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Hey everyone let’s quite literally judge this book by its cover
I like the shade of yellow in the text
I don't know about everybody else, but I'm judging it based on the author being a Canadian turbolib who's still really scared of getting nuked by the USSR.
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I know he was born in India. His professional career is in British Columbia.
His "it takes too long!" argument is absolute nonsense. It hinges on the bulk of the "construction" time being government reluctance about nuclear power. So nuclear power takes too long to build because we take too long to build it? That argument doesn't pass muster.
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Weird how China can do it in five years, then.
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I'm sorry. I think I've been overly hostile. We definitely can agree on the point that we need to walk and chew gum at the same time, so to speak.
We need to be busting out every tool at our disposal to slow down this global climate crisis. I'm just of the opinion that fear of nuclear power is vastly overblown, and this book is feeding into that fear. In a perfect world we'd be running entirely off true renewable energy. But we aren't. We live in Hell. We need to pull out all the stops so we don't make ourselves extinct.
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Yeah, the (online) left is weirdly "fuck yeah science!" on nuclear and the counterpart is still riding on the legacy of the 1980s anti-nuclear movement, opposing it under any circumstances.
I'm personally of the opinion nuclear should be phased out eventually, but coal, oil, gas and other minor fossil fueled energy has a way higher priority to go first.
It also matters little, because energy under capitalism is dependent on the infighting between factions of capital. Like the much-mocked German shutdown of nuclear power. Half opportunism to prevent the electoral rise of the green party and half gift to the mining corporation RWE. Had it not happened, it would be the firms dealing with nuclear power supply, etc. to profit. Nothing gets done without the bourgeois benefitting.
It would seem the problem is capital, not what policy to follow.
It also matters little, because energy under capitalism is dependent on the infighting between factions of capital. Like the much-mocked German shutdown of nuclear power. Half opportunism to prevent the electoral rise of the green party and half gift to the mining corporation RWE. Had it not happened, it would be the firms dealing with nuclear power supply, etc. to profit. Nothing gets done without the bourgeois benefitting.
I've been in the nuclear trenches a few times (on the pro-nuclear side, though there are very obviously drawbacks and limitations and by no means do I advocate for paving the world with nuclear power plants or whatever the strawman is nowadays) and I've come to realize that anti-nuclear sentiments aren't fundamentally influenced by these well-thought-out arguments that anti-nuclear intellectuals and professionals have. It's much more to do with their profitability and rate of return and investment cost than like, scientific arguments about the amount of uranium/thorium reserves, or potential for disasters, and so on.
As in, the nuclear debate online isn't actually as relevant in the real world as it seems, and a lot of the displayed concern about Fukushima or Chernobyl happening again in government bodies isn't actually the thing that is motivating them, it's just good-old-fashioned capitalism and they're dressing it up. If we're talking environmental impacts, massive oil spills, while certainly widely known about and important points in the fossil fuel debate, haven't really done much to dent fossil fuel production quite like how nuclear disasters affected nuclear energy's reputation. And it takes a shitload of rare resources like cobalt and copper and lithium to create the renewables that would be required to get us to a fully renewable economy even if we assume energy consumption doesn't keep rising over time. The cumulative effect of hundreds and thousands of mines and quarries on the environment (let alone workers) is gigantic, but they're spread out enough (and often located in countries that the average person couldn't place on a map, let alone care deeply about) that they don't feature as heavily in the debate.
So basically I caution anybody who gets too lost in the sauce over the common issues that online debates are about because, while these things are extremely important, these aren't actually the big reasons why capitalists aren't investing heavily in them, so you're kinda wasting your time (even under the assumption that internet debates are somehow productive). Do you think a capitalist gives a shit whether their nuclear power plant has some leakage that raises cancer rates in the surrounding area, so long as it makes a profit? We have to distinguish the discussion over these things versus the material reality.
20 years doesn’t really seem that big of a deal compared to the consequences of climate chsnge. But in the US, it will actually take 60 years and then abandoned half way because 25 contractors were revealed to be fictitious companies and the 5 real ones demand a $150 billion screwdriver
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What energy source ist fast enough to build? Wind? PV?
France constructed 56 reactors in 15 years (1974-1989) with about 60GW capacity.
Germanys nuclear program was faster in constructing capacity than any phase in the Energiewende.
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You do know that you can build nuclear power plants almost anywhere?
Four of the french ones are not at water sources. The biggest in the US is located in a desert. Katar has nuclear reactors.
Why would site selection be difficult?
