Nuclear Power Folk Beliefs

There's two fundamental "concepts" that define the mindscape of the vast majority of people: 

• first and foremost absolutely nobody knows what they are doing, 
• "folk beliefs" arise in that vacuum.

Swindlers take advantage of this conceptual landscape on a daily basis. Political, religious, and commercial swindlers con people into doing things that are against their best interests all the time so most of the things people believe are utter nonsense.

There are some great really obvious folk beliefs from history, or even the present day that show how it works. One great one is the concept of "puppy pregnancy" from India. It's basically a folk understanding of the disease rabies. Another really persistent and quite old one is the idea that "god will strike me down". That is a person who commits some kind of crime, like lying, will be zapped by the current day sky god. In ancient greece the sky god was Zeus who zapped people with thunderbolts. Current day people believe in jew Zeus.

Anyway, professional liars take advantage of people's reliance on folk beliefs. They seed concepts into the public, who then repeat them as folk tales, and then the concept becomes "true".

One example of that is nuclear power industry shills managed to convince many "conservatives" that nuclear power is the cheapest source of electricity generation mainly via social media and it has zero downside risk. The sales pitch for nuclear power made to liberals is totally different--for them nuclear power is super "green" because it's zero emissions (no CO2).

The main problem nuclear power has is it is impractical to build a new nuclear power plant. Society is too stupid and incompetent to build one today plus it's prohibitively resource/cost intensive. The only way the nuclear industry will manage to build another new nuke plant is with massive subsidies, that is, taxpayer support, so it requires an enormous con job.

The folk belief conservatives have is the government prevents the construction of new nuclear power plants. This is essentially the libertarian fantasy about society... that is, the government is the source of all problems. The libertarians believe if the government vanished, somehow everything would be great. The people are at least as bad as the government, and really the leadership of the society is just a reflection of "the people". It's greedy because the people are greedy. It's stupid because the people are stupid, etc... 

I think the sales pitch to liberals about nuclear power doesn't really work, except on people like John Kerry or other government officials who possibly get bribe money from the industry to support the "green" story about nuke plants.

What's the "truth" about electricity generation? Industrial society is messy and "unsustainable" overall. There's just least worst options. Nuclear power is by far the worst option for generating electricity. Its cost is a good signal about that. The time scale for decommissioning nuclear power plants is on the order of multiple human lifetimes, while whole nations and economic systems, like the USSR, came and went in less than one human lifetime.

It seems like the wisest course of action for people is to reduce consumption of everything, including energy, mainly to free themselves from supporting the industrial beast and have better lives, but people should probably do it slowly as well to avoid massive social and economic disruption as people shift into different economic activities that focus on thrift and efficiency.