Permanently Deleted
this is such a strange line of argumentation;
X is unpracticible because of the way that society is set up right now
okay but X is not being done. in the future we are advocating for X is not the literal only thing we want to change. when i say i want fission in the US on a scale never seen before, that happening at all hinges on fundamentally altering the economics of energy generation! if tons of fission was something our current economy liked, we'd already fucking have it!
so imposing the problems and limitations of right now, on something unimaginable under the conditions of right now, serves only to stifle imagination and lock us into the death cult
Thank you for so effectively articulating the opinion I had about this but couldn't put into words
jfc thank you. i'm just gonna copy/pasta this every time someone tells me we should drink our own piss instead of looking to the oceans / desalination as a water source because whatever unimaginative hurdle they come up with this time
https://environmentalprogress.org/the-war-on-nuclear
Sierra Club :: Has taken $136 million from nat gas/ renewables interests that stand to profit from the closure of nuclear plants.
Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) :: Has minimum of $70 million directly invested in oil and gas renewable energy interests that stand to profit from the closure of nuclear plants.
Environmental Defense Fund :: Has received minimum of $60 million from oil, gas, & renewables investors who would directly benefit from EDF's anti-nuclear advocacy.
WISE International :: Funded by renewable energy interests that stand to profit from the closure of nuclear plants.
Environmental Law and Policy Center (ELPC) Funded by natural gas and renewable energy interests that stand to profit from the closure of nuclear plants.
Greenpeace :: Works to kill nuclear power around the world and refuses to disclose its donors.
Friends of the Earth :: Works to kill nuclear power around the world and refuses to disclose its donors.
If everything short of fusion is going to result in pollution and fusion isn't yet viable, I go with the least-polluting method that allows for energy independence. That's a mixture of renewable fuels which can't separately power society and fission as the workhorse. The alternative is fossil fuels and those are objectively worse.
The U.S. uses nuclear energy for war and has had nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers for over 50 years. We could have had nuclear container ships by now.
Those things are large enough they could probably fit plants to produce hydrogen and oxygen out of the sea water. Probably wishful thinking on that one though.
Why don't we have land plants that do that? Or at least invest in refining that kind of tech?
Nuclears best use is small scale. So the fallout is minimal.
Nuclear should be on ships and used to give power small towns north of the arctic circle or mountain towns. You could have a locked down reactor the size of a shipping container.
If it’s waste and fallout you are worried about, the logistics of large scale plants would probably be more likely to cause long term issues
There is never anything like fallout from a reactor unless something catastrophic happens like Chernobyl, and modern pressurized water reactors are basically incapable of having a disaster on that scale unless you set off a bomb inside them.
The fact of the matter is that solar and wind literally cannot satisfy current power demands, and both have their own problems as well. More importantly, the production of the generators is far from carbon-neutral and as it stands right now requires materials largely flowing into the country by way of imperialism. "Green tech" is a grift that was never going to save us.
The reason people are looking at nuclear is because it may be the best of a bunch of bad options for reliable energy. As weather becomes more extreme wind and solar will increasingly just not be an option for large -scale energy production.
all of the plants would be privately-owned by Elon Musk-type bazinga brains who’d lobby congress to strip away all safety regulations for the sake of profit maximization. They’d be poorly managed and exist exclusively in impoverished, mostly black and brown areas.
Is this an issue with nuclear power or an issue with capitalism?
It's not like fossil fuels or green energy are worker owned co-ops owned by the people
My issue with nuclear is that even with all the saftey regulations in the world, a natural disaster, a war or any number of other things can and will happen, and then you've poisoned a whole region for decades. What is wrong with using renewable energy? Why do we need to harness the atom just to power treats? Save the fissile material for something epic like a space station the size of a city or something.
What is wrong with using renewable energy?
Nothing except that we literally don't have the resources to scour the earth to meet the energy demands of an entire planet.
and then you’ve poisoned a whole region for decades.
I'm sure the poisoned watersheds of mining waste for cobalt, lithum, and other rare minerals are completely recoverable as toxic lead and waste seeps into the soil.
Not to mention the absolute disaster that oil has turned the Niger river delta into.
My issue with nuclear is that even with all the saftey regulations in the world, a natural disaster, a war or any number of other things can and will happen, and then you’ve poisoned a whole region for decades. What is wrong with using renewable energy?
Nuclear is the only energy source that would only require a very large decrease in our collective quality of life to try and survive climate change, instead of a gigantic one if we went with renewables only. Most likely even both will not be enough, mind you.
Also, producing renewables at such a scale means an absolute disaster ecologically to extract, process, and transport the resources required.
Could you point me to a source regarding the resource extraction required to produce renewables at scale?
IEA study and conference on YT here. Skip to the key findings, you'll find some charts.
And a small coal plant actually emits more radiation in a month than a large nuclear plant emits in years.
a natural disaster, a war or any number of other things can and will happen, and then you’ve poisoned a whole region for decades
It's not like we're stuck at Chernobyl level standards. "Poisoned a whole region for decades" is not a thing that would happen. Fukushima wasn't "poisoned for decades" despite being an absolute fuckup.
Save the fissile material for something epic like a space station the size of a city or something.
Gotta hand it to you, this might be the single best case against (earth-based) fissile energy that I've ever seen. And I mean that genuinely :meow-hug: , a floating space city powered by angry rocks would be genuinely cool.
might be the single best case
You are overly swayed by rhetoric instead of logic.
pointing out hairbrained sci-fi things i find to be cool = being a redditor. 80 billion brain cells and you could only bring them together to try to flex on someone being nice. hexbear feels more and more like im at a jokerfied academic conference with dunning-kreuger leftists, more than an internet community. no wonder virtually no one posts.
