People who think Nuclear is very safe and impossible to fuck up forget they will have a government department called Doge being run by a fuckwit
this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
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Nuclear plants are far from the only public hazard if he's actually going to go into places and derail them personally.
Perfect. Now that renewable technology is finally cheap and quick to build, the oil and gas lobby is trying to redirect attention to nuclear, which takes decades to build in most places.
We can do both. There’s nothing preventing us from doing both, and the most effective way for the oil and gas lobby to get what they want is to divide us.
If pro-renewable people say “we must only have renewables, nothing else!” It makes us seem like ideologues. If we seem like ideologues, moderates get confused because they think “well I do like to hedge my bets and try all things out.” And pro-nuclear advocates (who are all over the spectrum) get louder, complain more, and swing more moderates and politicians back toward nuclear and away from renewables. Then you can repeat the cycle in reverse.
The conservative trick is not to substitute something that doesn’t work for something that does. It’s to keep us divided, blaming each other, and going back and forth between different solutions so often that we never get anything done. Chaos is a ladder.
We can do both.
If you have a set amount of money and resources to invest renewables are almost exclusively the better choice. Investing in nuclear instead means it will take even longer for us to wean off fossiles. That's why it's so useful for the oil lobby to support nuclear.
Jesus is this honestly how you think the world works? Oil is lobbying for their competitor? And why the fuck would any of these unfounded scenarios mean we couldn't, as citizens, push for both cleaner power options?
Almost exclusively? No. Nuclear produces predictable energy and a lot of it in a small area, which is why things like data centers are being built on them. As another example, if you're above the arctic circle renewables straight up aren't a thing in the winter (unless you count geothermal, maybe).
Overall it's still probably the better choice, just because nuclear is hard, but it's not like it doesn't have a few remaining drawbacks.
We don’t have a set amount of money and resources, fundamentally.
We have an abundance of food, water, and shelter.
We have a lot of smart people who are currently spending their lives making money on made up markets and apps.
We have plenty of steel, concrete, and any other resources that would be in contention.
When it comes to money, if we raised taxes just a little, we’d be fine. I’m kind of an MMT person, but point is, we could get money, print it, tax it, etc. as it’s an abstraction on top of the other things above.
The mindset of “it’s gotta be one or the other” is a false choice presented by the fossil fuel industry and conservative politicians. They say we can’t raise taxes and we can’t increase deficit spending so they can get us to fight. And I guarantee you, if we all agreed to do nuclear, they would flip the script and start investing in renewables, because what they want is to kill momentum. After all, who do you think was behind all the scare mongering after three mile island?
I don’t want to kill momentum for renewables, but I want to start building it for nuclear at the same time.
We can do both.
If we were actually going full speed with “all of the above”, I’d agree. We need to and it’ll give the best results. However nuclear is very expensive and takes too many years to build. All too often it’s there only because the current fossil fuel companies would find it more profitable.
We can’t afford to lose momentum on the fastest and cheapest energy choices to wait for something more profitable for fossil fuel companies
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We can do both
Can we? As you said, a lot of it is trying to divide us…. The next step is “we don’t need these renewables here, we should build nuclear” [continuing to pollute for 14 years, multiple billions of dollars]
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Honestly, as long as fossil fuels are more expensive nobody's going to stop the transition, anyway.
A decade ago, two decades ago, I was all for nuclear.
But something that takes 20 years from start to finish isn’t going to cut it when we’re already nearing 1.5 degrees.
That kind of thinking was wrong a decade ago and is still wrong now. If we have any chance of stopping climate change we are going to have to massively decarbonise not only electricity production, but also transport and heating. That's going to mean a massive electrification of those sectors and a huge increase in demand over decades. Putting off large fixed investment now as it wont help out immediately but will help significantly during the time that electricity demand is growing is just nonsense.
Again, we can do both. This is not a zero sum game, there are nuclear physicists and people who are passionate about nuclear who will either be working on nukes, OR pivoting to software engineering so they can make money on the crypto/AI/whatever boom. I have met them.
The enemy is not the person who wants to build a parallel solution to the same problem. The enemy is the person who says “oh oops, there’s just not enough money 😬 we gotta fund only one, which one should we do? Figure it out and then we can move forward, in the meantime we’ll just keep using these fossil fuels.”
