Three anti-science lobbies dragging our world back into the dark ages:
1) anti-vaxxers
2) anti-nuclear
3) anti-GMO
Let’s have a better public education before it is to late.
I grew up near Chernobyl and my parents still work there. While no one denies it was a huge disaster in which people died; they way nuclear is portrayed in (most) of the Western world is disgusting.
As of today (accounting for all past death) nuclear is the safest form of power generation (statistically even safer than solar, measured in deaths/mwt).
Do we want to stop climate change? If yes - nuclear is an essential part of the solution.
Please, never say "safer than solar". Even if technically correct from a certain perspective, it sounds like an "argue to win" point, and just alienates the very people you want to win to your side - environmentally-minded folks who might be convinced of the benefits of nuclear power.
From a less narrow perspective, it shows a total ignorance of how risk analysis works. It's not how many people have been harmed, it's how many people could be harmed. This is intuitively obvious to the people you're trying to impress with this line. So don't use it.
Also there is a huge difference between workers installing solar panels dying on the job from falling of roofs and citizens getting killed by exploding nuclear plants. The former is a risk they were very aware of, had some control over and were payed to accept. The latter is a risk imposed on them outside of their control and without compensation (and if they vote to get rid of that risk HN viciously attacts them).
And the latter (killed by exploding nuclear power plants) is historically zero.
All nuclear related fatalities are due to radiation exposure, and the immediate deaths are rather small numbers, with the lingering effects of the fallout (i.e. cancer) only pushing the numbers into the 10's of thousands.
The power plants aren't exploding - that's my point. Calling a meltdown an explosion is factually incorrect, and furthers misconceptions about what happens when a nuclear power plant goes critical.
Factually there was a hydrogen explosion in Fukushima due to things doing wrong in the nuclear part. And it produced fall out. That is was not a prompt critical nuclear explosion is semantics. You just want to push nuclear instead of being honest.
> "That is was not a prompt critical nuclear explosion is semantics."
In a world where nuclear weapons are a thing and the public is generally aware of their horrific effects, the distinction between a meltdown and a 'nuclear explosion' is not semantics.
It's a religious argument. The "death per MW" is a red herring.
A nuclear advocate will tell you that on a per-MW basis nuclear is safer from a "death from radiation" POV because your installer may fall off a roof or you might get knocked on the head by a loose panel. Conveniently, these "death per-MV" claims exclude the construction of the nuclear plants, the potentially thousands of years of waste containment and human labor associated with it.
You also need to price risk higher with nuclear because safety depends heavily on competent administration. That's expensive, and human failure is very common.
End of the day, the economics of nuclear are the problem. We would be building nuclear if they made money. In my state, nuclear plants need direct government subsidy (to the tune of billions) as they are unable to sell their electricity at a rate that sustains the plant. The capital costs are extreme and the plant needs to operate at capacity to work financially.
I'm certainly opposed to God forbids opening new nuclear plants, but I'm also opposed to closing existing ones, those are different arguments and should be treated as such. Nuclear fission is a relic of early 50's, but we already paid the co2 cost of building said plants, therefore should continue operating to reduce further damage to the biosphere by releasing more co2/methane. But we don't need to build new nuclear plants, as they are overly expensive and the safer you try to make them the more expensive they get, not to mention that they take a huge amount of time to actually get built and in the meantime release ungodly amounts of co2 with the colossal amounts of steel and concrete needed for the construction, a co2 budget that will take a long time to be recovered
They only take that long due to red tape, not due to any intrinsic reason. France did not have this problem. The U.S. could do like them, create the one standardized design for a nuclear plant, build them all the same way, which of course will help with construction, safety and maintenance.
A lot of that depends on what the energy medium is. Is the other 40% gas for cars and natural gas for heating? It's very easy to do 100% of electricity from solar in the Bay Area in a home that still drives gas cars, has gas heat and no AC.
I coughed up the money to go as solar as I can, (heat pumps, electric vehicles, ect,) but my state's financing had its limits; and then Mother Nature sent me an unusually cloudy April. I'm probably going to be somewhere between 70-85% solar after I have a few years of data.
Anyway, when it comes to reducing CO2, celebrate the partial victories. Rooftop solar can take a huge dent in emissions, but it's not a complete solution. There is no silver bullet for this problem.
The RBMK design was very safe, too. And it exploded due to a combination of design flaw and dangerous operation. Sure, the rest of them were fixed after that, but.
