This may be a “hot” one, considering lots of people do not like anything nuclear. If you would want to know my “bias”, well I have always been “pro nuclear”. So if you want to take this claim with huge mountains of salts, feel free to do so.

Here is a relevant wiki article for radiation hormesis. This is a proposed effect that certain amounts of radiation exposure may even be beneficial instead of harmful as LNT may suggest.

TL;DW for folks who do not want to watch video (I have not included examples or numbers)

  • Radiation from natural sources (like radioactive bananas you eat, or from soil or space) are always present.

  • Most nuclear safety guidelines consider that there are no “safe limits” of exposure to radiation. For example, there are safe limits of some metals in our body, there is no limit for mercury or lead exposure. There is a required amount of vitamins you need, but there is also a limit beyond which they are not safe. Radiation is treated like mercury in guidelines.

  • If it has no safe limits, then due to natural exposure, places with higher background exposure must have naturally higher rates of cancers developing - but the thing is, experiments and data collected does not match.

  • Your body has natural means to repair damage done by radiation, and below a certain limit, your body can withstand (and arguably benefit, see the linked article) the radiation.

  • Over estimating danger due to radiation leads to large scale paranoia, and leads to general public be scared of nuclear disasters, when they are not as bad ast they may seem.

And pre-emptively answering some questions I am expecting to get

  • Do you support nuclear bombs? Hell no. We should stop making all kinds of bombs, not just nuclear.

Are there not better means of renewable energy generation like

  • solar? - no, you still need rare erath metals, you need good quality silicon, and you need a lot of area. Until we have a big “stability” bump in perovskite solar cells, it is not the best way. is it better than fossil fuel? everything is better than fossil fuel for practical purposes.

  • wind? geothermal? - actually pretty good. but limited to certain geographies. if you can make them, they are often the best options.

  • hydro? - dams? not so much. There are places where they kinda make sense, for example really high mountains with barely any wildlife or people. otherwise, they disturb the ecosystem a lot, and also not very resistant to things like earthquakes or flooding, and in those situations, they worsen the sitaution.

  • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
    141·
    21 hours ago

    Jesus Christ I’m so tired of this shit. “What if climate change is actually good because you can grow food in colder climates? Then we wouldn’t have to change anything, which I really don’t want to anyway.” “What if masks actually make you more likely to contract COVID? Then I wouldn’t have to wear one, which I really don’t want to anyway.” And now, “What if exposing yourself to radiation is actually good for you?”

    This is absolute nonsense. The Wikipedia article is full of “[unreliable source?]” and “highly controversial,” and the video starts out with stuff like, “Actually, all the experts agree with me, they’re just afraid of speaking up,” which instantly destroyed any willingness to suspend my disbelief on this nonsense.

    Yes, there is a tiny amount of radiation in a banana that isn’t enough to cause harm. But that has absolutely nothing to do with nuclear reactors. The difference between “harmless” and “extremely lethal” with radiation can change drastically depending on factors like distance, in ways that are not intuitive to most people. Treating radioactive material and radiation produced by a reactor with extreme caution is the best practice regardless, because if things go wrong, they can go very, very wrong. You cannot mishandle a banana in such a way that it destroys a city, which is a something I never thought I would have to explain.

    Furthermore, your dismissal of other forms of green energy is outdated, it may have been true 20-30 years ago but the technology has advanced and will keep advancing and with the massive upfront cost of reactors it doesn’t usually make sense to build new ones (although keeping existing ones running is often reasonable imo).

    If you’re gonna push this then at least present actual evidence.

    • CertifiedBlackGuy@lemmy.world
      42·
      20 hours ago

      The up front cost of nuclear is largely all the red tape caused by fear mongering.

      Which is wild because coal plants release more radiation per kW generated than nuclear.

      Renewable tech has gotten far better in even the last 5 years.

      It won’t ever be able to handle 24/7/365 base loads, but they’ve already proven far more robust in developing places like Texas that cannot keep their fossil fuel plants running reliably in inclement weather.

      Jokes aside, seriously, the answer is, and always will be nuclear + renewables.