#antinuclearism

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“Finally they’re closed. No more atoms, pure renewables from now on!”

Not only are they putting on a celebration of the end of nuclear power generation in Germany, but the adjacent sign on the same board advertises a talk about the “climate protection policy” of the main governing party ― a policy which apparently consists in burning more coal.

How can anyone be so depraved?

It’s no excuse to be misinformed : when the information is so readily available, a person must want to believe lies.

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Coal kills.

It has been said that the only thing worse than coal… is no coal. Happily, we have a fully satisfactory alternative.

Nuclear power will kill the coal industry… if we let it!

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Not In My Ecosystem - Brown Political Review

Environmental legislation in California has been co-opted by wealthy citizens seeking to prevent development in their neighborhoods

If lawmakers are serious about fighting climate change, they must design climate-friendly legislation that cannot be exploited by anti-development activists.

I don't know how to tell you this…

Any attempt to mark some essential distinction between “legitimate” environmentalists and “anti–development activists” is bound to fail. Anyone who has read through the controversies of the 1960s and 1970s — for instance @atoms4ca here on Tumblr — can tell you that the opposition to nuclear energy, the defining characteristic of the Green movement, the one thing they are unwilling to give up, even in the face of the threat of climate catastrophe? Was founded on the desire to deny industrial civilization a sustainable energy source.

It’s NIMBY all the way down. The founders of “Friends of the Earth” looked at California and though “it would be awful if more people were here, and this State can’t support more people without electricity, and nuclear is the only reasonable option to supply that, so let’s oppose it.” Simple as that. And the Sierra Club, which had been saying “Atoms not Dams”, trying to accommodate development with minimal harm to the environment, saw money flowing to these radicals, and followed suit.

The CEQA process, just like the NEPA process, has been from the beginning and is being abused, because it was created to be abusable. There are few or no scientific or other objective standards attached to the Environmental Impact Statement process, and the “null hypothesis” alternative presented is generally a completely unrealistic one. “What happens if we don’t allow this power plant, or mine, or other project” is typically answered with “nothing”, not with an acknowledgement that the power, or minerals, or whatever will have to come from somewhere.

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If nuclear energy is not going to fill the gap, what can? The immediate answer appears to be ― nothing.

Ground for Concern ― Australia’s Uranium and Human Survival (a 1977 publication from Friends of the Earth), chapter 8

It is important to recognize that the antinuclear position does not grow primarily out of “concerns” about some problem or risk of harm associated with nuclear energy.  This is why the expressions of concern about waste, proliferation, or what have you often contradict one another, and responses to them fail to have much effect. Rather, they are provided as a rationale for a rejection which is already established, and may be more visceral than intellectual.

When we look at the antinuclear publications of the 1970s ― although the exact same thing can still be seen today ― it becomes very clear that one of the major motives for this rejection is a distaste for technic society itself, and a desire to bring it to a halt. While this message has a superficial romantic appeal, the general public is really too hard-headed to embrace it, so it is dressed up with platitudes about “conservation” and “alternative energy”. But what the campaigners always fail to recognize is that (as in The Man who Could Work Miracles by H.G. Wells) the consequences of this would be catastrophic, and as soon as its effects begin to be felt, all manner of measures will be taken to avoid it. We aver that the rejection of nuclear energy in Europe and America is intimately connected with the relocation of manufacturing industries to China. The direct energy demand of the developed countries has been relatively flat since about 1980, but huge amounts of coal have been burned overseas to keep it that way.

An alternative position, which is becoming known as “ecomodernism”, looks for ways to reduce the environmental impact per person in prosperous societies. Fission energy is a primary way of doing that.

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When “the facts don’t matter”

We have related before having been spat on for carrying a pro–nuclear sign in a climate rally in Munich. More edifying was being told by an old German Green, when trying to explain that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change itself ranks fission power as having the lowest global–warming potential among industrial energy sources, “those may be the facts, but the facts don’t matter”.

To amplify a point made in blast №2 :

People who advocate for nuclear energy often come from scientific, engineering, or other technical backgrounds, and tend to assume unconsciously that certain elements of the perspective that background gives them are universal. Hence they expect certain basic attitudes to be mirrored by the opponents of nuclear energy, which affects how they try to approach the topic. They may try to make arguments based on facts, or they may try to change the technology to meet the objections, but either way, because the opponents do not share that fundamental perspective, it is wasted effort.

“Nuclear energy is not safe” is not a statement about the risks and harms of various ways of supplying energy. It is a political statement, and it means “because I do not accept nuclear power, I am willing to accept the risks and harms of alternative forms of energy supply, including catastrophic climate change.” “There is no acceptable way to dispose of nuclear waste” is not a statement about reprocessing, vitrification, or deep geological repositories. It means, “I do not accept nuclear energy, and so I will not accept any approach to disposing of its wastes.”

