16% of global energy is from low emission sources, of which only 4% comes from nuclear energy. Experts wildly agree that in order to stop climate change, we need to use fewer carbon emitting fossil fuels but guess what? Currently 85% of the world's primary energy comes from fossil fuels.(Ritchie, 2021)
First of all, to get into touch with the antinuclear movement, what we need to know at first is the roots of this movement. The attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the very beginning following our dear oppenheimer, considered the first antinuclear person. The thing is, the fact that started with hiroshima and nagasaki, it also means that the first purpose of this social movement was to oppose nuclear weapons and a prevention to a possible nuclear war, but with the time, in 1960, the movement had also included the use of nuclear power as dangerous.
A couple of years ago, we had the case of Indian point. The shutdown of this nuclear plant where it came most of electricity to New York (that wasn´t from fossil fuels). the reason why people wanted to closed it, was because they were afraid of the fact that an Al-qaeda attack could happen. The fear of an attack,combined with the possibilities of a natural disaster, were important factors to turn public opinion against Indian point . New York’s then-governor, Andrew Cuomo, touted the shutdown as a major victory for state residents, saying that “ending the threat the plant has long-posed to an area that is vitally important to our state, the nation, and the world.” (Booth and Hughes, 2023). As we can see, when it's about nuclear energy, we might have some concerns because of course, people think about chernobyl,Three mile island, and a bunch of meltdowns in nuclear reactors around the world,the tragedies around nuclear disasters create a bad image of how dangerous nuclear actually is.
But how much damage can a nuclear plant really cause? Talking in terms of safety, everything comes with a degree of danger right? And energy sources are not the exception, but in order to measure this, we have to compare the number of deaths a type of energy has caused ( like accidents or premature deaths from pollution), with how much energy it provides. Taking this into account, what we call renewables (like solar,wind and water power)are extremely safe by this measure, natural gas is less safe and oil and coal are much more dangerous. But where is nuclear? It's right between renewables and oil and coal, this taking into account all accidents including thousands of deaths from radiation.(Statista, 2022)
So if we choose between nuclear and fossil fuels purely on a safety basis, there's no comparison.Today, the numbers show how rare a nuclear disaster is.
Then, we also have a big factor that makes nuclear an easy target for public opinion which is as always, money. The cost of electricity from nuclear has gone up in part because of actually minding regulations to address safety concerns and building new nuclear plants has become incredibly expensive. ( World nuclear,2022)
Now, compared to what? In all human affairs we have to ask ourselves, “compared to what?”. Climate change is way more devastating for far more ecosystems, rivers and bodies of waters than any conceivable effect of nuclear plants.
So if we combine costs, the fear of an accident and environmental threats, it's not that hard to understand why there (are, instead) so many people wanting to close nuclear plants but actually, there's one more thing we have to take into consideration, something that nuclear energy has that renewable don't (doesn't), and it's the fact that wind and solar energy come and go and if we base our electricity on those sources, we would be depending on the weather, (semicolon) for example, imagine having solar panels being on a rainy day? We can’t afford things like that (those) being in a busy society. So, this means that what we really need is a firm way to get power, and by firm im referring to something we can turn on and off when we want( .We already saw that we have tons of firm ways of getting energy, avery fossil fuel power plant counts as firm, but taking into account the environment , what we need to decarbonize, is clean and firm power, a firm power that doesn’t emit greenhouse gasses, but here are not a lot of candidates for that(Roberts,energy reporter, 2021) . It is true that nuclear power is not the only option of clean firm power, but being realistic, it's the only one that we have now.
Answering the big question though it's very clear, did this movement actually save us? No, it did not. The focus that people were giving to nuclear power was only based on the bad management that was given to nuclear power by the disasters and wars it caused, but as I already mentioned by analyzing the comparison of the effects of nuclear plants with climate change, it's more what benefits.
Bibliography:
https://ourworldindata.org/sources-global-energy ( percentage of energy)
https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-tragedy-of-indian-point#:~:text=Two%20years%20ago%2C%20on%20April,behemoth%20on%20the%20Hudson%20River. ( indian point)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ (statistics of mortality rates from different sources of energy)
