Anti-nuclear people in here arguing about disasters that killed a few k people in 50 years. Also deeply worried about nuclear waste that won't have an impact on humans for thousands of years, but ignoring climate change is having an impact and might end our way of life as we know it before 2100.
They're bike-shedding and blocking a major stepping stone to a coal, petrol and gas free future for the sake of idealism.
The biggest enemy of the left is the right, it’s just that everyone on the left can agree that they’re terrible so it doesn’t come up in discourse too much, whereas the people who are on your side but want to do things a different way will take up much more of your attention.
If socialists and liberals worked together in Germany, the Nazis would not have come to power. It’s their bickering that led to liberals giving Hitler power in a coalition and socialists famously saying “after Hitler, us”.
Even when there’s a fascist takeover, it’s enabled by the left of center arguing with itself.
Firstly, liberals are not left of centre, they are the original capitalists, the ideology that socialism was built in opposition to.
Secondly, Liberals will always side with fascists when push comes to shove. To liberals, Fascists are distasteful, bigots and extremists, however, fascism does not threaten the liberal system. It does not threaten the liberal ruling class, at least inherently, whereas socialism is an existential threat to that class. To a liberal economy, to a liberal nation.
And to Germany’s communist party, fascists were also distasteful, bigots, and extremists, and they would lead to the collapse of capitalism.
“As late as June 1933 the Central Committee of the [KPD] was proclaiming that the Hitler government would soon collapse under the weight of its internal contradictions, to be followed immediately by the victory of Bolshevism in Germany.” - The Coming if the Third Reich, Richard Evans
I’m not going to make some ridiculous statement however that leftists will always side with fascists when push comes to shove. German liberals tolerated fascists to get political power, and German communists tolerated fascists to get political power. They were both fucking idiots for doing so.
You’re correct that on the entire spectrum of political theory that liberals are on the right. However, on that grand spectrum, liberals are also authoritarian, and communists are also authoritarian – because the entire notion of having a centralized government is authoritarian. It’s pointless to look at the spectrum from an objective, academic position, because it’s totally incongruous with the actual reality of things. When it comes to the scope of Western politics, liberals are left of center, and most tend towards positions of complete civil equality for everyone, which is libertarian in Western scope.
Arguing that liberals are actually on the right is like arguing that we never actually have negative temperatures in winters because Kelvin is always positive and it’s impossible to have negative Kelvin. You’re technically correct, but for realistic purposes it’s utterly meaningless.
And to Germany’s communist party, fascists were also distasteful, bigots, and extremists, and they would lead to the collapse of capitalism.
This would be a good mirroring response if it had any amount of truth to it. To the Communists in Germany, the fascists were their mortal enemy. The two parties were fighting in the streets. The Communists saw the fascists as a capitalist system, they certainly were not under the impression that fascism would bring about the end of capitalism.
A declaration by the Communists that the Fascists would collapse under their own contradictions is not evidence to the contrary, or evidence that the German communists tolerated the fascists.
Liberal and libertarian are not the same thing and cannot be conflated, and authoritarianism isn’t anything with a state.
I swear, the political compass has rotted people’s brains.
How do you plan to reach 80% non-carbon-based energy by 2030? That’s the current stated goal by the Biden Admin, and it’s arguably not aggressive enough. Nuclear plants take a minimum of 5 years to build, but that’s laughably optimistic. It’s more like 10.
SMR development projects, even if they succeed, won’t be reaching mass production before 2030.
The clock has run out; it has nothing to do with waste or disasters. Greenpeace won.
This is why I’m very wary of groups that are environmentalists vs groups of scientists. I have strong distaste for the former as woo woo people who only follow the science when it’s convenient.
People tend to overrate the harms from potential changes, while simultaneously vastly underrating the harms that already exist that they’ve gotten used to.
A lot of the anti-nuclear sentiment comes from the 80s when the concerns were a lot more valid (and likely before half the pro-nuclear people in this thread were born).