Fukushima was a very safe design, too, and well regulated. Three Mile Island was a very safe design. And let's not even get into the history of lesser-known accidents with less-safe designs, in the hands of paranoid military operators and secretive, embarrassment-shy governments.
Of the well-known accidents, all of them were unexpected. And all of them could have gone far worse, were it not for heroic actions and some luck on the part of the operators. And all of them involved a degree of government coverup and the public distrust that causes. So it's not only expected that the public would distrust nuclear power more than is maybe absolutely needed, it's very reasonable for them to do so. The safety of nuclear power worldwide is the safety of the worst design with the worst crew, built by the lowest bidder.
Don't just react as if the public is stupid, or there's no risk involved. Those things are the reason the public doesn't take pro-nuclear activists seriously.
All sorts of accidents are expected. We take them into account. For example, if you operate a large data center, you simply assume that a certain number of drives and motherboards will fail, and build it into the plan.
No one planned for Fukushima to be flooded. No on planned for one of Chernobyl's reactor cores to explode. (The phrase "impossible" was tossed around a lot; it took a good deal of thinking to finally recognize the design flaw.)
Decades after the Chernobyl disaster, a worst case scenario, and the total number of people's health negatively impacted is well under 100k. I think it's safe to say that, regardless of the choice between "could" or "have", the number of lives impacted is relatively small (in the scale of power-generation related injuries and deaths).
The worst case scenario would have rendered large parts of Europe uninhabitable.
That worst case scenario was only avoided through a combination of luck and suicidal - not always informed and voluntary - heroism.
And its disingenuous to reduce this to "lives affected." Even ignoring the deaths, the economic opportunity costs in all affected countries absolutely overshadow the economic value of all of the electricity ever generated by the plant.
Chernobyl went prompt critical, that's about as bad as it can get. Chernobyl basically disproved the China Syndrome fears--everything that was supposed to cause a China Syndrome accident happened--but it only managed to burn it's way into the basement. The core doesn't stay in one blob, it responds to what it's eating through, changes shape and ceases to be critical.
But Chernobyl was not a worst case scenario. It was bad but the Soviet government did respond to it seriously. It could've been much worse had they not.
In fact, that's what this article gets entirely wrong about the film. The most disturbing thing the film highlights is not the gruesome deaths of a handful of individuals. It's how the disaster could've been much worse.
In the chernobyl podcast, where a lead director and producer of the show talks about it, he said a haunting line that in my opinion is nothing but the truth
>Chernobyl could only happen in the Ussr, but the Ussr was the only country with the capabilities to solve it
Only a nation with the colosal human, and natural resources such as the ussr could have "solved" the chernobyl problem
Indeed. They showed clearly that they were willing to throw near limitless resources at solving the problem before it became a worst case scenario. The worst cast scenario being the core reaching either the giant pool of water in the plant or the ground water beneath the plant which may have made a huge part of the continent uninhabitable.
How it could have been worse, and why. The layer after layer of lies and coverups going on within the Soviet government are very much at odds with the heroism of those actually on the ground.
Kinda like working IT in a big American corporation. :)
> the Soviet government did respond to it seriously
If by seriously you mean covering up the problem so the appropriate experts could be brought in to contain the problem before the fallout covered half of Europe, or in not providing proper shielding for the first responders, or by not providing proper funding and training for the staff at Chernobyl... sure, they took it very seriously.
I have read many books about the Soviet Union. The government was full of perverse incentives which encouraged fraud, deception, denial and corruption.
The dogma was so perverse it lead to a total corruption of logic and reason. To the point it essentially warped reality.
In the Soviet Union, to ask for a better tool was to imply that your managers were incompetent. Or the tool designers were. Or the manufacturers were. All of whom were appointed by the government. A government which saw itself as the manifest will of the people. To imply something wasn't good enough was to imply the Russian people themselves weren't good enough.
That horrendous logic may have been self inflicted but it none the less set the ground rules for any action taken by the government. The inadequacies you point out say nothing about how seriously the Soviet government took Chernobyl. You will find the exact same problems pervade almost every single Soviet government initiative.
What happened at chernobyl WAS Not a "worse case scenario", had the entire with the other 3 reactors plant exploded in a thermal explosion. Now that would had been a worse case scenario, and today there are still RBMK reactors in operation
You wont ever hear of such a risk from a solar plant exploding...
If you want to discuss the safety of nuclear energy, then own up the risk and face the criticism, to do otherwise is misleading and cowardly
> It's not how many people have been harmed, it's how many people could be harmed.
