This one is more about engineering and trust toward regulatory bodies. Science alone won't make nuclear plan not to break or leak. It is about trust toward companies that build the stuff.
Also, "scientists" is kind of nebulous group. I am unsure who exactly you mean and what exactly they support.
Your local scientists often advocate for nuclear. So I'm a bit confused. Sure there's some that don't but there's no large group that has unanimous agreement on anything.
Look, I'm pro-nuclear but 'if only everyone were as knowledgeable as me' is a losing communications strategy. seriously, why do you expect people to trust the engineering in a nuclear power plant when clever people can't even get the financing to work or the construction ot go smoothly?
Popular support. Legacy of Cold War era anti nuke propaganda and ridiculous portrayal of reactors and nuclear waste in fiction have lead to a skewed public perception on which politicians don't want to get burnt. Fukushima happened. Paperwork gets expensive. Active failsafe systems several layers deep complicate construction of plants. All of this loops back onto corporations and public institutions not wanting to invest into research.
it's an interesting problem. I understand why these engineers and scientists went through the anti-nuke network to get this thing done, but then the media will frame this as an anti-nuke thing instead of legitimate concern for one specific thing.
I came up with an analogy to help me think about this. Say you are a medical researcher and found some serious adverse health effects to an abortion pill and as a medical professional you think it's unsafe to be on the market. Who do you go through to take action and how will this be portrayed in the media? You have a problem on your hands.
The problem is most regular people think "Chernobyl" or "Fukushima" when they hear "nuclear power". It's hard to create an environment that fosters and finances innovation in this field when the political support needed may be career suicide for whoever offers it.
The EU just recently decided that nuclear energy is green because some of the influential countries failed to get into renewables and now need to greenwash their rotting nuclear fleet. I rather trust my local scientists who care about peoples health.
Union of Concerned Scientists are an anti-nuclear lobbyist group. Anything they say should be dismissed out of hand. They have 0 credibility and have spent the last 50 years spreading lies and fear about nuclear energy.
The problem here is actually that the people at 'Union' are deeply convinced that nuclear is bad and no nuclear project no matter how much time was spent on safety has ever been endorsed by them. This is simply how they operate.
The reason there are 'exceptions' is because partly with the help of themselves the nuclear regulatory system was changed in a way to hardcore specific technological solution into the regulatory process that only work for traditional PWR, practically excluding every other form of nuclear energy.
NuScale uses PWR technology in a slightly different form but because that's what they believed to be able to regulated, but even that requires lots of extra cost to get regulated.
The regulatory changes after the nuclear accidents essentially killed all research and all progress. This can be seen both in the rates of new reactor designs and reactor building rates.
Union of Concerned Scientiests and Greenpeace have been at the forefront of this issue for a long time now, and their deliberate strategy since literally 50 years (and this is a fact that has been shown based on their internal documents) is to always focus on nuclear safety because that's how they can make it uneconomical. And to their credit, this strategy has worked perfectly. It might be the single most successful political campaign of the 'environmental movement'.
If they had been this effective against coal we would live in a better world now.
Lots of the push against nuclear is non-scientific. Worth pointing out that all humans reject science, not just conservatives - liberals do exactly the same thing.
This is salient to the nuclear discussion because, regardless of the science, liberals STILL push against nuclear science - even though it's the best hope for getting away from using fossil fuels that we have today.
It's not just a pro-nuclear bias. It's techno-utopianism and scientism.
The ideology is that science and technology can cure humanity of all its problems, if only they were not so small-minded and ignorant to reject it.
There's also a strong identification between science and technology and their proponents' core identities, so that fundamental questioning of some of their benefits is seen as personally threatening.
Being anti-nuclear is not being anti scientific progress. And a scientific approach to this issue would have been to wait and judge the data, rather than claim that a melt down was impossible at the outset.
Also, "scientists" is kind of nebulous group. I am unsure who exactly you mean and what exactly they support.
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