely no reason. See Fessenheim.
The issue with construction isn't that it's hard to build a safe power plant, it's that there's been no will from anyone, or active harm from incompetent shitheads.
Hollande wanted to diversify France because it's not and they had to pay for this stupidity and still do to this day.
Fessenheim is the perfect reason for why Hollande wanted to close some of those plants: old, accident ridden, one of those which have to be closed down in summer due to possible overheating of nearby rivers and to top that off: it's in a region which may have earthquakes for which it is not prepared...
> The issue with construction isn't that it's hard to build a safe power plant, it's that there's been no will from anyone, or active harm from incompetent shitheads.
Weird because there are plenty western countries which do have popular support for nuclear energy but still struggle with construction times and costs in astronomical ways.
Fessenheim was amongst the top performing nuclear plants, and had no issues being given a 10 year renewal because of how safe it was before it was closed for political reasons. The EELV/Die Grunde kool-aid is not a good thing to drink considering how anti science they are.
And as always, the same awful arguments about "don't overheat the rivers", when the limits set by the safety regulations are way under anything that could damage the environment. You could triple the output heat in the river and it would change absolutely nothing.
Hollande did not want to diversify our energy production. It was a purely political play to get EELV's support and used Fessenheim as a sacrificial chip. Glad to see the German energiewende led to such diversification that you're running half your country on coal right now btw. https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE
> essenheim was amongst the top performing nuclear plants, and had no issues being given a 10 year renewal because of how safe it was
That is false. It was an old and accident ridden plant.
> And as always, the same awful arguments about "don't overheat the rivers", when the limits set by the safety regulations are way under anything
Luckily those limits are set by people who know what they're doing and not the nuclear astroturf online.
> Hollande did not want to diversify our energy production. It was a purely political play to get EELV's support and used Fessenheim as a sacrificial chip.
That's pure propaganda from the opposite political spectrum and is not even worth the discussion anymore at this point.
> Glad to see the German energiewende led to such diversification that you're running half your country on coal right now btw. https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE
We even had to get some coal plants back from retirement (just like you did) because your rotting nuclear fleet isn't performing and it's cold outside. You're welcome :)
Exactly, the phase-out plan was initially delayed in late 2010: the government decreed a 12-year delay of the schedule. Then something unpleasant happened at Fukushima.
What you don’t know is that in the 2010’s the left wing had a agreement with the Green Party to stop all nuclear by 2050. That’s why we stop financing and maintaining a lot of nuclear plants. It turned out it was a bad idea..
A huge program (55 to 95 billions euros) aiming at upgrading all existing reactors in order to run them for 60 or even 80 years was launched and runs:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_car%C3%A9nage
Governments also sold reactors to Finland (running project, way over-budget and delay), China (2 reactors, over-budget and delay, and they stayed offline or at low-power for a full year after an incident) and the U.-K. (this is a running project, already late and over-budget).
Which ones? Are we talking 90%, an the entire year, without creative accounting?
Disregarding electric dams because, while wonderful, those depend heavily on the country geography and I assume a lot of countries cannot build enough of them. (but we should build as much as we can of those, just don't expect 50% hydroelectricity everywhere)
Norway 98% since 2016.
Costa Rica 98% since 2015.
Scotland 97% in 2020.
Uruguay 98% in 2021.
New Zealand pushing close to 90%.
> Are we talking 90%, an the entire year, without creative accounting?
I don’t know what this means. If a country reports that X amount of energy came from a particular source in a particular year, that means the entire year. And if you believe these countries are lying and doing “creative accounting”, then the burden of proof lies with you to prove it, not for me to disprove it.
Norway: large hydro resources, low population.
Costa Rica: 80% hydro.
Scotland: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-56530424 says that renewable met 97% of energy demand, which does not mean that clean electricity was produced when it was needed in Scotland. Considering that this means the country could run at 97% of its production potential with only RE is what I consider "creative accounting". (the article does not lie but interpreting it that way is mistaken).
Uruguay: only 31% hydro, that's more interesting.
New Zealand: 55% hydro, 13% geothermal.
So except for Uruguay (which does look interesting), most countries mostly use renewable dispatchable sources which are perfect. But not all countries have the hydro potential / population ratio of Norway. We should use hydro as much as we can but we are limited by geography; once everything that can be used is we are stuck with nuclear, wind or solar.
Maybe Uruguay could be an example of country that manages somehow with mostly solar/wind; I need to look into it. Thank you.
Keep in mind it is also possible for countries to export electricity; for the world to be powered by renewables each country needs not produce 100% of it’s own energy demands.
I don't think so. People in the US have and have had net-positive views on nuclear energy. It's not like public sentiment has turned against nuclear energy because of naked tree hugging protesters. For example, this polling [1] from Pew shows that only 27% of the US public thinks the government should discourage nuclear power with everyone else saying the government should either encourage or be neutral towards it.
Of course some green energy climate tree hugger whatever protesters oppose nuclear energy, but they are powerless and don't change public opinion much and certainly don't influence outcomes. To my knowledge it's government regulations and laws that stifle nuclear energy - not protesters or climate people.
Is it though? The US Navy has a pretty impressive nuclear safety record for the number of reactors they have in service.
To flip it, would you have more trust in a private company with nuclear safety? If the same decisions being made that allows PG&E to cut their funding for maintenance that allows their lines to be the cause of California's forest fires, why would we trust they would pay for the upkeep on a nuclear reactor?
I've worked in the energy industry. There is complete capture there. When PG&E is the "bad guy" it's because the government needs them to be. ERCOT works the same way (though is better).
