9/18/2023 0 Comments Daniel boom tiktok![]() "This greatest of destructive forces can be developed into a great boon, for the benefit of all mankind," he promised in his now famous Atoms for Peace speech. No one appreciated the black cloud hanging over atomic power more than President Dwight Eisenhower, who accompanied the rollout of nuclear electricity with a marketing blitz. Thirteen years before the first American nuclear power plant opened, the same technology was used to devastate Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Around 8.7 million premature deaths were caused by fossil fuel pollution in 2018 alone, according to a February Harvard study.īill Gates, when asked if nuclear energy was a solution to climate change, responded: "If people were rational, yes." As you can infer, it's a highly contested number - but in either case dwarfed by the death toll from fossil fuel pollution. Estimates of deaths from nuclear incidents range from less than 10,000 to around 1 million. In the public imagination, nuclear power presages disaster. Those plans have also been abandoned.)Īs a result, nuclear power's reputation is among its biggest hurdles. (The US also toyed with launching nuclear waste into the sun. And the question of how to best store nuclear waste is contentious: The US invested $9 billion in building a storage site at Yucca Mountain before abandoning the project, though Finland, France and Canada have found potential solutions. Meltdowns, while rarer than once-in-a-generation, have cataclysmic consequences. "So this drives us insane." Nuclear's PR problem "The whole goal that everybody's talking about is to increase zero emission electricity, yet they are shutting down the source of the vast majority of zero emission electricity," said Dawson. The result? Higher emissions as the electricity gap is filled by natural gas. One reactor was shut last year and the second followed on April 30. The most recent retirement was Indian Point Energy Center, which formerly produced 25% of the electricity used by 10 million New Yorkers. In the US, where nuclear power produces nearly 40% of the country's low-carbon power, 11 reactors have been decommissioned since 2013 - and nine more will soon join them. The International Energy Agency estimates the developed world is on track to lose 66% of its current nuclear capacity by 2040. This second camp mourns the decline of nuclear power, which has steepened since the 2011 meltdown at Fukushima. Some argue that clean, reliable electricity produced in nuclear plants should be part of the solution. Governments around the world have declared intentions to reach net zero carbon emissions, most recently at the COP26 UN climate summit, but few have charted clear courses. "Better to expand renewable energy or energy saving, that is a better use of money in terms of climate change mitigation," says Jusen Asuka, director at the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies in Kanagawa, Japan.īut others believe nuclear power is necessary to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. Many scientists and environmentalists say nuclear power is prohibitively dangerous and expensive, that plants take too long to build. ![]() "Any energy policy has pros and cons, and we feel, after putting a lot of scrutiny on it, that the pros outweigh the cons of nuclear energy," said Dawson, a grassroots campaigner at Nuclear New York. ![]() Coal power is estimated to kill around 350 times as many people per terawatt-hour of energy produced, mostly from air pollution, compared to nuclear power. Contrary to their apocalyptic reputation, nuclear power plants are relatively safe. This separates it from fossil fuels, which are consistent but dirty, and renewables, which are clean but weather dependent. Though the word evokes images of landscapes pulverized by atomic calamity - Hiroshima, Chernobyl, Fukushima - proponents like Detering and his colleague Eric Dawson point out that nuclear power produces huge amounts of electricity while emitting next to no carbon. He's part of a wave of environmentalists campaigning for more nuclear energy. A former member of Germany's Green Party, Detering now spends his spare time as co-chair of the Nuclear New York advocacy group. ![]() "We're looking at a different world right now."ĭetering thinks nuclear energy could be the key to solving the climate crisis. "I'm sure we'd develop the hell out of it," he said, before sighing. That's the hypothetical posed to me by Dietmar Detering, a German entrepreneur living in New York. What would the climate change debate look like if nuclear power was invented tomorrow? Imagine if humanity had only used fossil fuels and renewables up to this point, and an engineering visionary revealed that split atoms could be used to generate clean power. ![]()
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