It is completely inexcusable that people in STEM fields are so reactionary, considering how capitalism utterly destroys science.
If universities were actually "left wing indoctrination factories" like the right thinks they are, every STEM grad would be taught, for example, what Kropotkin had to say about innovation.
idk man like theres a lot of people on the left that are anti-science and dont read scientific papers. there are leftists that are anti-nuclear, anti-vax, anti-gmo, anti-cultured meat, etc.
people will legitimately call you evil for advancing human knowledge and these nutjobs are one of the first things you come across when coming to the left. its a turnoff. i also do think it depends on the field. the majority however i think are socdems and see a lot of lefties as anti-science loons.
source: i do the sciences
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GMO good, Monsanto bad
nuclear is going to transition to fusion rather than fission over the next century. funding for it is of critical importance. the fuel is salt water for fusion and will produce so much energy we will have no clue what to do with it all. its important to fund fission as a stopgap till we get fusion in order to build expertise on nuclear energy.
Looking back at human history, odds are good that we will use it to kill each other.
i'm talking billions of years of renewability here lol. the whole point of fusion is we're basically creating a tiny sun that we can just feed energy in and get double out of it.
Lol yeah I know. Fusion is going to be great when it happens.
It really depends on the field. Conservation Biology or any other environmental aligned field can be pretty radical.
yeah, forgot to mention that. a lot of the bio/chem people that arent oil ghouls are pretty lit.
A shame, really.
yep. its a thing that frustrates me to no end. i try to educate them, show them papers and statistics, but they're in a damn cult.
Dogmatist do this, I guess. Become anti-science, that is, because they're worried that it'll taint their sacred knowledge from the one guy or book. J. Moufawad-Paul talks about it with Breht of Rev Left Radio in their episode on Moufawad-Paul's book.
I'm not saying the people you are referring to are these types but the behavior seems similar. That or it's similar to the anti-intellectual behavior on the right. Fear of the unknown maybe?
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they're in this thread so idk how true that is.
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yeah idk if its just my geographic location or what but all the physics people i know are chill
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The Sunrise Movement is officially agnostic on nuclear and de facto hostile. That's actually an extremely worrying stance.
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Biden's plan also leans heavily into nuclear, thankfully
Being against cultured meat isn't anti-science, it's anti-pointless-effort. We have all the necessary technology to not consume meat (and thereby not consume all the resources breeding animals just to kill them requires).
Cultured meat isn't factory farming. Its growing meat using cells, a process that involves no animals being harmed at all.
Yeah, I know what it is. We already have the ability to not eat meat, so why should we waste all this scientific effort on creating it without an animal involved (oops, except the animal you need to yank the stem cells out of)?
the only one of those things thats "nutjob" territory is being antivaccine, and i have literally never met an antivax leftist.
nuclear, gmo, and meat cultures are all things the world could do just fine without, so having discourse about their value makes sense.
so why are you being a wonk about it? because you dont like that other people dislike:
promoting eating meat when theyve been trying to stop people from doing that for ages, and they feel that taking stem cells is also a violation of an animals rights or whatever (i dont find this a compelling argument so forgive me if its presented poorly)
the idea of having a superfund site in their backyard and consequently think other energy solutions are better, because contrary to what you believe, nuclear waste will never all be contained to a single site the size of a football field (hi, this me. barring massive advances in fusion tech, nuclear will always have issues that i refuse to agree with)
the idea of monsanto brand seed cultures that destroy crop diversity getting a pass because youre busy patting yourself on the back about modifying gene structures to increase grain output (i can see the point here, but it comes down to capitalism doing it wrong tbh, so is there anyone that actually feels this way?)
?
tldr; there are valid criticisms of those things, other people also do sciences and disagree with you on some topics. learn to discuss that without calling other leftists nutjobs or :cope:
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with the exception of nuclear waste always being bad, because tainted water tables suck yall, i didnt say that at all.
and even then, i absolutely look forward to fusion tech finally being figured out, assuming we all make it another decade or two, given recent promising things along that front.
im a big fan of both lab grown meat and gmo technology, in premise. so no. inherently bad? not at all.
i dislike these assholes trying to "muh science" the discourse about problematic aspects of things away, and pretending any dissenters are "nutjobs" who hate science
you can argue that we could do just fine without them, but you could argue that we could do just fine without medicine, vaccines, advanced agriculture, and so on.
and no, they are definitely nutjobs. those things will make life better for humans everywhere, unequivocally.
do fine without medicine or agriculture? lololol okay. but no. no "we," as in a modern society, could not.
