- cross-posted to:
- chat
You must log in or register to comment.
god I really hate the western left being anti nuclear. it is safe, you just need actual regulation and long term management. they COULD be the backbone of a solid green energy grid. I hope the thorium reactors bring back that nuclear optimism
Can you blame us? Which corporation or government entity do you trust to run the reactors?
there has been very few big nuclear accidents. I trust most developed nations to run reactors. now the US, who the fuck knows with those lot, but most of the world I trust, even the cringe nations
there has been very few big nuclear accidents
So far. And that ones that have occurred were devastating.
Reminder that nuclear waste lasts functionally forever. And nations don't.
And add on that nuclear plants are also not carbon neutral until having run for decades.
US Navy seems to handle it alright (that we know of, admittedly).
Yeah this is true. They don't operate the subs for profit though (at least not directly). The trillions of war bux gotta go somewhere.
In my head canon the U.S. nationalizes its energy infrastructure
:bloomer:
listen buddy, my ideas are the greatest and the best, believe me you me you.
They still don't have a clue what to do with the old reactors tho. There's a field of them in WA I think.
Meh, it's a pittance compared to the trash fossil fuels generate. If the largest price of our energy providers is we have to dig a big hole in the middle of a desert somewhere and make it unlivable for a few thousand years then I think we can live with that.
I hate that the first thing everyone thinks with nuclear waste is "just dump it in a fragile ecosystem." Deserts may not support as much life as woodlands or fields, but they hold many unique species which live a very fragile existence. Why not carve out the inside of a mountain, a place nothing lives?
I was oversimplifying, but that is the general consensus for nuclear waste. You find a geologically stable mountain range in the middle of a desert where there's not a ton of wildlife to worry about and dig straight down a few hundred meters and slap a lead slab on top for good measure. Yucca Mountain is the archetypal one I had in mind.
Yucca mountain is a shoshone sacred site and the colonists have no buisness dumping uranium there.
Well, shit. I had no idea, yeah fuck that then. There has to be another mountain that fits the criteria out there though.
Which corporation or government entity do you trust to run
the reactorsanything?I mean yeah but the biggest nuclear fuck up ever was under a centrally planned governments watch, so…
No, the biggest nuclear fuck up ever was when the capitalist American government dropped two nuclear bombs on civilian populations.
More reactors involved in Fukushima and there's no way that we have an accurate, truthful account of the effects.
Okay but I’d argue the design of Chernobyl was a fucking disaster to begin with. Soviet authorities were so confident a meltdown wouldn’t happen they just build a sheet metal shed around the reactor. If they had put a concrete sarcophaguses around the reactor Chernobyl wouldn’t have been much worse than three mile island.
In the west like every other form of energy it's inseparable from some of the most egregious abuses of colonialism.
yeah, ofc, but the entire system is founded upon that. I know about the uranium mining in the south west united states and all that. but, 'just don't have power' is really not going to sell anybody on a left project. and we need to change our power now not in 20 years after capitalism.
The location of the first commercial reactor will be in the desert city of Wuwei, and the Chinese government has plans to build more across the sparsely populated deserts and plains of western China, as well as up to 30 in countries involved in China's "Belt and Road" initiative — a global investment program that will see China invest in the infrastructure of 70 countries.
That's imperialism! It's exactly the same as financing right wing coups, right?
The first two projects they "invested" (gave huge loans) in Hungary to was the renovation of the Szeged-Budapest railroad that can't be used by passenger trains because fuck passengers and the campus of Fudan which will be mostly for rich foreigner kids (as was CEU) and is built in place of a housing project that would've meant low rent apartments for thousands of poor students. Both of these were given to a right wing gov by the way.
Call me a trot, but i don't see that much of a difference.
Considering china has an approach of cooperation and trade with anyone but with a strict rule of "non intervention", ie. not telling them at all what to do, couldn't this have more to do with Hungary and what they wanted to do?
With the first you might be right but every report that came out here (even from the left news site we have) said the chinese government knew that there was supposed to be a housing project where their campus will be built but actively pushed for it to be significantly narrowed down.
That's pretty bad. But i've always seen china basically just let the country they cooperate with do whatever, even if it's bad. I understand it, I don't know if it's a good or a bad thing in every situation but I absolutely get why they do it that way. Did china choose to put it there, or did they just invest in hungary-led project?
