this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance (www.theguardian.com)
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[–] lazyvar@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Damn, if one reads that entire long list of ranting in one session it makes an even better case for nuclear than anything else ever could. It's like you started with your "Nuclear sucks!!!!111!!!eleven!!", and then had to make a lot of effort to find ways to fit things into your narrative.

But let's pick at it one by one, shall we?

That you think what I said is a slippery slope, an actual type of informal argumentative fallacy, is fascinating. Because if nothing else it exposes that you had a predisposed notion how to dismiss what I wrote before you actually read it. If you had said it's appeal to emotion, then fair enough. In a lot of ways it is exactly that, specifically the point I'm making is that if you're the one emotionally affected, then you don't care why you are, your suffering is the same either way. I skipped the part where we try to compare quantitatively how many people are affected by deaths from either source of power because - getting to that in a sec - that's the common part. But you're correct of course in that since I didn't present how I reduce from the large scale accident to an individual event of loss, it's an argumentative fallacy.
Only... a slippery slope? Really? What I was levelling against the person I replied to? They did that argument, that corruption in the building or maintaining process warrants not using something. Which is bullshit, you need to take a far more specific approach. Specific companies need to be targetted for this, not an entire industry or even more broad an entire type of energy production.

But now to the funny part, your data source. So I take it you have a single centralized data source that has tracked various kinds of deaths from completely different industries in a single central location over time? So there's no need to corrrelate disjunct data, nevermind what a completely normal process that might be?
Plus, the source that is from is, from looking around the site, they're not directly affiliated with an energy produced that has a specific stake in nuclear. The writer is an assistant to a professor that in turn is pushing for improvements to green energy at both their university and through a nonprofit. Importly, the writer takes the upper boundary of the thyroid-in-children cases even though that is exceedingly unrealistic but they do it to take a more conservative approach. Which makes sense if you're trying to check whether nuclear is really all that bad: When necessary, you take the numbers worst for nuclear so you can establish a solid lower boundary on its efficacy.

That it still comes up so well should tell you something. It's also interesting that you never talk about the actual problems with nuclear energy, which are mentioned by people actually trying to do a more measured approach or proper criticism (namely how we cannot build more plants now to shut down coal/gas with them but there's a secondary problem: while their accident effects are extremely localized by comparison to fossil fuels their duration is very long and we can run into societal problems in regards to warnings and long-term handling).

I will say, reading what you wrote, you're not an ineffective shill for nuclear energy. You make criticism of it seem laughable and childish.