Also propaganda and lobbying by fossil fuel industries.
Comment on Can somebody please explain why the world hasn't gone nuclear yet?
FartMaster69@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
Both the association with nuclear weapons and several high profile nuclear accidents worked to shape public perception negatively towards nuclear power.
vivalapivo@lemmy.today 4 days ago
As if the public decides anything
FartMaster69@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
If that was the case propaganda wouldn’t be necessary.
orbituary@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
Propaganda is for fomenting consent.
vivalapivo@lemmy.today 4 days ago
You think of propaganda as if its goal is to convince the general public
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 4 days ago
And the tiny tiny matter of it never having been economically viable. Both the R&D and construction were massively subsidised by the state. Then the corporations were allowed to skim off the profits while the nukes were running. After that the state gets stuck with the bill for decommissioning. It’s always been a racket. The only reason “civilian” nuclear power exists is as a fig leaf for nuclear armament.
anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
I don’t think post war Germany had the delusion of their own nukes. Here the nuclear industry just exists to shuffle public money into private pockets.
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Franz-Josef very much wanted Germany to have the bomb. While the German nuclear organ was ostensibly always civilian, they absolutely wanted to keep the option open.
lemming741@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Isn’t that the dream for every business ever?
Tiresia@slrpnk.net 3 days ago
Nuclear safety standards in most western countries are legally defined as whatever was high enough to make the reactors unprofitable (with language such as “the highest reasonably attainable level of safety”). This results in ridiculous scenarios like nuclear reactors being expected to store their waste perfectly for 100,000 years even if nobody attends to it while fossil fuel plants kill millions with polluted air and agriculture just pisses pollution into the environment. We build monuments to nuclear waste so that future civilizations may know to fear it properly even if all contact is lost because oh no what if like ten of these hypothetical post-post-apocalyptic people die, while hundreds of millions are set to die right now because of the climate change that waste could have mitigated.
Nuclear reactors are safe enough that grad students can operate them. If the entire world electrical supply ran on electricity you could put the nuclear waste in a couple hundred oil drums and drop those in an olympic swimming pool and people nearby would be under less risk than from a steel mill.
And yes, without the nuclear arms industry it would have made more sense to develop cheaper and safer fuels like thorium. But nuclear disasters are like train crashes - terrible, of course, but vastly overblown by the media in a way that somehow coincides perfectly with fossil fuel/car industry interests.