But blaming people on social media for blocking progress on it is a stretch. They’re multi-billion dollar projects. Have any major governments or businesses actually proposed building more but then buckled to public pressure?
Anyway, I’m glad this conversation has made it to Lemmy because I’ve long suspected the conspicuous popularly and regularity of posts like this on Reddit was the work of a mining lobby that can’t deny climate change anymore, but won’t tolerate profits falling.
do not let “perfect” be the enemy of “good enough”
edit: quick addendum, I really cannot stress this enough, everyone who says nuclear is an imperfect solution and just kicks the can down the road – yes, it does, it kicks it a couple thousand years away as opposed to within the next hundred years. We can use all that time to perfect solar and wind, but unless we get really lucky and get everyone on board with solar and wind right now, the next best thing we can hope for is more time.
I completely agree with everything you said except for ONE little thing:
You are grossly misrepresenting how far that can is kicked down, for the worse. It doesn’t kick it down a couple thousand years, it kicks it down for if DOZENS of millennia assuming we stay at the current energy capacity. Even if we doubled or tripled it, it would still be dozens of millennia. First we could use the uranium, then when that is gone, we could use thorium and breed it with plutonium, which would last an incomprehensibly longer time than the uranium did. By that point, we could hopefully have figured out fusion and supplement that with renewable sources of energy.
The only issue that would stem from this would be having TOO much energy, which itself would create a new problem which is heat from electrical usage.
Normally I’m not a “lesser of two evils” type, but nuclear is such an immensely lesser evil compared to coal and oil that it’s insane people are still against it.
I spoke with a far left friend of mine about this. His position essentially boiled down to the risk of a massive nuclear disaster outweighed the benefits. I said what about the known disastrous consequences of coal and oil? Didn’t really have a response to that. It doesn’t make sense to me. I’ll roll those dice and take the .00001% chance risk or whatever.
Nuclear is fantastic and would have been even more fantastic 30 years ago. But it’s 2023 and renewables are getting better every day. There’s just no real reason to not invest primarily in green energy sources, especially when the track record on nuclear waste management is abysmal. People will say “oh but the resources, oh but the storage, oh but the blah blah blah”. We act like these things can’t be done, but they are being done all over the place. While the US argues about whether solar is viable, China has almost produced more solar panels in a year than the US has ever produced. And they are planning to try and deliver to other countries with less productive capacity as well.
8 day old account, second post is to be an asshole to me for no reason. Classy. You’re either a bot or another shitty lemming. You’ll fit right in here with all the other insufferable shitheads in this forum.
I researched and it turns out no fully automatic weapons have been available for a few decades now. Tightly controlled. Semi automatic is just as lethal though. Also apparently the las vegas shooter in 2018 use bump stocks on his semi automatics which makes it pseudo automatic if you’ll pardon the pun. Notably, the DOJ announced this bump stock reg in 2018, under the Trump administration. Interesting, but not surprising, that the insane right didn’t lose their shit about “muh gunz” when it happened under Trump’s reign.
Nah the reason people didn’t make much noise about bump stocks is because they’re terrible. They are purely something you might do for entertainment rather than any serious attempt to shoot; they really hurt accuracy and comfort.
Really interesting and quite easy to read article. In fact, the french energy policy is to invest in new “little” nuclear plants. I’m not sure our politics will consider these scientifical comments…
They still seem to handwave away the issue of baseload, which is entirely frustrating. As I seem to understand it, it’s just a 1:1 comparison of costs.
They use nebulous phrases like “Flexibility is more important” and point to batteries or energy saving methods getting cheaper, without actually including it in the comparison.
Although if it’s true EU plants were randomly closed from production 50% of the time baseload doesn’t really make a difference I guess.
“Baseload generator” isn’t a useful concept. And grid reliability (which is a useful concept) is thought about. It just doesn’t fit into a soundbite like winddon’tblowsundon’tshine.