Until advocates for atomic power learn to distinguish such political statements — inherent for example in the title of Amory Lovins’ book Non–Nuclear Futures : Towards an Ethical Energy Strategy — from statements about scientific facts and engineering capabilities, they will continue to fail to carry their point. And that failure has serious consequences for the world.

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Umweltvereinigung: Nuklearia klagt gegen Umweltbundesamt | Nuklearia

Der Nuklearia e. V. hat Klage eingereicht gegen die Entscheidung des UBA, den Verein nicht als Umweltvereinigung anzuerkennen.

The German pro–nuclear citizens’ organization, Nuklearia, is appealing against the refusal of the Federal Environment Ministry to permit it to register as an environmental organization ― which would give it a privileged voice in discussions on energy policy.

The objections of the “Umweltbundesamt” are far–fetched, especially after Nuklearia amended its charter in response to a previous denial. The truth, often discussed but never before officially stated, appears to be that the UBA is a creature of the Green Party, and regards anything that does not align with the agenda of that party as alien to its mission. Designation as an environmental organization, with the advantages it brings, is meant as patronage for groups which in turn support the Greens.

The one, unwavering, central and fundamental position of Die Grünen is, of course, opposition to atomic energy in all its forms and manifestations.

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Estimating the impact of new high seas activities on the environment: the effects of ocean-surface macroplastic removal on sea surface ecosystems

The open ocean beyond national jurisdiction covers nearly half of Earth’s surface and is largely unexplored. It is also an emerging frontier for new types of human activity. Understanding how new activities interact with high seas ecosystems is critical for our management of this other half of Earth. Using The Ocean Cleanup (TOC) as a model, we demonstrate why it is important to account for uncertainty when assessing and evaluating impacts of novel high seas activities on marine ecosystems. TOC’s aim is to remove plastic from the ocean surface by collecting it with large nets. However, this approach also results in the collection of surface marine life (neuston) as by-catch. Using an interdisciplinary approach, we explore the social-ecological implications of this activity. We use population models to quantify potential impacts on the surface ecosystem; we determine the links between these ecosystems and society through an ecosystem services approach; and we review the governance setting relevant to the management of activities on the high seas. We show that the impact of ocean surface plastic removal largely depends on neuston life histories, and ranges from potentially mild to severe. We identify broader social-ecological implications that could be felt by stakeholders both beyond and within national jurisdiction. The legal framework applicable to TOC’s activities is insufficiently specific to address both the ecological and social uncertainty we describe, demonstrating the urgent need for detailed rules and procedures on environmental impact assessment and strategic environmental assessment to be adopted under the new International Agreement on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction which is currently being negotiated.

“Nobody actually knows.”

Simplified as far as possible, that’s the message of this paper. Everyone mostly assumes that plastic garbage in the oceans is bad for marine life, and given that it’s a new element, disturbing the existing equilibria, that seems to be a safe assumption. Everyone mostly assumes that removing it from the ocean would be good for marine life, and although this is in fact a distinct question, again, the assumption seems to be a safe one. But the information needed to confirm those safe-seeming assumptions does not exist.

By contrast, the effects on human health and the natural world of radioactivity, atomic energy facilities, and uranium mining have been studied with far greater thoroughness than practically any other “environmental” question. The information necessary for judgement is available, and it is remarkably unambiguous. Supplying power and heat from fission has such small associated harms that building fission plants to replace other kinds of energy facilities has large associated net benefits, and civilization can use many times as much energy from this source as any other, without overburdening the ecological cycles on which life depends.

So why is it that people are very hesitant, if not outright opposed, to making a transition to nuclear energy, but broadly enthusiastic about going ahead with “ocean cleanup” projects which may for all we know do more harm than good?

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Fighting flat-Earth theory – Physics World

Rachel Brazil explores ways in which the physics community can best combat unscientific thinking, such as the belief the Earth is flat

That the Earth is a sphere was so widely accepted in the Europe of the Middle Ages that Thomas Aquinas, at the very beginning of his great work on theology, uses it as an example of how the same conclusion can be reached by different lines of reasoning from different kinds of evidence.

The struggle over atomic energy is, perhaps as much as anything else, a colossal object lesson showing that scientific facts and reasoning have very little power to convince people who are not prepared to accept the conclusions which follow from them. To get that acceptance requires either incubating the scientific mindset, or building personal rapport and trust ― both of which are notoriously difficult.

It is unfortunately true that those who have a responsibility for guaranteeing future power supplies start off with a built–in disadvantage, because at all times they must submit their statements to the tests of truth, and of what constitutes responsible behaviour. This is clearly not true of much of the nuclear opposition.

― Heinrich Mandel, Chairman, Uranium Institute Foreword to Uranium 1978

The alternative is to build a social consensus to freeze such people out of public discourse and positions of responsibility, which is fraught with dangers as well as difficulty. But we are living (and dying!) with the consequences of failure to take some kind of effective action ― Flat-Earthers running school systems, plague rats running hospitals, a world that continues to run on fossil fuels.