apparently im a nutjob for not wanting to live in another town with nuclear waste seeping into its water table. because it would just be so much better if i did. 🙄
:O great argument bro do you have any papers on how widespread this is vs. the disruption of other energy methods.
great argument bro, hows that fukushima daiichi treating you?
omg i list one failure and apparently that reports a systemic issue with all nuclear plants i am a very smart nutjob that doesnt understand science. christ, this is exactly the issue im talking about. i'm tired of dealing with you people.
whaa whaa. i dont like that my nuclear do a whoopsie you cant bring that up you nutjob!
fuck off. did you miss the part where i lived in a town with nuclear waste seeping into the water table you absolute twit?
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people that make that argument also dont realize that we wont be doing that with solar or wind either. so great, we're all in the same boat. i'm just trying to get the nutjobs not to shut down our already low carbon nuclear sites, like they're doing in germany.
yeah and people in my family have died mining rare earth materials, what is your fucking point??? energy creation is bound to have death. nuclear minimizes it.
You do realise that producing solar panels and wind turbines creates orders of magnitude more toxic waste than a nuclear power plant, right? Before involving any batteries.
lets also talk about that the official quote for fukushima is 0 dead and 40-50 injured. good luck getting those stats in lithium and rare earth mining.
0? check again. some two thousand died in the evacuation
ok so lets assume the worst, then. the biggest, worst, estimate is 60k deaths from anything related to nuclear, including low level poisoning and stress, which means you lived pretty long but it was cut short by the sickness. we have had nuclear technology for around 80 years. if you include the stats from old-gen nuclear reactors like chernobyl, it is slightly worse than wind, but not as bad as solar. if you consider only the newest gen reactors and technology, it beats out every other energy source. in fact, latest gen nuclear reactors have roughly half the death rate of wind. here's a simple, noncomprehensive diagram from forbes: https://i.imgur.com/4LXeCFD.png.
of course, you could argue that 'oh, since these are new they havent had a long enough time to fail'. actually, there have been dozens of failures of new gen reactors and there are lots of them. however, we have gotten really smart about how reactors fail and when they do they don't hurt people.
do go on about how drinking nuclear waste is super great for my health. by comparison or whatever. maybe with batteries even. such a compelling argument.
im sure those wind turbine blades are just awful. so many tonnes of fiberglass. oh no.
Ideed. Five tonnes of fiberglass that contains water-soluble epoxy that cannot be recycled per blade. All to produce 0.3 MW of power and be thrown away after 20 years.
Compare to a depleted uranium fuel bundle, that weights ~100 tons, produces over 3000 MW of power and lasts around 7 years before it needs to be reprocessed. Because yes, unlike turbine blades, it's recyclable.
neat. wind turbine blade technology can certainly be improved and made less wasteful. nuclear, baring significant advancements in fusion tech, will always pose a serious danger because its waste products will kill you.
but no really do go on acting like im unaware, or that i even advocated for wind tech in the first place.
I'm sorry? It was you who brought up the wind turbines.
Your 'technology will fix it' argument is ridiculous, you're pitting toxic plastic recycling technology that doesn't exist against toxic uranium reprocessing technology that has existed for decades (though unprofitable) and needs a scale *500 times smaller..
no. i didnt.
You do realise that producing solar panels and wind turbines creates orders of magnitude more toxic waste than a nuclear power plant, right? Before involving any batteries.
see that part where you brought it up?
also, good second strawman there on me saying anything about recycling plastics. 🙄
Oh, okay. What is your preferred alternative to nuclear?
Edit: or to non plastic materials for a massive wind turbine, I suppose.
loving the crickets right now
I was hoping they'd reply before I went to sleep 😕
the answer is: its irrelevant.
first off, not my job to solve the issues of wind or solar tech on a fucking internet forum.
secondly and more importantly, the point is that nuclear waste is bad not that its the worst possible thing int he world ever.
lets assume only coal power existed. that was the only power source. would you argue we should use it, even knowing all the obvious issues with coal?
nuclear waste is bad, has had a detrimental effect on my life and the lives of people i know, ergo i do not support nuclear fission energies. its not that fucking hard to understand.
edit: ohhh no i stepped away for a whole hour to deal with real life shit, how terrible, i must have been owned so hard kristina. fuck off
Of course. No electricity causes endlessly more suffering than the pollution of coal power plants. Would you really prefer to return to feudalism in your hypothetical situation?
