• 0 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle







  • Very well, let’s agree to disagree. Perhaps I am wrong. But I am in no way right wing or spreading misinformation.

    The people I’ve spoken who work in the nuclear field bitch about unneeded red tape all the time. Some of it is important for sure, but a lot of it can be cut if we wanted to without safety becoming an issue. The price of nuclear has gone way up the past 20 years, whilst the knowledge and tools have become better. This makes no sense to me. We should be able to build them cheaper and faster, not slower and more expensive. And there are countries in the world, that can get it done cheaper, so why can’t we?

    I’m all for renewables, I have solar panels. But I’m not 100% convinced we have grid storage figured out. And in the meanwhile we keep burning fossils in huge amounts. If we can have something that produces energy, without fucking up the atmosphere, even at a price that’s more expensive than other sources (within reason) I’m all for that. Because with the price of energy from coal, the money for fixing the atmosphere isn’t included.

    Thank you for answering in a respectful manner.



  • I have never heard being pro-nuclear is the anti science stance and it being on the rise among right wing political parties. All the right wing is talking about it more coal and less things to be done about the climate.

    The people who I talk to who are pro nuclear seem very well informed and not anti science at all.

    I believe nuclear can help us get to the future we want and we should have done it a lot sooner. Nuclear doesn’t mean anti-renewable, both can exist.



  • Nuclear is by far the safest form of energy production. Even with the big accidents, the impact hasn’t been that big.

    Chernobyl was by far the biggest, but that was 40 years ago, in a poorly designed plant, with bad procedures and a chain of human errors. We’ve learned so much from that accident and that type of accident couldn’t even have happened in the plants we had at the time in the west. Actually if the engineers that saw the issue could contact the control room right away, there would not have been any issue. In 1984 that was a problem, in 2024 not so much, we have more communication tools than ever. The impact of Chernobyl was also terrible, but not as bad as feared back in the time. In contrast to the TV series, not a lot of people died in the accident. With 30 deaths directly and another 30 over time. Total impact on health is hard to say and we’ve obviously have had to do a lot to prevent a bigger impact, but the number is in the thousands for total people with health effects. Even the firefighters sent in to fix stuff didn’t die, with most of them living full lives with no health effects. And what people might not know, the Chernobyl plant has had a lot of people working there and producing power for decades after the disaster. It’s far from the nuclear wasteland people imagine.

    Fukushima was pretty bad, but the impact on human life and health has been pretty much nonexistent. The circumstances leading up to the disaster were also very unique. A huge earthquake followed by a big tsunami, combined with a design flaw in the backup power system, combined with human error. I still to this day don’t understand how this lead to facilities being closed in Germany, where big earthquakes don’t happen and there is hardly any coast let alone tsunamis. It’s a knee jerk reaction that makes no sense. Studies have indicated the forced relocation of the people living near there has been a bigger impact on people’s health than anything the power plant did.

    Compare this to things we consider to be totally normal. Like driving a car, which kills more people in a week than ever had any negative impacts from nuclear power.

    Or say solar is a far more safe form of power, even though yearly hundreds of people die because of accidents related to solar installations. Or for example hydroplants, where accidents can also cause a huge death toll and more accidents happen.

    And this is even with the non valid comparison to the current forms of energy where we know it’s a big issue. But because the alternative isn’t perfect, we don’t change over.


  • Agreed, dealing with the waste is a thing. But for me a solvable problem and something that doesn’t need to be solved right away. We currently store a lot of nuclear waste in holding locations till we figure out a way to either make it less radioactive or store it for long enough. The alternative however is having coal plants all over the world spew all their dust (including radioactive dust) and CO2 straight into the atmosphere. This to me is a far bigger issue to solve. It isn’t contained in one location, but instead ends up all over the world. It ends up in people’s homes and bodies, with a huge impact to their health. It ends up in the atmosphere, with climate change causing huge (and expensive) issues.

    The amount of money we need to handle nuclear waste would be orders of magnitude lower than what we are going to have to pay to handle climate change. And that isn’t even fixing the issue, just dealing with the consequences. I don’t know how we are ever going to get all that carbon back out of the atmosphere, but it won’t be cheap.


  • Agreed, building a nuclear facility takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money. However… This doesn’t need to be the case at all.

    A lot of the costs go into design, planning and legal work. The amount of red tape to build a nuclear plant is huge. Plus all of the parties that fight any plans to build, with a heavy not in my backyard component.

    If however a country would be prepared to cut through the red tape and have a standard design developed for say 10 plants at the same time, the price and construction time would be decreased greatly. Back in the day we could build them faster and cheaper. And these days we build far more complex installations quicker and cheaper than nuclear power plants.

    The anti-nuclear movement has done so much to hold humanity back on this front. And the weird part is most people do think nuclear fusion plants are a good thing and can solve stuff. But they have almost all of the downsides nuclear fission plants have in terms of red tape, complexity and cost.




  • Plenty of cats play with toys. My cat a long time ago had a toy rat which he would play with and “catch”, only to bring it to me to present as a prize. Thank you for bringing me a dirty toy you’ve been chewing on. But if I threw it back, he would resume playing and when the hunt was done either he would bring it to his bed to sleep with, or bring it to me. Only thing was when he had the thing in his mouth and he started yelling about it, it sounded like the cat was choking and dying. I told my wife the first time it happened it scared the shit out of me. I came running to save the cat, only for it to sheepishly look at me what my problem was. She laughed at first, till a few days later it happened to her. She went running to save him and then couldn’t stop laughing.



  • People always confuse multiple things.

    There is gravity, the actual effect we see every day all around us. Gravity is a real thing, it exists. Then there’s the law of gravity, this is a math formula you can use to predict the effect gravity has on things. There’s multiple variations of this one, think Newton and Einstein. For almost everything the Newton version works just fine. Then there’s the theory of gravity, this is our attempt to explain why gravity exists and why it does the things it does. This is the tricky one we don’t really have a grip on.

    By mixing these things it is often portrayed that “scientists” don’t know anything, they don’t even understand something as simple as gravity.