For reference, 5kWh home batteries currently retail for about $1300 so this would add <10% to the capital cost compared to recent nuclear projects. Pumped hydro is about half the price per capacity, but a bit more per watt. The former is dropping at 10-30% per year, so by the time a nuclear plant is finished, storage cost would be negligible.
Even in the counterfactual case where the ~5% of “other” generation is only possible with fossil fuel, focusing on it is incredibly myopic because the resources spent on that 1% of global emissions could instead be used for the other 70% which isn’t from electricity and has different reliability constraints.
Doesn’t the Australian model ask for a 4-6% fossil or other fuel input? I don’t see how base load, nuclear or other fuels aren’t relevant to discuss, as nucleur is like 4% of global output right now.
The profile of other is short spikes 5-100 hours a few times a year.
1 year of delay is equivalent to 20 years of exclusively using fossil fuels for “other”.
It’s not even obvious that adding nuclear reactors would reduce this because they’re so geographically and temporally inflexible. France has 63GW of nuclear capacity, <45GW of average load and 61GW of winter peak load with vast amounts of storage available via interconnect to hydro countries. They still use 5% gas on top of the rest of the “other” (which is about 10-25GW).
5% of other from gas adds about 20g CO2e/kg per kWh to the total. Less than the margin between different uranium sources.
Running 40% of the capacity 10% of the time puts your nuclear energy in the realm of $1-3/kWh. The list of ways of generating or storing 6% of your energy for <$1/kWh is basically endless.
That’s about 4-8TW of capacity worldwide. 1kg of uranium is good for fuelling about 750W of reactor on a 6 year fuel cycle. Loading those reactors would require digging up all of the known and assumed-to-exist uranium immediately.
Nuclear is an irrelevant distraction being pushed by those who know it will not work. You only have to glance at the policy history or donor base of the politicians pushing for it in Sweden, Canada, Australia, UK, Poland, etc etc or the media channels pushing it to see how obvious it is that it’s fossil fuel propaganda.
It is obviously obviously true that it’s a non-solution. It fails on every single metric. All of the talking points about alleged advantages are the opposite of the truth without exception.
I don’t know enough about the topic to have an argument against, just trying to educate myself. I am curious how you would respond to this person in another thread:
I assume your response would be essentially similar to your previous comment. That we can develop the battery tech and it would be easier just to use fossil fuels as a bridge anyway?
If the Great Filter theory is correct, climate change will most likely be our Great Filter.
Our species is simply not equipped with the ability to deal with the problems it created. Many people can, but they’re not powerful to do anything, and there’s too many uneducated people for the masses to rise up about this problem.
We think so short term, it’s impossible for some people to think about the future and accept that we’ll need to change the way we live now so that we can keep living then. They’re hung up on Chernobyl because it was a big bang that killed lots of people at once and it was televised everywhere that has a society and TVs, but they are unable to see that in the long term coal and gas have killed and are still killing way more people than nuclear accidents, because it’s a process that’s continuous and kills people in indirect ways instead of a big blast.
This is the same problem/argument you have with the argument/perception of planes being unsafe.
In 2022 almost 43000 people died in “motor vehicle traffic crashes”. And yet many believe that Planes are much more dangerous to use than cars because hundreds of people die all at once in a Plane crash.
A Plane crash is automatically a sensation, something that doesn’t happen every day but a car accident happens every day but this isn’t reported as much because it is already a daily routine.
The same goes with the “Coal kills more than nuclear” argument which is even less likely to be grasped by the normal population.
I mean just look at the climate change denier who say “but it is snowing so climate change isn’t real” while at the same time complaining that each summer is so incredibly hot.
All of those things are so incredibly complex that the vast majority can’t understand and outright deny them because they read/heard somewhere that they actually can understand, that it is a hoax. I mean, I wouldn’t count myself to the people that understand climate change but I can understand that it will have a drastic impact on our lives if this goes on.
Apple and oranges. It’s unhealthy and unsafe to live near Chernobyl. It took nearly a decade for people to start moving back to Fukushima Prefecture after decontamination and subsides to lure people back.