If so, you're a by-the-book reactionary.
feudalism isnt defined by a lack of electricity lol
It's not, but industry requires artificial power. And industry is Good. And Capitalism and Socialism require industry. They are even defined by machine industry. Read Marx.
it aint worth the time arguing with a nutjob. if it were real life, just physically force them out of the room is my opinion. i have a huge disdain for them if you cant tell
industry good therefor i cant even imagine a world in which we live without power but also embrace communism, trying to do so means youve never read a book.
im sure the anprims love you at parties.
Please explain how we reach fully automated gay communism without commanding many times more energy than what we can produce with our own bodies.
Your first sentence is exactly true, and anprims are indeed reactionaries. Marx on the Luddites, the anprims of the 19th century (edit: it's in section 5, 'The Strife Between Workman and Machine').
nah. youre rolling deep on some stemlord shit and i dont need to explain anything, let alone amuse the idea that fully automated luxury gay space communism is the only worthwhile goal possible.
i was proposing a thought experiment to try and shake things up but youre literally the least imaginitive person around town, so you jumped straight to "no! go read marx!" instead of actually thinking about what a coal powered world would look like, and how perhaps mass consumption and automation via coal would not be the best idea for peoples lungs.
but whatever.
fuck off
A world automated with coal is impossible, even if you ignored pollution, because there's not enough biomass in the world to sustain full automation. Communism will require the command of today unthinkable amounts of energy. Nuclear fission is the stepping stone so we can arrive there without polluting and cooking ourselves to death.
What is your goal? You can't roll back the wheel of history. De-electrification, and therefore de-industrialization, implies the death of 95% of the population of the world. And the return to subsistence farming and a pre-industrial mode of production. Edit: remember, the preindustrial mode of production is what killed all the forests of Europe, because they needed wood for cooking, heating and tool making.
my goal was to point out that something is not inherently a good option just because it seems like the only option.
yall seem to be labouring under this idea that i hate the very idea of nuclear energy existing. i dont.
nuclear waste is bad. get over it.
i do not support nuclear energy because i dislike the effects that it has on people when it goes wrong. that is the only real point ive had, and its got yall all bent out of shape.
i am not advocating turning off all the electricity. merely pushing for you to admit to yourself that nuclear is not all fucking sunshine and roses and that critique of it is not inherently bad or something only nutjobs do.
lmao i told you it had deaths. so youre just doing this contrarian debatelord shit to make yourself feel smart.
no, you minimized about it and acted like those deaths didnt count. fuck off
When I say it's a stepping stone, it's implied that it's of course not perfect. The point is that solar and wind power are worse. Nuclear fission (and hydro) are the best power sources we have today. Nuclear fission could immediately be even better if profit wasn't a concern, but that's too capital intensive to be viable under capitalism.
Still, if I had to vote for a new power plant today, I'd vote for a nuclear fission power plant. If I was hearing about the decommission of a nuclear power plant, I'd protest against it, because it implies worse pollution and more deaths in the future. What would you vote for?
buddy, i dont live in a place where my vote matters like that.
again, you seem to think this is about finding the bestest most goodest answer. it isnt. its about accepting critique and allowing discourse.
yknow, the original thing i was responding to? where anyone that dislikes nuclear power is basically an antivaxxer, because some people dont want to hear that nuclear has issues?
to answer the hypothetical: i would have to see actual proposals, but theres a roughly zero percent chance id pick nuclear, because i personally have no interest in living in another town with nuclear waste spillage, so convincing me to vote for that option would be a tough sell
That is why you're basically an antivaxxer. When faced with the choice, in practice, you can't let go of your ideology and choose instead death and pollution.
It's the twelfth form of liberalism.
"you choose death and pollution by refusing to choose the option you have literally seen pollute a town with deadly toxic waste!"
thats you. youre a moron
You might as well be saying "you choose death and disease by refusing to choose the option you have literally seen somebody die of a deadly vaccine!".
a complete failure of the system to prevent death and disease on a large scale is not equivalent to a person having an allergic reaction.
you might as well say "well of course people die from covid, but its not as bad as heart disease! therefor being upset about it means youre as crazy as someone that thinks eating strawberries should be banned because of allergies"
There is no such failure. Nuclear fission has caused the least death and disease of any kind of energy, per Wh produced. You still haven't said what exactly you'd pick, so that we can compare.
About 4 vaccinations per million end in death. This means that 1000-5000 people die of vaccination every year and 10-100× more (depending on the vaccine) have non-deadly complications. And still vaccinations are good, because the alternative is worse.
Compare this number to the amount of people getting power from your local fission power plant, and the amount of people who died because of it.