Here’s the half earth socialism chapter on nuclear:
spoiler
pover plant was enemied less out of control, and the dia. poser Fukushima sermed less elet in thesel and ont it. set his have ben offerill recorded in the gears since the his. dea again, this is almost certainly an underestimate. Two tete times more caesium-t37 was released at Fukushima tar Al Chernobyl. Caesium-137, like the better known sonog. strontium-go, easily lodges itself in the human body, where stan cause radiation poisoning and cancer. The estimate 1,000 excess cancer deaths seems more realistic, 46
Given the size, secret venes, and strategic importance of nuclear industries, it is hard to hold them to account even when they fail. Cleaning up Fukushima is predicted to cost up to $736 billion and last forty years. *7 It took eight years to construct a bespoke robot able to survive the conditions of the disaster’s epicentre, and even then, it has merely made contact with the ‘corium’ - the magma-like amalgam of con-crete, uranium, and the reactor itself. 48 The company that ran the Fukushima plant, TEPCO, was caught lying when it said during the early days of the crisis that the problem was only minor core damage rather than a full meltdown. During the trial held on this self-confessed ‘cover-up’, the judge leniently agreed with the defendant that it would be impossible to operate a nuclear plant if operators are obliged to predict every possibility about a tsunami and take necessary measures". This ignores how the company’s own in-house models showed three years before the disaster that they were underestimating the risk of a tsunami, 19 In the end no one was convicted, but as an act of contrition TEPCO’s president imposed upon himself a to per cent pay cut for a month.so
There is good reason to be sceptical of the pro-nuclear environmentalists’ second claim of nuclear power being
‘carbon-neutral’. There is a wide range in estimates of nuclear power’s carbon impact because few agree on how much carbon is released during the mining and processing of uranium, decommissioning of reactors, and permanent storage of toxic
I apologize for the great difficulty which posting this is taking me. I don’t know if it’s possible to post the rest.
TLDR: prominent nuclear advocates call for a huge rollout of new nuclear power plants. This will not go well because it vastly increases the possibility of nuclear accidents and dangerous substances like Strontium 90 in our bodies. The damage caused by past nuclear accidents is greatly underestimated. Fast breeders and fusion don’t seem possible in the foreseeable future. The environmental movement has been it’s strongest while anti-nuclear so we shouldn’t throw that away.
My personal criticisms would be that I’m more optimistic about future nuclear technology, the Fukushima disaster was mostly poorly handled because of capitalism (though I’m not sure if the same can be said for Chernobyl), and the environmental movement can run on socialism and doesn’t have to focus on nuclear (though we don’t have to put pro-nuclear at the front of our advocacy). Otherwise the argument seems to hold up.
Here’s the half earth socialism chapter on nuclear:
spoiler
I apologize for the great difficulty which posting this is taking me. I don’t know if it’s possible to post the rest.
TLDR: prominent nuclear advocates call for a huge rollout of new nuclear power plants. This will not go well because it vastly increases the possibility of nuclear accidents and dangerous substances like Strontium 90 in our bodies. The damage caused by past nuclear accidents is greatly underestimated. Fast breeders and fusion don’t seem possible in the foreseeable future. The environmental movement has been it’s strongest while anti-nuclear so we shouldn’t throw that away.
My personal criticisms would be that I’m more optimistic about future nuclear technology, the Fukushima disaster was mostly poorly handled because of capitalism (though I’m not sure if the same can be said for Chernobyl), and the environmental movement can run on socialism and doesn’t have to focus on nuclear (though we don’t have to put pro-nuclear at the front of our advocacy). Otherwise the argument seems to hold up.
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