Maybe this is already widely understood on here, but I feel understanding how the anti-communist left was leveraged to fight nuclear energy.
As more people are reading this I wanted to share what I consider to be a superior analysis https://communistperspective.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-nuclear-debate-for-and-against.html
And to be clear, you can be pro-renewable without being anti-nuclear I am referring to many of the European Green parties that are anti-nuclear above all else. Nuclear has it’s drawbacks, but it is preferable to climate change, for now.
Yeah I always thought nuclear would be a good transition between fossil fuels and other green energy, or at least an option to consider.
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/288306
In this post I link to an essay by a communist Nuclear technician laying out how Nuclear is essentially the solution to our problems. And how if you build to specs and maintain (which a socialist society could easily do) Nuclear energy is like a perfect placeholder until we develop fission energy.
spoiler
I love reading about nuclear power. Please give me resources to read about nuclear power. I know it’s a political topic but I just think nuclear power is very cool. And radiation.
I find material about the environmental impact of different power sources difficult to understand. I know very little about this. If anyone knows how I can understand this better, I would appreciate the help.
Doesn’t want to broach political topics.
Is a Marxist-Leninist.
Lol I know you meant controversial* but I couldn’t let that softball pass me up.
I will link you in any future comments or posts I make about nuclear power
I meant that my fascination is very disconnected from my politics and ideology. I have no other way to explain it than monkey brain goes “wow, powerful rock”. Further explained by my poor understanding of environmental impact, I couldn’t defend it against renewable resources for example.
But yeah, as a Communist I do find most things Political™ and that makes me insufferable IRL
Everything is political, all power other than political power is illusory. (re-reading it, this could sound rude - I was actually criticizing the people who find panic insufferable for finding most things political)
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Reducing usage can and absolutely should be done, and unlike building new plants of a particular type, it doesn’t require changing people’s minds. Well, mostly.
One of the biggest wastes of energy is of course work commutes, which are stupid. But that’s mostly fossil fuels and let’s just set aside electric cars for a minute. The other big waste besides travel is lighting and HVAC for the offices.
Then we have the easier stuff. Most homes have terrible insulation or no insulation at all. Insulation should be on the list of minimum habitability requirements for rental homes. The difference during summer in a moderate climate (such as los Angeles) is 80-90% decrease in energy usage.
Industry should also have to pay their fair share. Instead of getting a discount for being bulk users, they should have to pay more for being demand drivers.
New communities should be built with microgrids. Each home and business should generate their own energy using solar and wind. By having unlimited energy flowing from some unseen tap, people tend to not pay attention to how much they are using and just pay the bill when it comes. There’s some economic principle with a fancy name that covers this but I forget the name.
And that’s just for starters. Really we waste 95% of all energy generated by power plants. And I mean waste. As in the same things could be accomplished without compromise for less energy. It’s the economic incentives that are all out of whack.
Urbanization is insanely important and there is actually a very interesting and tragic history of how the US public infrastructure of trains and trams were monopolized then dismantled by bad actors on behalf of GM and other car companies. The car, tire, and oil industry (I think it was firestone, Ford, and Standard Oil) also heavily invested in lobbying for highways, privatization of railroads, and the mass adoption of suburban housing developments.
All this to say is that yet again, monopoly capitalists are at the heart of our problems. I worked briefly on wind energy and the open secret was that the real opponent (on a local level) was the power grid/utility companies. Their business model is never maintain the power grid, so the ide of REPLACING/REFURBISHING the power grid to be more compatible with alternative energy is a non-starter. As we all agree here, they should be permanently nationalized. My friend works for PG&E and he tells me how they take the money from the government to update the grids, pocket it with huge bonuses then don’t maintain the grid and problems happen.
Edit: This essay grossly misrepresents the intent of the conference imo (“how come everytime we capitalist try to improve something, things get way worse but also way more profitable”), but includes raw data worth examining, i.e. the Ford Foundation “tackling urban development” (lmao at bourgeois academics who never call out conflicts of interests).