Really? So we should take into account scenarios like 1. Solar installer falls from roof, hits car, dies 2. Car didn't have handbrake on, starts to roll down the driveway, rolling over the toddler playing in the yard, killing her too 3. Rolls into the street, causing a school bus full of children to swerve and hit a LNG tanker, causing a massive explosion killing everybody onboard.
Of course, in reality, we need to take into account realistic failure pathways and plan accordingly. Per such analysis, both solar and nuclear are both very safe.
> It's not how many people have been harmed, it's how many people could be harmed.
I don't understand. Why should there be any difference between these, unless you're saying that the safety of solar/wind is improving faster than the safety of nuclear is improving?
There is no case in which the failure of a wind farm could cause death or injury to millions of people at once.
The whole "safety" argument of solar is buried in flat-out bullshit analysis about how people fall off of roofs while installing panels. There's no safety concern to speak of with solar/wind.
The issue of falls is enough to put the death toll from solar above the death toll from nuclear. It's just the solar deaths are spread out thin enough they aren't even going to make the local news, the nuclear deaths are concentrated and make worldwide news. (And note that neither Three Mile Island nor Fukushima involved any nuclear deaths.)
I didn't claim to be any kind of expert. But I don't understand how the scenario you are describing is necessary for solar/wind to have a higher risk per MWh. What does the presence of catastrophic failure modes have to do with past versus future results?
I'm going to toss a coin, you call it. If you win, you get $5. If you lose, you pay me $1. You probably do it, right?
Next scenario. I'm going to roll a 100-sided die. If it comes up one, I'm going to shoot you in the head. Anything else, you get $100. Now, would you agree to that? Of course not. Even though you're 99% likely to get $100. It's that 1% chance of dying that stops you.
That's because "risk" isn't just one number. Even at a very basic level, we distinguish between the likelihood of the risk, and the consequences of the risk. You're only considering the likelihood, not the consequences. That's where you're going wrong.
> You're only considering the likelihood, not the consequences.
I'm considering the likelihood of the same consequence: people dying. You are describing a totally different scenario with your coin toss example. You are making it sound like I'm weighing profits against lives and that is not correct. I'm weighing lives against lives.
No, I understand what you're weighing, but you're still weighing it wrong. You're looking at individual deaths. What is the maximum number of deaths/injuries that can be caused by a solar power accident? Two, maybe? Now, what is the maximum number that can be caused by a nuclear accident? Millions.
Someone stumbling off a roof will not cause the evacuation of a city. Period.
The problem is you seem to think the bigger incident is automatically worse.
Mr. Evil is sitting in a tower. He has two weapons, a rifle and a rocket launcher.
Scenario A: He rolls a d100. If it comes up 1 he picks up the rifle and shoots at the first person he sees. He's competent, his target dies.
Scenario B: He rolls two d100s. If both come up 1 he picks up the rocket launcher and fires at the first group of people he sees. The shrapnel from the rocket will kill 10 people.
You live in the city he's in. Do you want him to roll one die or two?
Okay, let's imagine an alternative universe where home-sized nuclear reactor somehow got popular and people got used to it.
As a result, a typical city has millions of small nuclear reactors. Even though the government tries hard, it is impossible to regulate all of them to absolute safety, and every month there's a nuclear leak somewhere, in every city. As a result pretty much all mankind (well, at least the urbanites) enjoy(?) a permanently raised level of radiation and elevated rate of cancer.
Experts say millions die per year worldwide, but since nuclear is a part of our life, we have accepted it as a given and decided it's the price we're willing to pay. On the bright side, because each reactor is so small, each leak doesn't cause evacuation of a city: at worst the unit is locked down for a few months, and (because we've been so good at it) usually nobody dies as a result. At least no one's death can be conclusively linked to any particular accident.
So, in your metric, do you think this world is safer than our own Earth with large-scale nuclear plants?
...Now, note that this isn't just an idle fantasy: it's pretty much an exact mirror image of what we do with vehicular emission.
Right, that's the whole pro-nuclear argument: individual deaths are what matter, not individual incidents. What relevance do the individual incidents have when you only need 1 nuclear plant for every 500000 solar panels?[1] If we are talking about overall utility to the human race, then why shouldn't we be looking at the overall death count? I just don't see how the potential magnitude of individual incidents factors into that when the overall deaths have already been taken into account.
