Is this worse than Obama pretending to drink Flint's water?
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Nah Obama’s is way worse because the Flint water actually was (and is afaik) dangerous, whereas the Fukushima water release is perfectly safe and everyone freaking out over it are just scared of nuclear shit.
Do not give anti-nuclear people an inch, or they’ll do things like shut down all the nuclear power plants in Germany while still burning coal. The people scared about this are no different from anti-vaxxers and you should treat them the same
Eating the fish is a dumb pointless stunt, obviously, but unlike Flint people who are worried about this are wrong, and should be properly educated rather than taken seriously.
I studied some nuclear engineering in University (professor was an expert on Radioactivity and Environmental Accumulation, but I just took some classes out of interest). I think people are rightly worried, but radioactivity is one of those topics that is almost impossible to teach without a lot of explanation or background. I see many takes that I understand are entirely incorrect, but also understand that environmental accumulation isn't a super widely studied phenomenon (pretty much the only tests done are after accidents, where that professor and his like 15 worldwide co-experts rush off to after every spill or accident to study as much as possible for years). That leaves scary gaps in our knowledge, and it's understandable to be skeptical and conservative in how we treat those gaps. That includes this one, so I don't want to take a strong stance, honestly, except that education should come first then decisions can be made which the people agree with.
Tritium is not one I know much about (my professor was a big fan of weather patterns/soil deposits from rains and his studies from Chernobyl and Three Mile Island where this was not studied), but I do know that that professor gave us exams specifically on the problems of Fukushima and was entirely convinced that this was a non-issue even if they dumped it all out in only a few months. And he said this in like 2018. This is entirely an appeal to authority and nobody here knows me to trust it, but just a bit of extra info.
He was also much more nervous about a concentrated location in barrels due to well known accumulation that could occur if those leaked on land (soils, again)
Getting rid of a few reactors is a bad idea, but so is building thousands of them:
2011: "Why nuclear power will never supply the world's energy needs”
news summary: https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.html
full PDF: “Is Nuclear Power Globally Scalable?” https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/5/6021970/06021978.pdf
TIL a needle can semi-permanently create zones like in Stalker
It would take eons for exclusion zones to add up to all the land taken up by non-nuclear sources of energy lol. But since human civilization dropped the ball in the 20th century, there's little point in arguing for a nuclear-dominant grid with thousands of reactors nowadays. May as well do like 80% renewable and 20% nuclear generally speaking.
Infectious diseases are far more destructive than any nuclear accident has ever been so idk what your point is?
It's not supposed to supply 100% of the world's energy needs, it's supposed to be a transitional source to move away from fossil fuels and then to renewables. We can build both renewable and nuclear, or we can build renewable and fossil fuels. One of these is much more harmful for the environment. In an ideal world we could just go 100% renewable immediately, but unfortunately that isn't an option. So it's better to go with the "less harmful" option than the "will literally kill the planet and all of us" option instead.
You're wrong. The water is probably safe, but the chance of it being unsafe is not negligible. There are a huge range of possible contaminants in that water besides tritium and radiation. And even if the only things to be worried about with that water are radioactivity and tritium levels, you're relying on agencies and companies with very vested interests to lie, to tell the truth.
I'm not saying it's definitely unsafe, but at the same time, there's a definite possibility it is.