Nuclear Power Alt Media PR Comeback?

One of the weirder trends I see on alt-media is a resurgence of interest in nuclear power as a "green" alternative to fossil fuel power production even in the wake of not-so-long-ago Fukushima. I even see some youtubers cheerleading the money hungry nuclear weapons stockpiles of the US. ($30B-$50B per year to maintain) My guess is some buzz cut korea war era bureaucrats spent some money to promote nukes on the Internets before they went to their retirement parties.

I think this is a generational thing. If you were at least 10 years old in 1986 you'd be 42 years old today and would probably remember the news reports of the Chernobyl disaster, and if you're older you will remember Three Mile Island.

If your memory is good enough, and you meditate on these topics a while, eventually a whole cornucopia of corporate sociopathy will bloom before your mind's eye, such as the Bhopal Disaster which killed thousands of people. If you're in your forties you remember EPA superfund sites, Love Canal and leaded gasoline. Eventually the millenials and gen-Zers will be paying for all the fracking site well failures and ruing the energy boom.

Corporate sociopathy is really the concentrated lack of concern and recklessness of a million individuals all concentrated into singular events and accidents and accumulated pollution and destruction. One such example I saw this past summer was herbicide application along the high voltage powerlines a mile from my house. In a typical year, they brushhog the powerlines in the fall, but last year, probably to save some shekels, they sprayed trees and fields from helicopters during the peak of the bird breeding season. It turned my stomach to see it, but my lights are on and I'm paying my electric bill monthly, dutifully.

Nuclear power is that sociopathy plus the delusion that industrial civilization will persist forever and that the schemes of some engineers will thwart nature indefinitely and that our current mode of living will go on for hundreds if not thousands of years or that the shitty power companies or the governments of today will last in perpetuity. Even if something like the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis is incorrect, the period between civilization ending events is shorter than the lifespan of nuclear waste. Rome couldn't even maintain sewers for more than a couple of centuries. Fuck. Michigan can't even maintain some WW2 era water lines.

I think a hail mary internet PR effort by the nuclear industry isn't enough to revive it. It's too expensive to build new plants and the end-of-life costs of the old plants are yet to be known as they transition into long term waste storage facilities.