[1]: Based on an extremely generous estimate of 1000W per solar panel, and a fairly conservative estimate of 500MW per nuclear plant
Nuclear is not an essential part of any solution, it is more expensive than solar and wind per Mwatt, it takes far longer to build new plants, and if you want to make sure those plants are actually safe then you need to invest billions of dollars into them leading again to a higher price for electricity, the risks for said plants are still there, and unlike solar or wind they require big rivers or water bodies nearby. Uranium extraction and processing is still a dirty power hungry affair and that won't change any time soon.
Having deaths/mwt is also stupidly misleading because no solar plant ever had the risk of exploding and decimating a chunk of Eastern Europe, not to mention forcing thousands out of their homes and abandoning everything behind never to return
If you want to discuss things, then don't do it by misleading statements, that only makes you look like an angsty teen that opposes the status quo simply because it is cool to do so
More expensive than solar and wind per MW comparison misses something essential.
If you can't figure it out, you are missing the big picture.
Nuclear is not full solution for all energy needs, but it has that something that makes it very effective part in the mix together with wind and solar.
You are not impressing anyone by playing the "I'm smarter than you card", you are only shaming yourself and not addressing the points of the discussion
Solar plants with natural gas backup turbines are still cheaper than nuclear plants per mwatt
I hope I do t sound too irated, but I'm indeed highly frustrated by the fact that wherever I have this discussion about nuclear power i dont see anyone who is actually ready to have the discussion, only people who believe in an ideal world where nuclear plants are all safe, where 3 mile Island "wasn't a big deal", and where the exclusion area in Fukushima "is a minor externality"
Again, if you want to argue, you will have to bring real world arguments
Yeah, it is, and that's where things get interesting such as logistics, economics trends, risk assestment
At the moment the US is going through a natural gas boom, companies many times have a serious over supply of it, and they are releasing it into the atmosphere, the Bakken Oil Fields at night are quite literally visible from the International Space Station[0] because of the colossal amounts of natural gas flares of companies burning excess natural gas. All of that is simply wasted energy, and extra CO2 and unburnt natural gas that enters into the atmosphere
One of the reasons why so many coal plants in the US are going through hard economic times is because they are being undercut by both solar, wind and stupidly cheap natural gas turbines [1].
To build nuclear plants today in the US, would be an horrendous economic decision, because those would instantly become stranded assets that would need to be bailed out by the general public via overly expensive electricity bills. In the meantime, gas is just so readily available that's being burnt on an unimaginable scale, all of that energy could be simply packaged and used as electricity.
In the meantime in the rest of the world, most countries are already divesting from big bulky centralized energy sources, simply because of how expensive they are. They just can't compete with cheaper renewables with a assistance of natural gas, and in the long as prices fall even further run those natural gas assistance plants can be replaced with batteries.
In short, what I advocate, is simply Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. If we have nuclear plants already built, use them, but dont build more, if a country is experiencing a surplus of natural gas, use it, and please dont burn it as waste.
That's a false choice, as natural gas is already being wasted and burnt as a byproduct, if that natural gas were used as an energy source, then we could better control the burning process and reduce emissions. Building nuclear plants would actually just increase the amount of natural gas that ends up being burned as a byproduct all the while not helping us in the grand scheme of things
> Building nuclear plants would actually just increase the amount of natural gas that ends up being burned as a byproduct all the while not helping us in the grand scheme of things.
I don't know where you're sourcing that argument. Seems like nuclear beats most renewables (solar specifically) in terms of carbon emissions and potential for quickly and reliably replacing our generation in a centralized way:
Solar in particular can vary wildly when it comes to the CO2/MWatt because of geography, the ratio of CO2/Mwatt in Atacama desert will be wildly different from a solar plant in Germany, but still, when averaged out, the values of the plants themselves are mostly equivalent.
Yet the problem happens when costs and other externalities are thrown into the picture, a solar plant doesnt need to worry about the storage of nuclear waste, and the mining of new facilities to store that waste, nor the extraction and refining process for Uranium which has all sorts of caveats, solar needs only worry of silica extraction, rare earths (which are needed by other industrial processes anyways) and refining and production, then simple disposal. And unlike Nuclear, the waste disposal of solar panels is comparatively super straight forward.
The big one is the economic cost, where solar and wind heavily undercuts nuclear energy production
And solar/wind can be expected to continue falling in price as technology continues to advance and economies of scale pick up the slack, same is not the case for nuclear technology, where safety requirements balloon up the price of the plants, waste management, uranium extraction, and in a competitive disrupted market such as the modern market of energy production, nuclear plants are falling by the wayside as a consequence of continued delays, ever increasing safety requirements and waste management fees increases.
