Our panel was with Martin Kohlrausch, Jens van de Maele and @cecipax679.bsky.social. Check out their work as well!

Congrats!!

The highlight of the conference for me, however, was my Master and Commander moment on board the Briggen Tre Kronor ⛵⚓

@siegfriedevens.bsky.social scattered nuclear landscape in Belgium, with little national regulation until late 1980s/1990s. Local and transborder anti-nuclear protests, interantional influences really important, but success not entirely clear in face of corporate decisions to drop nuclear plans.

Look, the Guardian is hardly a pro-nuclear newspaper and you can definitely ask a tech bro to do the same old nuclear marketing pitch. But when you make up historical facts, use them to argue for investing billions of £ in new nuclear, and there is no factcheck, there really is a problem!

8. "Today we have this added motivation to get rid of fossil fuels." It's not added. This motivation already existed in the nuclear sector since the very beginning. It was just more related to energy dependence than climate change. But nuclear's competition with fossils is not new at all.

7. "France is not too dissimilar on how its government functions." Not sure if this is true at all, but certainly not for nuclear. France's nuclear policy has been quite unique in how state-centred, centralized, and nationalistic (see The Radiance of France by @gabriellehecht.bsky.social) it was.

6. "The French fleet arrived on time and within budget. 55 were built basically at the same time." His chronology is very off here. A period of 3-4 decades is not "the same time." And they were definitely not all on time and budget.

5. "In relative terms, the same amount of people has died from nuclear as wind/solar." The problem with these kinds of quantitative comparisons is that they are so unnuanced. Are all deadly workplace incidents in nuclear facilities over 9 decades in those numbers ? And all latent radiation deaths?

4. "Small modular reactors, like submarine reactors, used to fit under a kitchen table." Maybe this was a joke. But Admiral Rickover would not have found it funny. Obviously untrue though.

3. "We need a lot of mines for critical minerals for renewables." Correct. But at no point does anyone mention uranium mines and the historical impact on people and the environment they have had.

2. "Three Mile Island and Chernobyl put an end to the expansion of nuclear power." The expansion had already stopped before 1979. Reactor orders were already going down in the US from 1974 onwards. The main cause was high costs.

1. "Calder Hall was the first commercial NPP." No, its prime purpose was to produce plutonium for nuclear bombs. Shippingport was the first fully commercial NPP.