Because of their effect, their media positioning, and their cost. These monuments are from the 20th century, when clean alternatives were more expensive and less efficient, so the defunding of nuclear directly fed into increased fossil fuel consumption. And thus into increased pollution, climate change, war, and airborne radioactive waste. Any activist could have seen this.
As for media positioning, it is always very clear whether corporate media support or oppose a cause. Climate activists are disruptive weirdos that get arrested while people whose lives they slightly inconvenienced are interviewed over shots of backed up traffic or a wide-angle shot of a handful of activists amidst a lot of context. Anti-nuclear activists are concerned citizens who get interviewed to low crowd shots that show even small groups as a throng, or lower-middle class moms and pops interviewed at home about their worries for their kids’ health, cut with ominous shots of drinkwater-safe water vapor coming from cooling towers.
As for cost, first there’s the monuments themselves. Grassroots activism tends to have lots of people with hodgepodge equipment, while astroturfing has fancy tools and either a handful of people to operate them or contractors. These monuments are massive projects built by contractors designed by handfuls of individuals. It fits the pattern.
Second, there’s all of the expensive storage. No capitalist government is going to waste millions of dollars listening to their people’s objectively excessive safety concerns, unless it directly benefits the rich people they have made corrupt deals with. Nuclear safety laws were designed to keep nuclear power more expensive than fossil fuels, because if the safety standards were reasonable then it would blow fossil fuels out of the water and threaten the justification for funding the military-industrial complex.
Even now, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, if nuclear power safety standards were reduced merely to those of wind turbines and solar panels - where people regularly die from falling, electrical fires, electrocution, etc. - nuclear power would probably be cheaper than renewables.
Why is anti nuclear propaganda always portrayed to be pro fossil fuels by nuclear proponents?
Cleaner alternatives have been available for quite a while now.
Because of their effect, their media positioning, and their cost. These monuments are from the 20th century, when clean alternatives were more expensive and less efficient, so the defunding of nuclear directly fed into increased fossil fuel consumption. And thus into increased pollution, climate change, war, and airborne radioactive waste. Any activist could have seen this.
As for media positioning, it is always very clear whether corporate media support or oppose a cause. Climate activists are disruptive weirdos that get arrested while people whose lives they slightly inconvenienced are interviewed over shots of backed up traffic or a wide-angle shot of a handful of activists amidst a lot of context. Anti-nuclear activists are concerned citizens who get interviewed to low crowd shots that show even small groups as a throng, or lower-middle class moms and pops interviewed at home about their worries for their kids’ health, cut with ominous shots of drinkwater-safe water vapor coming from cooling towers.
As for cost, first there’s the monuments themselves. Grassroots activism tends to have lots of people with hodgepodge equipment, while astroturfing has fancy tools and either a handful of people to operate them or contractors. These monuments are massive projects built by contractors designed by handfuls of individuals. It fits the pattern.
Second, there’s all of the expensive storage. No capitalist government is going to waste millions of dollars listening to their people’s objectively excessive safety concerns, unless it directly benefits the rich people they have made corrupt deals with. Nuclear safety laws were designed to keep nuclear power more expensive than fossil fuels, because if the safety standards were reasonable then it would blow fossil fuels out of the water and threaten the justification for funding the military-industrial complex.
Even now, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, if nuclear power safety standards were reduced merely to those of wind turbines and solar panels - where people regularly die from falling, electrical fires, electrocution, etc. - nuclear power would probably be cheaper than renewables.