Oh also, a very important point, is this "china" as in a chinese private company, or an SOE? Private companies are still bad, even in china, they're just more regulated and pressured but from what I've seen they still do as many shitty things as they can get away with, especially abroad. The state has pushed back on this and punished a bunch but it'll still happen as long as those companies are... private companies.
It's Fudan, which is a state-owned university as far as i know.
And the info that were leaked was that they specifically chose the place where the housing project was planned.
Wow. That's very interesting, thanks for that info. Would you have a good source on this event, and do you know what year this happened in?
It was announced this year, there was already a pretty big counter demo (which was called by a leftist/succdem rep candidate but was coopted by libs and was turned into an anti-china event in general thanks to mainstream lib media.
The problem is that what i can give you is in hungarian since it wasn't really picked up by mainstream media: https://merce.hu/search/fudan/ These are from our most left and popular news site.
And btw i wouldn't be complaining about this that much but anticapitalist left just seems to find its footing in hungary and this is used to feed anticommunist sentiments and is actively harming the movement, even if China isn't intervening.
I'm asking because I'm wondering why they would have made this decision (specifically wanting to build it where the housing project was), like what the intent is, is it accidental (they wanted it to be there for other reasons, not because they wanted the housing project to be removed or something), is it on purpose? For what reasons? Also because I'm wondering if there might be internal weirdness in Fudan, considering in 2019 there seems to have been a lot of internal difficulties when the had to change their pledge to include "loyalty to the party" and following xi-jinping thought, and you had (according to wikipedia anyway) student protests against these things. Even a state-funded university might have issues, considering a lot of academia tends to be very lib.
I don't know where I'm going with this, but It feels like a very interesting event.
I don't know the actual reason either but if i would have to guess the reason probably is that that area was the largest available at the moment and China is pushing forward with the project because they want as much of BRI ready (since this is also supposed to be a part of that project) in the least time possible as they can. At least the things that leaked so far seem to indicate that.
Don't get me wrong btw this is a huge mismanagement of assets by the government as well, but in this case at least not taking a look at what their project erases is kinda not a good strategy here and it makes it even worse that this is actively hurting the movement here.
Agreed, it's a shame and it also contributes to anti-china sentiment.
Even as China positions itself as a global leader in the fight against climate change, the country is already under acute strain from extreme weather events
Global warming is nationally bounded
Global warming, at this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the world, localized entirely within a country you politically oppose !?
I, for one, am very excited to visit the Chinese state of Oregon . Sounds very exotic.
This is mad funny because my dad, a capitalist bootlicker, is also molten salt/thorium reactor stan. He has DVDs. He has written about it on his shitty blogs. He would talk our fucking ears off about how that was the future, and communist China is doing it, not America. LOL.
feel free to let this question drop but if you are disposed to saying, what happened in June
I had posted some daily updates back in June but then things turned mean and traumatic and it stopped being so funny.
My attempt to have an existing relationship with my dad kinda careened off a cliff when he called me names and insulted my wife while getting coffee, which I paid for — the audacity! So that night he posted some dumb quote from Ayn Rand about Capitalism being benign, and I had just been reading about Indian Schools, dead children and the unmarked graves, and I knew she was a native genocide apologist. So I told him, Ayn Rand was a dumb bitch; he continues to talk about politics when I don't want to engage with him. He said he'd do whatever he wants, so I insulted him. I went by the next day to pick up something and he yelled in front of my grandma, my brother, and my kid. It was the yelling at me in front of my kid that almost made me lose my shit. I was dropping him off. So I almost did a u-turn and went back to beat his ass.
I ended up, just cussing him out and warning him never to speak to me that way; he was adamant he will do whatever he wants, so I warned him next time I will kick his fucking teeth in, blocked him, and haven't spoken to him since.
After that happened, I talked to my therapist who compared it to family members of Alcoholics, who think they have to control their family member, to try and change them. I basically just gotta let him live his life the way he wants and set my boundaries. And my boundaries include not talking to him right now, he keeps telling my mom he is ready to make amends but I am not.
Obviously this isn't the first time he has done this shit; and he used/was/is an abusive piece of shit, so I don't need that shit.
that sounds very difficult, sounds like you are handling it intelligently. I wish you strength
Thank you, I wrote him a half-finished eulogy and have kinda buried myself in family, work, games and books...
Meanwhile US technological efforts are concentrated on space tourism for oligarchs and inventing new ways to make you click ads
Creating technologies that reduce CO2 emissions to own the libs.