If the government wanted PG&E to properly fund their line maintenance, PG&E would properly fund their line maintenance.
Smith-putnam was early 40s and both PV and the concept of an economic learning curve have been known since the 50s.
We could have had the wind and solar revolution any time in the last 70 years. Instead trillions were gifted to fossil fuel and nuclear con artists.
This blame of the failure of nuclear on them being forced to sort-of clean up some of their mess rather than just sending native people to mine with no PPE and dumping tailings and waste wherever is a sad attempt at gaslighting.
To me - it seems the existential fear around climate change is the topic of the day for environmentalists only because nuclear ended up not gaining traction. Nuclear waste/proliferation is not the number one existential threat these days only because it's used so little (both because of PR issues and lack of economics/long term maintenance challenges).
The masses of environmentalists moved on from nuclear in the 80's but would surely return if nuclear regained traction.
Not sure if that's controversial? I don't think the fossil fuel industry (or Putin) could've wished for better allies than the Energiewende (anti-nuclear, pro Russian gas with a bit of solar and wind) supporters in Europe.
Whoever was behind it successfully managed to delay nuclear fission adoption by about 60 years for all of the EU and UK except France causing massive amounts of totally unnecessary CO2 emissions in the process.
Putin is an omni-present monster, sure, and an oil and gas monster to that. But he also is THE biggest nuclear power monster:
[Rosatom] ranks first in the overseas NPP construction, responsible for 76% of global nuclear technology exports: 35 nuclear power plant units, at different stages of development, in 12 countries, as of December 2020.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosatom
At some point it will, but has fossil fuel use actually declined so far? From what a I’ve read, the Arctic is being looked at as a new frontier for oil and gas exploration as the ice retreats.
There is so much wrong with this comment I'm not sure where to begin.
0. Nuclear is not forbidden.
1. Nuclear power is exceedingly common in many countries.
2. Electricity production is not (by far) the only source of carbon emissions. Why have we also not seen any major action to reduce emissions from other sources? Or did the treehuggers also force people to fly, eat meat and drive large cars?
3. > Last best hope.
Energy efficiency. Regulation incentivizing fuel efficiency. Low carbon public transportation. Incentives to reduce the carbon emissions from agriculture. Renewables. The list of available remedies is long.
But sure, go ahead and blame environmentalists for the destruction profit driven market capitalism caused. If that soothes your cognitive dissonance.
> But sure, go ahead and blame environmentalists for the destruction profit driven market capitalism caused.
The alternative economic systems are even worse on environmental grounds, and their only saving grace is their ineptness and inefficiency, which limits the amount of damage they cause.
Like, have you heard about environmental disaster of Aral Sea? About how Soviet Union explicitly pursued maximizing fossil extraction as its core economic policy? About the environmental disaster of Great Leap Forward? Check out the list of 10 most polluted places in the world, where are they? Literally the only one that got its pollution under capitalism is in Zambia, all the rest are in former Soviet Union, China and India, which started doing market economy when they were already high polluters.
The regulation is there for a purpose. The idea that nuclear was "killed" by regulation is a kind of "stab-in-the-back" conspiracy theory.
If nuclear was truly this obvious answer to aquire abundant clean energy, wouldn't our business friendly leaders embrace it with open arms?
A couple of treehuggers didn't stop them from allowing overfishing the sea, or from extracting fuel from oil sands. Despite those things having very clear negative environmental consequences. And strong popular opposition.
But for Nuclear apparently they went totally in the opposite direction. Deaf to the cries of businessmen they heavily regulated an obviously harmless and extremly profitable energy industry to death?
The regulation is there for a reason, but it doesn't have to be a sensible or proportionate reason. Nuclear power is held to a ludicrously higher safety standard than fossil. You are right to suspect that business interests had a hand in subverting nuclear power - the issue is that while nuclear was getting off the ground, the fossil fuel industry was already well established and integrated with government. The anti-nuclear movement wasn't the ultimate cause, but it allied public opinion with a business interest it should have been viciously fighting.
> But sure, go ahead and blame environmentalists for the destruction profit driven market capitalism caused. If that soothes your cognitive dissonance
This is laughable. I come from a country that’s officially socialist. But even people from there want to come to Texas and drive a big SUV and live in a big house with a pool. Better yet, they want to attain that same standard of living in their own country.
If environmentalists tell people to turn down the thermostat and stop eating meet and crowd into public transit, they will lose every time.
Because people in India and China want air conditioned malls, meat for every meal, and private cars. The governments in these regions are absolutely dependent on keeping those countries on a path to western prosperity for their legitimacy. Any climate change plan that contradicts that isn’t a serious plan and will fuck us all.
Then let the west (which has by far the largest carbon emissions per capita) lead the way! Show the world that prosperity isn't necessarily 2 cars and a heart attack at 67.
And to people saying it is not possible, I call bullshit.
There are large carbon footprint variations within the West. Of course countries have different circumstances, but it's also very clearly a question of political will.
Controversial opinion: by scaremongering about nuclear power—which the west could have started adopting in the 1970s like France did—the naked tree huggers did as much to set back climate change mitigation efforts as the oil lobby.
At least with the oil folks, they were pushing a status quo that was likely to stand until today anyway, because renewables have only become cost competitive relatively recently. Even without lobbying by the oil industry people had powerful incentives until now to stick with the technology that didn’t require them to put on a sweater or pay more for energy.
The anti-nuclear movement by contrast knee-capped the last best hope for climate change mitigation. A technology that could have been deployed—and catalyzed electrification and energy storage efforts—decades ago when we had more runway.