Lastly, nuclear plant construction, is neither "easy, nor speedy". it is an absolutely gruesome afair which has lead to the bankrupcy of many companies
Neither is waiting 15 years until a next generation of nuclear plants are built....
Natural gas is the resource that we have right now, and as it stands, in Bakken Oil Fields, natural gas is being burnt as excess waste. That gas needs to be used, there has to be a demand for it. Because otherwise companies will continue to burn it, as they dont have a place to store it
Also, I'm not advocating for long term usage of Natural gas, in due time natural gas plants need to be phased out in favor of batteries, which will work as a way to stabilize a renewable energy based grid, but we are not there yet.
If the world were perfect, then yes, I would agree to Nuclear Fission, but alas here we are, where nuclear plants construction is constantly delayed
>>Dr Portugal Pereira said: "If we want to decarbonise our energy system, nuclear may not be the best choice for a primary strategy. Nuclear power is better late than never, but to really address climate change, it would be best if they were not late at all, as technologies like wind and solar rarely are."[0]
> Neither is waiting 15 years until a next generation of nuclear plants are built....
Well, certainly it's shameful how bad we're at doing large projects in the Western world today. That being said, even if we in the short term won't relearn how to do them on budget and schedule (as Russian, Korean, and Chinese designs appear to be doing) there's plenty we can do while waiting for such long-term projects to finish. Like, massively expanding wind, solar, high voltage grids, pumped hydro, EV's, public transport, heat pumps, energy efficiency measures, demand response and whatnot.
> Natural gas is the resource that we have right now, and as it stands, in Bakken Oil Fields, natural gas is being burnt as excess waste. That gas needs to be used, there has to be a demand for it. Because otherwise companies will continue to burn it, as they dont have a place to store it
Sure, it's better to burn the gas for power rather than just flaring it off. But, we really should think about how to ASAP scale down and eventually shutdown the fossil industry (barring a magical fairy^H CCS improvements).
> Also, I'm not advocating for long term usage of Natural gas,
As the article I linked to mentions, at this point we can't really think of gas as some kind of "bridge fuel" either. Gas infrastructure we build now will have an economic lifetime of several decades. So if we ever decide to tackle climate breakdown, those will be stranded at an enormous cost to society.
> in due time natural gas plants need to be phased out in favor of batteries
I'm skeptical batteries will ever become cheap enough for bulk storage to cover when wind/solar don't produce in an industrialized nation. I do think they will be very successful for ancillary services like frequency control or peak shaving.
Real world arguments include comparing radiation exposure from coal, gas and oil exploration to the nuclear power.
When you extract gas for the turbines from the ground, it's not just hydrocarbons. The scale of hydrocarbon use makes even relatively small amount of radioactive materials comparable.
Battery technology, be it lithium ion or one of the numerous flow chemistries, is on a continuously decreasing cost curve, while nuclear tech is on a continuously increasing cost curve, or at best stagnant.
Additionally, with nuclear, we are locking in todays prices for 60 years, without taking delivery for 10-15 years. Investing in storage tech with a 15-20 life span allows reinvesting in a cheaper tech after that.
Additionally, seasonal storage technologies, outside of the currently existing hydro dams, are likely to enter the stage, such as synthetic fuel.
And since a huge amount of our emissions come from sources that can't yet be electrified easily, we really we will likely need some sort of synthetic fuel strategy, which would also turn into a seasonal storage tech.
Electrical generation is just one part of the climate solution, and honestly renewables plus storage plus HVDC is, today, a 95% solution. Getting that last 5% also solves the other parts of the climate problem. We need to be looking beyond electrical grids to other regions of our economy, and we need to be doing it five years ago.
If the nuclear renaissance of 2008 had delivered a desirable product, it would be deployed in far more places. Instead, it was late, and also way too expensive. Nuclear may come back in some form, such as SMR, but as it is, it's neither necessary nor desirable to tackle climate change.
I think that they're the only options that have a chance at scaling. We know how to build battery factories reliably, and we continually make them cheaper.
We don't know how to build nuclear, much less on the grand scale that would be needed, probably 50-100 reactors for the US alone.
The US already has 98 reactors. Gradually adding 50 more while wind (6.6%) and solar (1.5%) catch up would eventually provide 30% of US electricity from nuclear power. The optimal ratio depends on how alternative energy storage tech advances.