:xi-lib-tears:
Everyone in Europe complains that China set it's own higher emission standards (because they are a developing nation) but they will still wreck the West in climate mitigation tbqh
I'm sure many developing countries would be willing to set stricter standards if Western countries and corporations made the technology necessary to enforce and maintain standards freely available.
God thorium reactors would be so cool. If they succeed, it'll truly be revolutionary.
Who the fuck cares if we use the same material to make energy instead?
If something goes wrong - not talking about intentional mischief - it's pretty damn expensive and lots of people get sick. As has happened in Fukushima, Chernobyl, or Three Mile Island. Furthermore, as of now nobody knows how to deal with the waste.
Since solar and wind power are so much cheaper per kWh and also not as dangerous, it's economically and ethically sound to not build nuclear power plants.
people were brainwashed into thinking nuclear waste could not be contained at all by fossil fuel companies.
France has used nuclear for almost 100% of its power generation for like 70 years and all the waste takes up like a 5x5 yard cube because they reprocess it. Yeah it's still dangerous and 10000% needs to be taken seriously, but I would state it isn't nearly as bad as mountaintop removal for coal power. You can see that shit from space on Google earth, the applalacians look like they have leprosy from all the destruction.
Hard disagree, what about the Land? Wind and solar energy end up being dependent on massive tracts of land that would be better off as wilds but instead must support some level of constant human interaction to support the wind and solar repair and maintenance. A thorium nuclear power plant is capable of out producing all of them more efficiently (because sometimes the sun don’t shine and the wind don’t blow) while taking up a fraction of the footprint of either. Not to mention every nuclear accident ever is more or less a steam explosion because of the necessity for pressurized water in a uranium light water reactor. Thorium reactors simply do not have the same capacity for explosive failure because they do not require super heated pressurized water to act as a medium for the heat from the radiation. Also the waste from Thorium reactors has a much shorter half life than what comes out of Light water reactors and could theoretically be used in other applications including other kinds of reactors.
I mean, thorium fears are unfounded. Theres a structural argument that they centralize the energy grid and take power out of the hands of the people, which is why I'm more for decentralized networks of solar and wind cooperatives like Japan is building. But they produce fairly manageable waste that will decay in 500 years.
That said, uranium reactors are actually a huge problem. In Japan, one melted down and they had to evacuate a whole prefecture. It's only a matter of luck that they didn't have to evacuate all 5 cities in Tokyo. Now the government is claiming they cleaned it up, but independent scientists disagree and so there are lots of people just getting irradiated right now.
There's also the issue of disposal. In Japan there's no good place to do it, and in the US we love to do it on indian land. Then it's there for 10,000 years.
Then there's the issue that without maintenance they melt down. States fall and companies go bankrupt, what happens to nuclear plants then?
You're right that nuclear weapons are also a problem, but that doesn't mean we should make the problem worse.
Modern reactors are designed to shut down if they approach critical temperatures without human input
We live in a crumbling empire on a dying planet. We can't make plans that are only safe if we do everything right, because we won't do everything right.
Thorium doesn't melt down the same way, and solar and wind just become hunks of metal when civilizations crash. Uranium reactors become tests of if we actually installed and maintained the safeties.
That's reductionist. We can de-grow the west and use the spoils to bring up the living standards in the rest of the world. It's not nuclear or agrarian society, there are spaces in-between.
Western population degrowth is a good idea. We can do it by improving sex education, improving access to reproductive healthcare, paying a basic income to women, increasing social security, and doing green development of rural areas and the rust belt.
We can also lower the energy needs of the west by stopping new car sales, de-militarizing, rezoning the suburbs, creating policies requiring products to last longer, reducing access to metals and plastics, stop subsidizing beef and dairy, among other policies.
we will still need supplements in the form of fertilizers/composts to feed everyone this way.
Can't farms become closed loop except for labor?
hey look it's the cool technology I was telling people about in 2007 that the USA hasn't done jack shit with
I’ve been obsessed with this shit since I was a kid, it’s nice to know it’s being taken seriously somewhere.
thorium reactors can literally eat heavy long-term radioactive waste and turn it into shorter-lived isotopes, they're so fucking cool
Absolute full support for China on this one I mean my god. There is no hope without this technology. I feel so much better just knowing it’s being explored.
With all the YouTube videos about how thorium is basically the unobtanium of nuclear reactors, I would have thought we’d have more of these by now.