This is something that I’m a bit at odds with. On one hand, I kinda do support nuclear, but the org I’m a candidate for doesn’t. In their perspective, a lot of energy is wasted on capitalist production and the US military especially, the largest polluter. Under socialist organizing, the energy wasted would be distributed in a more logical and efficient manner, in their view. I haven’t finished the PSL book on Climate solutions beyond Capitalism, so I’ll reserve my full judgement for now.
A lingering concern of mine would be the storing of energy from solar and wind. I’m not sure if the needed batteries are developed enough to sustain entire cities.
Energy storage at the public utility level is essentially a solved problem, via pumped water storage.
There are so many political factors that go into different sources of energy, but so far solar, wind, and nuclear have the lowest cost per watt, and least damage to the environment. There are some concerns with the raw materials needed for solar tho that make it not necessarily better than nuclear, even tho its cost per watt has been going drastically down.
Environmental impact of making solar panels is definitely not great. Idk how it compares to what goes into a nuclear reactor other than shit ass loads of concrete and steel.
Is that the book by Tina Landis?
It is indeed
I saw her speak the other day, actually. She didn’t think nuclear was a good option. Her book is in my queue.
Did you see her at the people’s summit? It’s a very good book so far. There’s a section where they start talking about mushrooms, hehe.
She came to my local PSL on her tour.
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I’ve heard lots of conflicting info about nuclear. I saw a socialist speak about climate change recently and she didn’t think it was a good option. I need to do research on it, I have no idea.
I already knew that opposition to nuclear energy has its origins in fossil fuel protectionism, but now as I read that the Council on Foreign Relations was also involved from the beginning all the imperialist pieces are falling in to place in my head. To be fair I haven’t spent much time on energy topics since firmly identifying as an ML.
The energy/oil cartel is central to empire. Coal then oil.
When I first learned about the history of the industrial revolution I was shocked to find out that the step between beasts of burden and hydro power was human power… People in giant hamster wheels in some cases. The thinking was that animals were too stupid or difficult to train to get them to speed up or slow down as needed, so humans that could follow instructions was an improvement. Keep in mind that humans can only produce about 1-2 kilowatt hours per day.
Hydro is the original “robots” taking our jobs. Coal/oil then made it so you didn’t have to be near water. You could extract resources and bring it elsewhere.
This interview lays out how the extraction of primary sector resources from the global south by the global north is what more or less produced the industrial revolution.
Primary sector : food, energy (at certain points those two are the same - human and animal power) and minerals.
Look up maps of these three things, Europe is poor as hell. Oil is just the latest iteration of this phenomenon, but it is central to empire. I don’t remember who it was, but an economist said that the advances in production are far less tied to technology than to energy. So the advent of the industrial revolution was due largely to the increased availability of fossil fuels/steam, than to “ingenuity”.
Nuclear energy is slow and expensive.
Slow to build.
Slow to turn on and off.
Their peak production will never exceed that of wind or solar and wind and solar power consumption combined just passed total nuclear power consumption last year.
By the end of the decade nuclear will be smaller than either than them for certain as nuclear power plants are slow to build.My FIL is an environmental inspector for a city and he inspects big companies and their waste. He knows a lot about energy.
He’s really anti-nuclear because he sees it as a non-renewable source of energy. He’d rather have the world running on renewable energy sources as that’s always better than having to deal with toxic/dangerous waste. I’ve always found his POV very interesting and I could see his point. It also went a whole lot deeper than just slap some wind turbines on a field. He’s also advocating zero waste, trying to design cities in smarter ways, trying to rethink our consumption needs etc.
I’m not really against nuclear energy but I think I agree with his renewable energy view. But it still has a long way to go, like this article mentions. Nuclear energy seems inevitable for now. His view is also pretty Western-minded as The West has more financial resources.
I don’t understand the article’s ‘fossil industry puppet’ point though. Apart from the one organization he mentions. Just because there are people that also want to look at non-nuclear options does not mean they are puppets of the Big Oil.
I highly reccomend this article
As to the fossil fuel industry puppet, that is just the article’s only mentioned source. look up literally any anti-nuclear activists that have made a career out of it, and look through their background. imo they scream “wisner’s wurlitzer” type academics. (CIA operation in the 50’s to infiltrate academia with post-modernists). Greenpeace is kind of notorious for being impractical on this front.
