yea the solution is to put 50% tariffs on 80% of the world's solar panels
death to AmericaHey 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.
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.
Anti-nuclear greens are serving the fossil fuel industry
Canadian Greens are the absolute most insufferable kind of libs. Their solutions for climate change are basically to replace fossil fuels with [Future Technology 18] like they're playing Civilization 2 with cheats turned on.
I mean it's not the solution. We can't afford to rely on fossil fuels for twenty more years while we build nuclear plants. Nuclear is probably the best way to generate power but it takes so long to get running and will be a small portion of the solution to climate change. Building nuclear is a good idea but renewables can happen now and we can see immediate benefit. Also keep in mind a lot of the success of nuclear in the West is a result of cheap uranium from colonial exploitation. Nuclear isn't a silver bullet, more of a pellet in silver buckshot.
Of course it's not the solution. Much like geothermal isn't the solution, or wind isn't the solution. They're all tools we need to be using, right the hell now.
And the decades long startup time for reactors is solely a mater of political will. There's no reason we can't have modern nuclear power plants up and running in the span of a couple years, rather than decades. These aren't the rinky-dink 1960's reactors that melt down if the operator is an arrogant capitalist asshole. Modern designs take that choice out of human hands—if things go sideways, they self-terminate.
The recent war in Ukraine made me a lot more cautious of nuclear because if there's a belligerent who's willing to cross the Rubicon by bombing nuclear plants (ie the US), then all the statistics about nuclear plants being safe goes out the window. There's also speculation that if Israel nukes Tehran, Iran will launch hypersonic cruise missiles targeting Israeli nuclear plants and Chernobyl Israel since their main nuclear plant is located at the very center of Israel on top of other nuclear plants that are located close to urban centers.
Of course, it's not like bombing coal plants will have zero environmental impact and I would imagine blowing up dams will overall do far more environmental damage and kill far more people.
The relevant questions are:
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What are the environmental impacts and human costs of a nuclear plant being bombed and destroyed by a belligerent military?
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What safeguards can be placed to thwart or mitigate military attacks targeting nuclear plants?
if i didn't want iran to bomb my nuclear power plants i would simply not bait them into conflict when committing genocide
Death to America
iran is not going to blow up your power plant. nuclear plant in ukraine wasn't destroyed in recent fighting either. the hypersonic missiles were just regular ballistic missiles that reach hypersonic velocities at the end of their flight path, not state-of-the-art. it's not speculation iran can absolutely sustain a blackout of israel
Taking a look at Chernobyl today, the environmental impacts of a melted down or destroyed nuclear reactor are way less destructive (maybe not destructive at all, except to human life within close proximity of the reactor) than the costs of avoiding nuclear in fear of these hypothetical possibilities
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nuclear is the answer (destruction of the west with nuclear bombs)
A post about the debate between nuclear and green energy and not one idiot in the comments talking about windmills killing birds or claiming solar panels don't work in winter.
I feel like I'm breathing fresh air for the first time
Solar panels kill birds and windmills don't work in the winter. If nuclear wasn't the only truly green energy source, why does it glow that color.?
I believe that's what they call, in the business, a checkmate.
Just fucking shoot me
maybe read it first before posting it here
Nuclear is actually the solution, trap every billionaire in a nuclear waste barrel and bury them in a cave 1km deep forever
~for better results, recycle used barrels~
heres my fake summary:
instead let's.. i dunno, drill a hole to the earths core or mine asteroids for orbital solar panels or other easily attainable, practical solutions we can do in the next 5 years
then we'll just wait for a bunch of scam startups in the west to magically develop a commercial fusion reactor
Japan is literally doing an orbital solar demonstrator lol
Solve one problem by introducing a dozen new ones
Who wants to get in on scamming Western governments with my patented and 100% guaranteed safe Swensonium reactor?
Because when you buy a Phineas Q. Swenson product, you can rest assured that it's a quality product at a quality priceAfter all, that's what the Q in Phineas Q. Swenson stands for, guaranteed!
Someone smarter than me would need to run the numbers on actual electricity consumption but a while back someone took the world's total energy consumption, which is kinda uncharitable but also kinda representative of how nuclear isn't a solution tbh, and we would need to be constructing like 1 nuclear power plant of the scale of one of the largest nuclear power plants that exists on a weekly basis for over a decade to meet the demands and constraints (including the need to decommission and replace the current nuclear power plants at the end of their lifecycle).
I can only imagine that the world's energy consumption has increased since that point and, given the very late hour of climate change we are in, even if it was only building one nuclear power plant of the capacity of the largest ever built per month (which is exceedingly conservative an estimate) we're still looking at something that is unfeasible for a variety of reasons.
Add to that the fact that nuclear reserves might only realistically last us in the order of a decade, give or take a few years, at that rate of consumption, and you're looking at something unfeasible from another perspective.
I'm pretty much an irredeemable doomer by this point but if we rule out the hail Mary of fusion then we're looking at investing heavily into what is essentially a dead-end technology due to resource limitations or investing heavily into renewables which have much greater promise of being a long-term solution.
I think we've already blown it but whatever.
