OK well I can agree with that! I have never converted an antinuke with that fact. I have converted dozens (at least from absolute rejection to cautious optimism) with 10-15 minute in-person discussions. I have not found out how to scale that.
The pro-nuclear advocates are usually their own worst enemies. That smug dudebro points-scoring is a huge problem. Then again, I think most people would be a lot more effective at life if they'd sit down and read How to Win Friends and Influence People and other basic sales texts.
I'm generally anti-nuclear, but not for safety reasons. I'm sure we can build safe plants. Rather, I distrust institutions, whether governments or giant corporations. I'm also concerned about the impact of nuclear power on inequality, as it's simply not available to the poorer nations, for reasons both good (proliferation, terrorism) and bad (lack of infrastructure).
Renewable power is so good in terms of fundamentals, particularly accessibility to poor nations and difficulty in using it for state-level violence, that I no longer see good reason to even attempt scaling up nuclear power. A meaningful scaling would take decades of effort and trillions of dollars worldwide. In that time, we'll grow a renewable infrastructure of the same scale profitably and organically.
This is a very good point. The shape of society will mirror the shape of its vital infrastructure. Energy is the fungible commodity - you can make virtually anything else with it. Centralize the [electrical] power, and the [political] power will centralize also.
I'm generally pro-nuclear - I think it's astonishing and tragic that we discovered an infinite source of clean energy, and doomed the Earth by failing to switch to it immediately - but the self-organization of the internet holds valuable lessons on the importance of distributed, fault-tolerant structures.
Especially as we enter a time already made uncertain by climate change, perhaps now is not the time to aggressively centralize. Windmills and Tesla walls look distinctly more "apocalypse-proof" than nuclear power stations.
Eh, nuclear isn't that great. It's taken decades to start even getting close to truly safe, low-waste reactors, and that only due to the considerable public pressure involved after various high-profile accidents. It's pretty cheap in the long run, but the initial costs are extremely high. We can't trust every nation to stick to high standards in terms of safety, so we're running globally at the safety level of the least competent crew of the worst reactor.
At this point, we're rapidly approaching (or already past) the point where renewables are cheaper per kwh in the long term than nuclear, and much cheaper in the short term - without the dependence on the neoliberal hegemony of giant governments and giant corporations and giant finance.
At this point, I'm not too concerned about climate change, largely because there's not much we can do about it. Environmentalism and liberalism are unfortunately full of a bunch of hairshirted Puritan shaming over anyone doing anything that feels happy or successful - denial is a moral good, and allowing ourselves the benefits of abundant energy is a sin. I feel that's driving concerns about global warming more than the actual environmental damage - they finally have an excuse to deny people a good time.
More importantly, denialism won't work. If we cut our consumption by 50% right now (fat chance), it'd just take us 100 years rather than 50 to burn through the same amount of dinosaur. Same long-term damage. The only thing that will work is creating an energy framework (both production and consumption) that doesn't use fossil fuels, but has roughly the same cost (or less) and the same output.
Renewables are on their way to giving us more energy than dinosaurs ever did, at lower cost, without complex technical dependencies, high up-front costs, etc. It's the greatest weapon against the Corporate State since the internet. Why anyone would want nuclear and its dependency on the neoliberal hegemony (especially if they fear concentrated power at all) is beyond me.