France gets around 70% of it’s power from nuclear with no problems. You have people who want to dismantle reactors… with no plan beyon “we need renewables”. What results is that they return to being dependent on the fossil fuel industry. That’s what Germany literally just did.
Sorry for jumping around, I have to go run errands, but the point is that when billions of dollars/annually are at stake you should put on your conspiracy glasses a bit more.
the idea that nuclear energy could be safe relies on a utopian world in which there is neither conflict nor natural disaster. until now, there is no safe nuclear energy. as much as i’d like hydrogen to drive the world, it won’t for the foreseeable future, because you can’t secure a pipeline in such a world without an empire of evil
It’s pretty much the safest energy source. It kills less people than windmills (this includes construction and transportation of the windmill)
Solar isn’t that clean either. The production uses many toxic materials. Who then get dumped in 3rd world countries.
Some places aren’t suitable for nuclear plants because of tsunamies and earthquakes, but just don’t build near coasts or fault-lines (like that plant in Japan. But Japan is working a new technology to harvest underwater currents)
That second link in my comment actually lays out how the seawall at the Fukushima plant was not built to recommended specifications and that the radiation actually didn’t even kill anyone, the tsunami did.
As to the minerals renewable energy relies on - I found this to be pretty informative. There are a lot of imperialist mining operations that love wind power as well.
the problem is not the plant itself rather than the storages, which have to last. and these cannot be protected from natural disasters and i have not heard of a castor that can actually sustainable and safely hold nuclear waste as of yet.
I don’t mean to be rude but your comment doesn’t read very clearly.
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It’s not utopian to think we can have nuclear plants that are not sabotaged or nuclear plants that actually build sea walls to the recommended specs. That is literally just enforcing codes and laws. The fact that the capitalist sphere does not build to specs and engages in gross acts of sabotage should not be considered a mark against nuclear energy, the same thing happens with oil refineries all over the world only the propaganda machine doesn’t latch onto those stories. The seawall at Fukushima was not built to specs and in any case no one has died from the radiation. Rather, as usual, the propaganda machine conflated deaths from the tsunami with deaths from “NUCLEAR MELTDOWN”.
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No safe Nuclear energy - say that to the men and women who sail nuclear aircraft carriers and submarines with no adverse effects. Or the power plant in middle of nowhere Ohio that provided half the power to the city from 1959-1966 before being shut down for unspecified reasons never to be reopened. Or the massive Chinese investment into 100 Nuclear power plants. (As an aside, the second link I put in the post addresses the idea that Nuclear power plants are expensive- every West Asian and East Asian power plant tends to be built within budget.)
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What you are talking about wrt pipelines and hydrogen either makes no sense or you need to expand upon the thought. Pipelines are not only the products of empires of evil they can be the result of mutually beneficial collaboration. And pipelines are not an insurmountable problem, we literally have pipelines all over the world which can be adapted and even simultaneously used for gas and hydrogen using pipe in pipe technology.
now, i m not saying that nuclear isn’t agreat form of energy compared to coal. compared to gas i m not so sure. personally i would condone hemp oil and plant oils over anything else because they would create a closed loop. whereas any mined ressource causes excess waste. unfortunately we are too many to pull this off atm.
i m talking about the theoretical problem of hydrogen pipelines, as these would have a better throughput than any other form of energy transportation via grids. the problem here is that we don’t even have safe oil pipelines. we have dictatorships and hells around pipelines to keep them secure from sabotage, we run immense security states in order to achieve this. and with the potential of nuclear energy or hydrogen, this only becomes worse, not better.
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I’m liking the nuance I’m seeing in this thread. Reddit is often extremely pro-nuclear to the point where any nuanced opinion is seen as anti-nuclear.
fake dichotomy, because energy consortii usually entail both: nuclear and fossil energy sources. they have the same fucktarts as lobbyists. they are about as corrupt and they are about as sustainable when it comes to waste as all the others are.
what i do regret though is that due to the campaigns against nuclear energy, science also lacks nuclear physicists. and the few that run around are always threatened by kidnappings if they are not already working for the western NATO energy consortii
we shouldn’t stop researching modes of energy production, that doesn’t mean we should implement the most problematic ones. which are definitely fossil & nuclear
