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                                            Feb 28 - Mar 01, 2015

A collection of some remarks posted at               NUCLEAR_DENIAL
crookedtimber by various people
concerning Dan Kahan's work, with
particular emphasis on the case of
nuclear power.

  [link]

John Quiggin:
                                                              QUIGGIN_BIOLOGY
  "The other aspect, which evidently pains Kahan, is that
  this issue has a clear partisan dimension. Not only
  are specific anti-science attitudes far more common on
  the political right, but responses to the anti-science
  trope also break on partisan lines. I can't find a
  link now, but the experimental evidence shows that the
  reinforcing effect of contrary evidence is stronger
  among Republicans than Democrats. The differences are
  much starker among the politically active: the
  discrediting of antivaxerism on the political left is
  just one example ..."


Lee A. Arnold:

  "The climate deniers ALSO believe that climate
  change mitigation will be a global economic disaster."



Landru:

    Quiggin:

         'The only remaining issue on which parts of the left
         still take a full-blown anti-science line is the claim
         that consuming GM foods has adverse health effects.'

    "Hmm. I would be inclined to put 'anti-nuclear' as always
    having been the big one, basically the creationism of the
    left; and it isn't receding at all as far as I can see. But
    these are all of a piece: anti-GMO, anti-vax, anti-nuke,
    anti-pesticide, etc., share the hippie-ish thematic root of
    'unnatural, therefore dubious', together with 'motivated by
    greedy, uncaring profiteering, therefore dubious'; and
    anti-nuke in particular shares 'this is how the world ends'
    and so gets an extra resonant boost."



Cheryl Rofer wrote:

     "One of Kahan's strongly held positions is
     that right and left indulge in hanging on to
     their anti-science positions equally. As JQ
     notes, the situation may not be quite as
     symmetric as Kahan would prefer. We might
     consider attitudes toward nuclear power as
     well, although that gets complicated."


Joseph Brenner:

Cian wrote:

    'I'd like to push back against a conflation that you often see
    in these discussions. There is a difference between being
    anti-science and anti-technology.'

In this context, it hardly matters.  If you can do arithmetic
you should be able to get the point that the risk of nuclear
power is low compared to it's returns, and that the competing
low-CO2 emissions power sources are in their infancy and are
unlikely to scale fast enough and far enough to cover the
problem.

If the anti-nuclear people really cared about the subject as much
as they claim they do, they would've learned by now that they're
worried about the wrong thing-- instead they indulge in behavior
*exactly parallel* to the climate change deniers.  E.g. any
expert who disagrees with you must be a deluded ideologue or
corrupted by financial interests.



Rich Puchalsky wrote:

   "A lot of what Kahan writes about can be considered as being
   under the rubric of 'framing' as used by people like Lakoff, a
   doctrine that I hated as soon as I heard about and was much
   beloved by nonprofit groups operating out of DC."


Joseph Brenner wrote:

  Matt wrote:

  "My problem with modern nuclear power is more the inability of
  the industry to build to a schedule and a budget. Also the long
  lead times even when everything goes as planned. China is
  supposed to be the great hope for nuclear power but even their
  reactors average 6 years from construction start to commercial
  operation."

France.  After the 70s energy crisis, France is the only country
that responded intelligently.  They did a massive scale-up of
nuclear power in a short period of time, and consequently their
C02 emissions are really low.

If you think 6 years is a long time, think about how long it'll
take you to build an equivalent photovoltaic plant.



Lee A. Arnold wrote:

   "Creating fission waste seems to me to
   be as short-sighted as pumping CO2 into
   the atmosphere."
                                                       
And that is an astoundingly ignorant thing to say, and       
it was coming from a regular at crookedtimber who is         
far from stupid.  Just that fact that anyone might           
need to argue that point at this late date is proof of       
Landau's point that the anti-nuclear complex is              
"basically the creationism of the left".                     
                                                             
Seriously: the worst case with nuclear waste is if
someone screws up really badly then cancer rates tick
upwards in the vicinity of the mistake.

Compare that to global warming: rising sea levels
trashing coastal cities, weather change induced
shortages producing waves of refugee imigrants,
resulting in an upswing in anti-imigrant fascism, 
the potential for ocean ecology crashes as 
temperatures and acidity change faster than they 
have tens of thousands of years... 




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