Just an FYI chemo truthers arent that new. They are older than flat earthers which started sprawling fairly recently in the last few years.
Given how expensive chemotherapy is can you blame anyone. Theres also another batch anti corn syrup, anti fluoride toothpaste, anti eating meat, anti self driving cars, anti electronical voting, and so on. The list goes on. And on....
Yeah, I belong to the anti-nuclear faction. And grouping it with anti-vaxxers is just a cheap rhetorical shot. It’s not that Chernobyl or Fukushima or million of tons nuclear waste that someone else will have to pay for to take care of are products of imagination.
The death toll from Fukushima is in the low triple digits at most.
Pollution from coal kills hundreds of thousands of people a year when it's working normally. (This is even if we completely ignore the effects of global warming, whose future death toll is unknown).
Nuclear being seriously dangerous because of a few isolated accidents IS your imagination. It's similar to people who refuse to fly, and drive long distances instead.
The problem is that nuclear "oopses" effectively become forever problems due to the half-life of the materials involved. When the worst-case scenario makes a location a permanent hazard / permanent toxic pollution generator, it's reason enough to say no.
Every other form of pollution can at least be cleaned up in a human timeframe. This kind can't even be approached by machines without them breaking down.
The only way I'd ever support nuclear power is if the nuclear industry were to develop an actually safe reactor (and by safe I mean that it's literally IMPOSSIBLE to cause a nuclear hazard, not "we have safety protocols in place"). But so far that hasn't happened in any meaningful way, so I'm all for dismantling everything and forbidding any new reactors until they can actually prove their safety (this is where I applaud Merkel).
But that's never going to happen, because big projects like this are full of graft, lies, payoffs, and plain fraud (just look at Boeing). So effectively, I don't expect I'll ever be anything but anti-nuclear. And that's a shame, because it has huge potential :/
Coal vs. Nuclear is a false dichotomy. We need to double down on renewables that by some estimates are already cheaper to build let alone to run and to decommission when plants reach their end of life.
And those accidents didn’t cost any money at all, and if they did, all costs were carried by the owners of the plants. And you believe the fantasy that the only deaths caused by Chernobyl was the firefighters and a few people working at the plant. And as usual, you ignore the question of the waste.
And there are other alternatives than coal, which are much more economical than nuclear when each producer carries their own costs, including environmental and insurances.
I don’t have a problem with people disagreeing with me about nuclear, but I do have a problem who are so narrow minded and lazy that they group everyone that have different ideas than themselves together.
LOL, I actually grew up near Chernobyl and my parents STILL work on CHNPP. So I do know a thing or two about the tragedy.
One thing for sure is that it is very speculative to assume pretty much any death toll rather then immediate deaths by liquidators right after the tragedy (<100). I am not sure that cancer rates in Chernobyl are greater than average or, especially, near the vicinity of coal/gas plant.
And if you really have a degree in physics you should know that nuclear waste is a very manageable problem. Finally nobody advocates about building more ChNPP style reactors - there are plenty extremely safe alternatives. France is a good example on this
Just because it’s very hard to estimate the exact excess deaths or cancers doesn’t mean there aren’t any. There are estimates from 4000 up to near a million early deaths, with the lower probably more reliable, but that is far from none or a few. Ukraine are still spending about 6% of its budget on costs related to the accident.
And it is just pure bullshit that nuclear waste is manageable. Or tell me why there’s still no long term storage facility open anywhere in the world. It’s not that they haven’t spent decades trying. The only way waste management isn’t a problem is if you just say it is someone else’s, ie, future generations problem, or if you rely on reprocessing that still won’t reduce all waste, or also seems to be hard to find economy in.
I’m an advocate for nuclear energy, but I acknowledge that there are some strong downsides. Per my analysis, those downsides are worth it, compared to the alternative (millions of death from coal pollution, climate change, etc.), but it’s not the same as people who have a completely wrong belief about things like vaccines, climate change, or chemotherapy. Of course, in some cases even chemotherapy isn’t worth it, such as very old people who would rather not suffer the pain and would rather dir quickly.
Also, GMOs are probably not spoken against for the reasons you think. Most anti-GMO advocates (that I know) are advocating against them because of the dangerous business model of companies like Monsanto that sue farmers because GMO seeds blow into the farmers’ fields, not because of mistaken beliefs about the health risk.
Judging by the downvotes I assume a few of the people from groups 1-5 are here. There are no scientifically founded reason be be against vaccines/nuclear/GMO, so grouping these things together by the parent comment should not be offensive to anyone
With a PhD in physics and against nuclear power I’m very happy to downvote anyone that groups that with anti-vaccines. I respect that people might have a different opinion than me about nuclear power, but calling opposing nuclear superstition is just cheap.
Some parts of anti-nuclear movement hold a position "ban nuclear no matter what". But for example, what happened in Germany, is nuclear plants being replaced by coal and gas plants.
Then discussion moved to if nuclear plant will be replaced by coal plant, is it really that better in the end? When faced that question, it was observed that anti-nuclear movement splits, where one side thinks that nuclear makes sense to stop coal, while another thinks that we must ban nuclear even if whole planet will die from climate change.
This is why, at least in Germany, some parts of anti-nuclear movement can be perceived as somewhat radical.
I don’t really care to have the discussion right now. There there are valid arguments on both sides.
It’s intellectually dishonest, lazy and counterproductive to groups everyone that you disagree with. That means that you never actually cared to understand the arguments.
Sadly, a lot of the population are members of at least one group. Would love to know if the membership numbers of are 1-5 going up or down