Nukes have exclusions zones when bazinga brains want to cut corners and squeeze a bit more out of the angry atomic bee machines.
Even if we account for the occasional meltdown, which modern type plants really wouldn't do. It still puts out less radiation than coal does. However, I'm willing to deal with some radiation so we don't turn into venus.
Also radioactive waste can be turned into fuel if we actually invested in it.
Renewable energy is important and should be #1 priority, but for now every nuclear plant that's kept online is like 3 fossil fuels plants that aren't online
As others have mentioned, it requires a different form of society. But, it also seems reasonable and achievable to libs and uncommitted people on paper and in isolation.
So it's what Trotsky (I know, hear me out) would describe as a "Transitional Demand". A demand that seems like an obvious, minimum, reform. That has even been done elsewhere, but in fact cannot be done because the Capitalists are unable to enact it due to the contradictions in the system. See also Public Healthcare.
Do you think fossil fuel plants don't spew poison into the air?
Pretty sure nearby coal plants have kicked up enough radioactive material when burning coal to set off nuclear plant detectors before.
A friend needs to return my book to look up specific statistics but studies published by the coal industry themselves puts the radioactivity of simply burning coal from a single refinery over 2 years releases more radiation into the atmosphere than the worst possible meltdown. A meltdown is localized so the immediate damage is greater and more obvious but on a global and accumulative level oil and coal are more radioactive.
Coal plants produce more radiation than a nuclear plant, so that tracks. You will receive more radiation from a partner in the same bed as you than you will by sleeping outside the gates of a nuclear power plant.
Because as the climate becomes less hospitable to human life humanity is going to be forced into refugia, many of which (arcologies, underground hives, caves, enclosed cities) will require extensive climate control. The energy for which will be easy to produce with some modular reactors but would be goddamn near impossible to manage with any other technologies. The risk of nuclear-related disasters will eventually be outweighed by the need to keep a billion humans alive.
Nuclear power only pollutes at the extraction stage and when shit goes super seriously wrong. Which has happened twice to any major extent. Oil spills are an unintended environmental consequence that sometimes happens but if that oil isn't spilled it's still burned, which is bad for the environment. Also the amount of radiation released by burning coal of like a month the way we go through the stuff is more than even a severe meltdown.
Hi my name is whatyousayingthere and I like to keep my nuclear material inside bombs instead of inside perpetual energy plants!
The Diablo Canyon provides 10% of electricity in Califonria. It is planned to shut down in a few years, and it will not be replaced entirely by renewables right now.
The federal govt is trying to extend is so it lasts till 2031, then maybe enough renewable capacity will have been built up
More than half of Illinois is already powered by nuclear fission :shrug-outta-hecks:
Your problem is with the ownership of nuclear power plants, while valid, nuclear energy is still the only way we don’t kill ourselves through climate change. Say there’s one Chernobyl level disaster every decade. It’ll still be worth it.
Climate change will literally cause more fission plants to fail. IE Fukushima.
Also you're judging Chernobyl based on how bad in ended up being. Not how bad it could've been. It could've irradiated all of Europe as bad as the exclusion zone.
so what is "what the hell" about saying that taking the less bad thing would be worth it over the worse thing
"The mass nationalization of all infrastructure" has the same energy as "you've activated my trap card" when you use it without any elaboration like that. Go on, do tell us how that is a solution for the energy problem without saying "well if we nationalize all infrastructure, then we can just do something different!" as though that wouldn't have already occurred by now if it was going to.
How does nationalized power infrastructure solve any environmental issue? A private power plant that burns coal is the same power plant when privatized.
OP is obfuscating to be anti-nuclear with the veneer of leftism.
Okay but we live in reality, not in fantasy land. Nuclear meltdowns are preventable, and working towards making the current society somewhere that cares about preventing meltdowns is a million times easier than inventing some mythical "ideologically pure" energy source
Genuinely it would.
Nuclear disasters are noticeable and big. When a big one happens, people panic. But it almost never happens.
Oil and gas fail catastrophically all the time, pollute constantly, and destroy the planet. It's (pardon the pun) background radiation. It's the destruction that never gets news because it's so common.
It's also literally radioactive too. A meltdown per year still releases less radiation than we currently do just by burning shit for power.
Oil and gas fail catastrophically all the time, pollute constantly, and destroy the planet.
Oil extraction has likely destroyed the Niger delta for good.
I don't have any reservations about the accuracy of the comparison, but I made the same face.
Near-periphery nations such as Armenia who have nuclear power seem a more immediate threat.
Ukraine shelling the Russian-captured NPPs is a scenario that could easily reproduce itself elsewhere.
We don't have time for perfect solutions. There is no other option for mitigating the effects of climate change, so cutting out nuclear is simply not an option in the short term. Whatever drawbacks there are simply have to be endured.
Obviously traditional power plants can and have done all the shit that you're describing in your hypothetical worst case scenario, while also guaranteeing catastrophic, global effects due to emissions. Solar and wind are great but they're not universally applicable and don't generate enough to replace coal and gas. That means it's nuclear or degrowth and good luck with getting people to voluntarily choose degrowth.
If you're bleeding out, applying a tourniquet could cost you a limb, but not applying a tourniquet could cost you your life. The planet is bleeding out. Simple as.
understanding climate change is exactly why non-bazinga brains don't want nuclear, it takes decades and a fuckton of resources to get a nuclear reactor online, time and resources that would be best used to iterate renewable energy.