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I got an error there. They are built by water sources but 11 of 15 power rely on evaporative cooling via cooling towers. There is the possibility of dry cooling, which doesn't use external water.
- Geological stability is not relevant with on site storage in spent fuel pools or dry caskets.
- If you keep risk assessment up to date that is not a problem (tsunami walls, emergency pumps/generators automatic shutdown, ...)
- Security risks are of a concern not only for nuclear power plants. Think of pumped hydro. The Ukrainian reactors at Zaporizhzhia have very high standards of protection. Thick concrete walls, steel containment. It would be cheaper to start nuclear attacks, than to try to create a nuclear catastrophe by damaginh the reactors. But better save than sorry, hence the warnings by IAEO.
- Ground stability is a factor in every building. Especially high ones with small ground area and strong forces acting on them... like wind turbines.
Naomi Klein gave it a good review so it's probably not turbolib shit.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you simply don't know what you're talking about.
Let's take a peek at Naomi Klein's recent writing, but first I want to preface it by pointing out her last book was about how "the pandemic made everyone crazy" and some people mixed up her Twitter account with an antivaxxer. Pretty thin gruel, and the Shock Doctrine wasn't really much better at using a lame analogy to conduct a historical investigation. It's kind of impressive how people trip over hacks like Klein and Zizek and make them part of their weird pantheon of writers considering their writing contains so many blatant insults to the reader's intelligence. I guess it's all about the buzz surrounding some writers, Klein speaking at occupy, Zizek appearing in documentaries, which obscures the hints in their writing that precede their most trashy displays in rando magazines like Compact and whatever this one where Klein is using a genocide to sell the aforementioned shit book is called. Okay, now on to the good stuff.
DS: It’s very hard to know how to behave right now. I know you wrote a piece last week about the tragedy of the Hamas attacks, and there were some who were hurt by parts of it.
NK: I think everybody is in an impossible position that we didn’t create. The Israeli government has used the bloodiest day in the history of the Jewish people since the Holocaust, and there was not even time to bury the dead to mourn before those deaths were used to justify a massive war crime that is ongoing in Gaza and now expanding beyond it.
Let's remind ourselves what got her in hot water that she's brushing off here:
I spent the evening in candlelight and tears with a dear friend who just learned that a close family member was among those massacred in Israel. I won’t name the kibbutz to protect her privacy but yes, it was unequivocally a massacre.
We tried to explain the killing of this family member – a civilian with two kids – to our kids. We tried to do it in a way that would not fill their young hearts with fear and hatred for the people who committed the crime. That was hard enough, but possible. Harder for us adults is the fact that, in their desire to celebrate the powerful symbolism of Palestinians escaping the open air prison that is Gaza — which occupied people have every right to do — some of our supposed comrades on the left continue to minimize massacres of Israeli civilians, and in some extreme cases, even seem to celebrate them.
In fact these callous displays are a gift to militant Zionism, since they neatly shore up and reconfirm its core and governing belief: that the non-Jewish world hates Jews and always will – look, even the bleeding-heart left is making excuses for our killers and thinks that Jewish kids and old ladies deserved death merely by living in Israel.
"So sorry you were offended, it's hard to know how to be "politically correct" with all the rabid leftists these days, buy my book. :-)"
It really seems to be a no-brainer that any writer who compulsively shits on the USSR without making a real analysis just by making shitty historical comparisons (Ann Pettifor comparing proposals to use western tax dollars to fund a "green belt" of for profit enterprises in the Sahel to the Soviet Union may be a rare exception, but honestly she seems to hinge everything on investors putting down the cocaine and considering climate change seriously so maybe the rest of her stuff is lame too, also the guy who wrote Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of A Ukrainian Nationalist trashes the USSR here and there but he never backs it up with anything good and the stuff on the OUN etc is great) can be dismissed completely
Thank you for coming to my TED talk in conclusion check the ingredients on your slop next time
Why does it take too long? Because there are too many people who believe it's too dangerous
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why are you assuming that nuclear has to completely replace all other forms of energy, whether renewable or not, to be worth building?
Death to America
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Did your calculation account for the fact that energy and economic growth having an almost 1:1 relation, meaning a compound growth of ~3% economic growth every year will add up quadrupling the energy requirements in 50 years.
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Capitalism is generally also horrible at building things, even if the decision is finally made.
let’s quite literally judge this book by its cover
The title on the cover is pretty blatant about what the thesis of the book is.
I think the layout is boring and makes it look like a textbook.