The actual cost of a Nuclear disaster is incredibly costly.
It still requires mining, processing and it still produces waste, waste which has to sit at the site of the nuclear reactor or be transported across country to some other temporary site. To my knowledge there is still no permanent disposal site for nuclear waste in the United States.
I’m with you most of the way, but it’s also extremely unhealthy to live near a coal power plant. That’s why they keep building them in or next to neighborhoods where the residents are too poor to be able to effectively sue them for all the cancer and other nasty deaths.
They’re intentionally shitty people. None of them have real political views because they are all still in middle or high school and don’t have to pay bills and don’t have real jobs. They’re entire purpose is to troll. They just get on here and look at what anyone is talking about and take the opposing stance to be pricks. Those people would defend any given serial killer or fascist war monger if it meant someone got upset.
In what fuckin universe does that even make sense. How dull does the mind have to be to justify this? I couldn’t chop an arm off of someone I hate, let alone a kid. Let alone all the other insert word to describe this horror.
Can Iran not be a victim of the west but also wrong in their treatment of women?
Society isn’t stuck in the medieval ages there. It’s cruel, sure. But they have phones, coffee and automatic weapons just like everyone else, so they’re firmly in the same age as everyone else.
This woman is using her privilege as a prominent(ish) figure to highlight the injustices prevalent in Iran, so she’s unlikely to get the worse punishments you’ve mentioned. I say fair play to her and I hope more people get to speak out.
Sadly, though, history tells us that dictators can do whatever the fuck they like to their own people with no repercussions.
No, just for creating the conditions that allowed the mullahs to seize power. You know that the vast majority of Iranians hate the dictatorship, right? Everything they do is to control their internal population. A lot of people who would never call themselves feminists suddenly care about women’s rights when it privides a way for them to unleash their hatred on Iranians.
It’s an evil theocratic dictatorship, but do you know how it got that way? There was a revolution opposing a US puppet ruler. The west would like all Middle East nations to be like the Saudis: nice, stable petro states who are compliant for the most part and who cares what happens there internally. But this formula has gone wrong several times (Iran) or the west hasn’t tried as hard to achieve stability because the oil incentive isn’t there (Syria) or the borders were specifically drawn to crate instability (Iraq).
There’s no pointing fingers at the Middle East without acknowledging the culpability of the UK, France, Russia and the USA in their horrid dysfunction. Understanding this is a rite of passage. Children point and hoot about the horrible Arabs. Adults know what’s actually up with that part of the world.
The other day an agressive dog that looked like a pitbull, suddenly lunged at me barking loudly… It was about 10ft away from me but still scared the shit out of me
The owner yanked the dog back on its leash and i thought, “FML, the only thing that saved me from a deadly mauling was a 3/4 inch wide piece of nylon with a metal clip the guy bought off amazon for $5”
The actual issue is that's it's a degenerative disease in dogs of similar breeds. At some point they get old and less able to recognize friend from foe. That might be ok if it weren't for the jaws you mentioned.
I'd go one step farther and even say if they even had the same amount of attacks as other dogs, had no possible mental diseases, and all want to caring homes I would still put restrictions/ban on them.
They are just too large to handle, too big of a bite to brush off, and end up in dog attacks a lot. That's enough for me.
Hippos are super aggressive, territorial, and will bite a crocodiles in half. It’s amazing that’s supposed to be a cute, disarming nickname for a breed notorious for the same traits.
Literally all I’m saying is that the vast majority of pit bulls aren’t violent. I fucking said I’m in favor of spaying and neutering the breed out of existence because the few that do become violent are excessively dangerous.
If you’re a dog owner and you’re paying attention, then your personal experience should include the following truth: any dog can go postal. If you then combine this with the knowledge that pitbulls are much more deadly than other dogs when being agressive, then you must reach the conclusion that this breed should be banned, even though that is admittedly a sad conclusion.
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