Okay so I was scrolling through the PSL’s info page, and it is stated that they are to denuclearize the power grid. Why is this? I was under the impression that Nuclear Energy is the much more sustainable and frankly realistic source of power–even without Molten Salt Reactors and Thorium based ones.
Im finding it most orgs tend to stay away from Nuclear energy due to fear mongering from fossil fuel industries; Thus its stain in the imperial core, reaching from liberals to western "leftists". But I am surprised the PSL, a radical organization, is anti-nuclear.
FYI this isn't a deal breaker or anything--they seem to be taking the lead for vanguard party--just was curious of the stance on nuclear energy.
I dug into this quite a bit a few years ago and came to the conclusion that opposition to nuclear power was originally all astroturfed, and continues to be astroturfed to this day. I may have missed something and I don’t know why leftists in particular are against it, but here’s what I learned.
Environmentalist organizations were for nuclear power into the 1960s. In general people were for it, it was a promising new technology. Then in the late 60s and early 70s these big environmentalist groups (Sierra Club primarily, but others as well) were taken over and astroturfed by oil and gas companies. Obviously oil and gas capitalists were not at all on board with the idea of getting plentiful and cheap energy from little bits of metal, so nuclear energy had to go.
At the same time there was a huge anti-war and anti-nuclear weapons movement. It was super easy for bad faith actors to conflate nuclear weapons with nuclear power, and that’s one of the anti-nuclear-power misconceptions to this day. There also wasn’t any public awareness or even concept of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.
In the 70s public opinion shifted hard against nuclear power, first due to these oil and gas lobby efforts and later due to opportunistic propaganda around the Three Mile Island accident (and the conveniently released film The China Syndrome). Further accidents such as Chernobyl (and its easy conflation with anti-communism) have only served to make nuclear less and less popular over the years.
Semi-related, but do you ever find it interesting that Chernobyl disaster is known pretty much all over the world and became pretty much synonymous with “nuclear incident”, while the Three Mile Island is barely heard of? Funny that
Interesting and yet not surprising at all, as we know anti-communism is baked into the modern western consciousness. In the minds of those who even know there was a serious nuclear accident in the USA it’s an innocent capitalist industrial accident vs. inept communist hubris and corruption. Even though many of the socio-political under and over reactions to the events are very similar.
So, essentially, there’s a perception in the US that nuclear reactors are always at risk of catastrophic failure and that if this happens, it will be as bad as Chernobyl. Therefore, they oppose anything even remotely related to nuclear power. Of course, this perception has been very intentionally created by the fossil fuel oligarchs.
At this point, it’s been so drilled into the heads of most people here that they just won’t listen to anything you have to say that counters this point of view.
That ignores the scientific fact that even the worst nuclear disasters we’ve had aren’t as bad as the worst fossil fuel or even hydroelectric disasters we’ve had. That ignores how damaging the business as usual of the fossil fuel extraction and consumption industries are. It’s like you say, and as I wrote in my original comment as well, this perception is all by design as it benefits fossil fuel industries.