50 reactors is 50 bets, each at a cost of $5-$15B. And given our success rate, it's actually probably 75-100 bets if we want to end up with 50 reactors, each with a massive (25%-50%) chance of complete loss even before generating electricity. Even if you assume unchanging technology costs, it's unlikely that a successful build will recoup its costs. Once you account for advancing technology, it's virtually guaranteed that each of these nuclear reactors would never ever be able to compete on cost. So the upside to the bet is practically negligible.
So clearly no rational economic actor is going to undertake a build on their own, after what we've learned from Vogtle and Summer. We wouldn't be able to find a contractor or a utility or anybody that wants to take on that risk. So what's left is a massive government subsidy, of somewhere between $500B - $1T to build reactors.
What if, instead of government actors deploying $10B-$20B per year to build reactors, we spend half on well-proven technology like lithium-ion grid storage that the government owns and operates at cost, and spent the rest to buy the early products of industries that are developing, including nuclear SMR, in order to give them the chance to advance their learning curves and become more cost effective?
Nuclear technology, as it exists today, is dead in the water. Even if we eliminate all regulation and all local NIMBY opposition, we are left with the problem of finding merchants willing to construct it. This is a serious problem for the technology, and it's innately tied to the technology itself, the engineering required to build these massive reactors, and the tight construction tolerances that are required to make them work.
We need a nuclear tech revolution before it can compete with storage and renewables. Solar and storage are ultimately thin film technologies, which works great with our current manufacturing capabilities. Wind is lots of identical, smallish generators. Nuclear does not fit at all with our current construction capabilities or engineering practices and capabilities. Until it can be brought into the modern world (possibly through SMR), it is not a good technology.
Not sure why not having a current recycling program for lithium is an issue. We didn't even have economically viable lithium ion storage until recently.
What assumptions go into a 5-8x lithium price increase?
The real price of solar and wind is vastly more than the current market price.
The current system is highly subsidized by the existing power infrastructure. You use the sun when it's shining and the grid when it's not--but that means you need just as many generators, they just burn a bit less fuel.
The cost per kWh for pure solar power is something that's not discussed much, I did manage to find one figure of over $1 per kWh and the lowest (which I considered questionable as they were pushing off-grid systems) was $.40 per kWh.
Ok, so what are solar cells other than semiconductors that pretty rapidly wear out and need to be scrapped. Who is recycling these? Answer: no one. They’re going to be e-waste shipped off somewhere to seep cadmium and other harmful elements into the environment. The idea that nuclear is dirty, ignores the very real byproducts of current renewables.
At least nuclear energy centralizes waste. With renewables we’re spreading generation across a country, with little control of ensuring the materials are ever recycled in a responsible way.
About GMO, you don't need to be anti-science to be against them.
My problem is that GMO seeds are proprietary, that is you need to buy them from whoever produces them. And you don't get to use the seeds produced from the plants themselves because either they're sterile or you're legally prevented to do so. I mean, there's even a concept of "seed piracy", which to me is crazy.
The day we have "free-as-in-freedom" (and, of course, safe) GMOs is the day I won't be against them.
I'm a bit perplexed when people here go crazy because John Deere refuses to let people repair their own tractors but as soon as someone is against GMOs it's anti-science.
I don't think this is really being "against GMOs" though, what you're really against is IP law surrounding GMOs. It's like saying you're "anti-film" just because you don't support the MPAA. It's attacking the wrong target and giving people a bad taste regarding GMOs even though they have the potential to do great things for society.
> My problem is that GMO seeds are proprietary, that is you need to buy them from whoever produces them.
This is getting a bit off topic, but GMO has absolutely zero to do with this, and is a completely unrelated facet of agribusiness.
Plant patents go back long before GMOs were ever a possibility. Hybrids, which don't reproduce true, have also been a huge mainstay of farming since longe before GMOs.
It's fine to be concerned with the monetization of plant life, but GMOs are not an aspect related to that.
There are plenty of non-profits that are trying to make better products that can be freely distributed and grown by farmers, but such misleading information stymies their efforts.
1) anti-vaxxers 2) anti-nuclear 3) anti-GMO
Let’s have a better public education before it is to late.
I grew up near Chernobyl and my parents still work there. While no one denies it was a huge disaster in which people died; they way nuclear is portrayed in (most) of the Western world is disgusting. As of today (accounting for all past death) nuclear is the safest form of power generation (statistically even safer than solar, measured in deaths/mwt). Do we want to stop climate change? If yes - nuclear is an essential part of the solution.