However, as a writer, I’m describing the subjective reality of growing up in that environment. When you see 'scorched-earth' measures taken to manage a city, it shapes your visceral perception of that power, regardless of the science behind it. My goal isn't to debate nuclear policy, but to capture how that specific 'bad governing' colored the way we, as residents, perceived the very energy that defined our lives.
- most nuclear power does indeed seem to be well run with minimal pollution. - when it goes wrong, the consequences are awful and long-lived (I can, off the top of my head, name two sites that are dangerous decades after they were polluted. I suspect there are others that don't have the same cultural resonance for me. - the alternatives in terms of renewables and storage are improving seemingly from one day to the next.
The long term consequences, and human frailty in the face of a requirement for total and eternal vigilance convince me that the risk outweighs the reward. Where nuclear power once seemed [to me. I appreciated that some people have always been anti-nuke] like the least bad option compared with e.g. coal, now there are better ways to make our lives work.
If the endless 50-years-in-the-future ever actually expires and we get practical fusion power, it'll be interesting to see how this changes my thinking. Perhaps that will will have fewer toxic side effects when it goes wrong.
The same can be said about wind and solar. Nothing about producing the rare earths required is clean.
Even if we include Chernobyl, nuclear is still by far the safest source of energy when looking at deaths per TWh generated.
> I can, off the top of my head, name two sites that are dangerous decades after they were polluted
Two? I can only count one. Fukushima is almost perfectly safe today, although exclusion zones still exist.
The metaphor says maybe “extreme cleanliness is like war”, second pass war is bad governing…
Don’t engage with it.
At this point, you’re arguing with an LLM, not a coherent storyteller. The events your question refers to have been downgraded in the context window.
It’s like the game of twenty questions where the LLM doesn’t have a persistent secret object, it’s just simulating consistency.
Especially when comparing the number of deaths(1) from then-China's favourite energy source or simply Uranium's efficiency(2) and the fact we know now how to recycle most of the waste(3)
Sure, I prefer the solar too, but I agree the governance is the bigger problem in the example from the story.
(1) https://www.researchgate.net/figure/rates-for-each-energy-so... and https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/10/new-nuclear-power-is-p...
(3) https://whatisnuclear.com/recycling.html and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054421...
It's called bad governing. To connect nuclear "not clean" with such bad governing is bit much.