They are playing us with divisive politics. My expectation if we fund both is one of the following happens:
- We reach 20 years from now, and between storage breakthroughs and renewables scaling out we are 100% renewable capable. We stop construction of new nuclear plants, we keep the few that came online for a while and then we decommission. We win.
- We reach 20 years from now. We have made significant progress on renewables and storage, but we still haven’t been able to replace base load entirely. Storage breakthroughs didn’t happen, and we have to keep funding more research. In the meantime, we’re able to decarbonize and rely on nukes instead of fossil fuels. We win.
Hedging bets is smart in all cases, especially when it’s not a zero sum game. Don’t let them divide us.
I think it’s generally people online talking about one or the other, or trying to advocate for nuclear over renewables. If it had to be one, renewables are cheaper, faster to build, already having industry scaling up. We can’t afford to slow this train down.
I’m more than happy to jump on we need all the non-fossil energy generation we can get, but we can’t afford to be any slower than we already are. We can’t put off progress we can have now for some potential in a decade or two.
I’m also not convinced we can make nuclear affordable and safe, but it has enough advantages that we should certainly try …. Only if it doesn’t slow down where we’re already making progress
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Yeah, because it'll tie budgets up for ten years building it, and in the meantime all the fossil fuel people can tap those final nails into our coffin while they line their pockets.
Ten years? More like twenty. Hinkley point C was started in 2013, supposed to be finished 2023. This year the estimation was corrected to 2029-2031.
Counterpoint: UAE went from zero nuclear energy to producing as much as Denmark or Portugal produce renewables in ten years. From a base of zero nuclear expertise in the country.
It was 13 years and not 10. From your source the bid was won in 2009 and the third reactor started in 2022, with the fourth not ready for that article (middle 2023). Still not 20 years, but 30% above the claimed decade.
The graphic and comparison however are just clickbait. For one it compares a filthy rich oil-state without democracy and Denmark/Portugal where the government can't just push something like that through. Apart from that it's made to look like a sudden extreme increase from UAE that might continue that strongly, which it won't. Starting an NPP of course makes a sudden huge spike, while renewables are more incremental.
This comes as no surprise to me when the source seems to be highly subjective with a huge bias towards UAE:
Those who are critical of these high-energy nations ought to consider that they are not the countries to blame for climate change. Indeed, these countries ought to be applauded for taking measures to wean themselves off of fossil fuels
Of course one of the major oil-states that pushes against measures to slow down the climate change at every chance it gets is not to blame for anything... Sure...
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We've postponed nuclear for +40 years, causing climate change to get further and further out of hands.
Thanks Greenpeace /s
Greenpeace funded by the Rockefeller family trust. Literally.
And Friends of the Earth funded by Atlantic Oil.
The 1970s were full of oil companies throwing money at environmental groups who were anti-nuclear.
Except the money kept rolling in for decades.
If America hadn't responded to Chernobyl with fear of atomic power and instead adopted a "this is why communism will fail, look how much better we can do it" attitude, the climate crisis would be a non-issue right now
As an engineer, Chernobyl is terrifying. It was close to being 10x worse than it was. The thought that capitalism could do it better is the height of hubris. If you think your technology is fail-safe, nature (including humans) will find a better way to fail.
There are many reasons besides safety that nuclear makes no sense. Others have listed them here. But this recent hand-waving away of safety is frightening. Saying that our technology today is so much better while anti-intellectualism is running rampant. Saying facilities could always be staffed by experts while our political system is more unstable than ever. Thinking that we could store waste for 10,000 years when humanity has never built something that has intentionally survived a fraction of that time.
The downside of this equation is just too severe. Nuclear plants are uninsurable for a reason, and by default are insured by the public. That cost is ignored in the equation, because it's too large for even the biggest insurance conglomerates to consider.
Don't forget about three mile island. I think much spin on the Chernobyl situation can be attributed to the embarrassment of the self failure
Threee mile island was only a partial meltdown, and very little fission product was ever released to the environment. Nowhere near as blatant and drastic of a failure as what happened in Chernobyl.
True, however it was embarrassing to the atomic lobby. It was very similar in his a little lack of oversight caused a huge crisis.
The scale of the repercussions was very different, yes and that was emphasized to put the three mile incident in a better light.
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About fucking time.
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