MSRs are not the solution they've been made out to be and it's still going to take years before we could reasonably expect to see us going all-in on them, at which point we probably would need to start building one or more per week. And thorium, while relatively abundant, is not nearly as viable on the scale we would need it for thorium reactors; there's also a lot of gold in the ocean but even that isn't enough to motivate us to start extracting it at an industrial scale.
I agree with this, wholeheartedly. Nuclear is okay from a surface level thinking, but comes with so many caveats, limited resource and slow build times that it's just not viable this late in the game, especially when compared to renewables which are quicker to pump out and modern options range between equal-to-cheaper than nuclear. Nuclear probably was the right interim choice to start building, 60 years ago. But it is no longer 60 years ago.
Uranium will last us 10 years tops. And anyone arguing "but the technology will be able to do X in X years" may as well just sit back and wait for techbros to invent the magical climate changer fixer. We have the long-lasting, cheaper, easier-to-deploy technological solution now, already. Its only 'downside' is that it's so decentralised that oil barons are struggling to make a profit from them, so the bourgeoisie aren't interested.
I'd argue it's just silly to be considering other options than renewables and storage, at this point. Yes your magic rocks may have lots of power in them, but the sky is being bombarded by orders of magnitude more energy every second, will actually last longer than a fraction of a lifetime.
We have the cheap, easy, sustainable solution, now, in our hands. Considering other 'interim' options on a major scale, especially under capitalism, is a waste of time at best.
Yeah, I agree that 60 years ago was the time to build nuclear and that this window has basically closed on us.
I think this is probably what gets lost on a lot of people who hear from the most unhinged or the most anti-science anti-nuclear positions; I'm not opposed to nuclear power. I think there is very likely to be niche applications for it that we will see long into the future (beyond just nuclear subs or nuclear space travel too), provided we last that long. I just don't see it as a magic bullet and from the standpoint of environmental concerns I'm about as enthusiastic with regards to nuclear power as I am with EV cars - like I guess it's something? But it mostly represents a huge waste of resources that would be better dedicated to something else and it's really just a bandaid measure when the patient has already haemorrhaged out and is going to flat line at any moment. And at the same time I'm far more concerned about the bourgeoisie having private jets and yachts that are so massive they have smaller yachts docked inside of them than I am about whatever EV car I come across.
I just wish we'd go all-in on renewables but moreso sustainability in the long-term, like radically reorganising society so that we work two shifts instead of a 9-5, thus making things like public transport, urban footprint, and load on the energy grid reduced in a huge way.
Just imagine the environmental impact if every office job suddenly required roughly half the amount of office space and IT equipment - in your city alone that would have a major impact.
I know this is going to be a bit vague and vibes-based but so many ways that we engage in consumption and we have waste scales in a non-linear fashion; adding one extra car on the road doesn't simply contribute +1 to traffic or demand on road infrastructure. If the demand for parking spaces is roughly halved, if the need for childcare is reduced by 1/3, if there are half as many people in the UK all turning their electric kettles on at approximately the same time, if peak hour isn't two hour-long periods in the day but it's distributed across four of them then the need to spool up production and supply of services is reduced in a huge way and it's likely that there would be a lot of efficiency built into that equation. If you only need roughly half the amount of trains and buses for the peak hours and during the overlapping shift-change peak hour you have public transport running near full capacity as it's both inbound and outbound, rather than only being at capacity half of the journey, then it would make for more efficient public transport.
It kinda breaks my heart to really grapple with how absurdly wasteful society is. And I'm not just talking about the most obvious examples of things like piles of fruit left to rot because of the anarchy of the market but there are so many other deeper aspects to it that go mostly overlooked.
I think this is what a new socialist revolution would need to undertake in order to get out from under capitalist encirclement - we have the modelling and we have the data, it would be reasonably easy to just outstrip the prevailing capitalist mode of living at every turn by opting for things that are vastly more efficient but which would never be permitted under capitalism. One example would be having Venezuelan-style colectivos but well-equipped and operating things like a tool library - suddenly there isn't any great need for everyone to have a battery-operated cordless drill sitting in their garage that goes unused for 99.9% of its existence. Or for everyone to have a lawn mower. And so on. With the added benefit of the internet and communication tech, the ability to optimise a tool loan scheme would be greatly increased.
I imagine this is what countries like Cuba and the DPRK have had to resort to in some measure but I still think there's so many overlooked opportunities for optimising society to be as efficient and low-footprint as possible that don't get considered mostly due to deferring to the conventional way of doing things. It would be funny to see a high-tech socialist utopia where it is so thoroughly optimised that the "GDP" wildly outstrips similar capitalist countries on half the "budget" with regards to consumption and infrastructure etc.
It's what could have been, I guess. Oh well.
based and correct. if you still think there is any technology that is the answer to human civilizations unsustainable ways you are worse than useless.
The opposite of this^
As opposed to the useful demand that entitled, murderous imperialists stop buying trinkets and treats and help developing countries?
Okay Ted
Half-Earth Socialism has the same take. If you look at groups who organize around ecological issues they are overwhelmingly anti-nuclear. If you want to build a pro-nuclear eco movement you are either starting from scratch or appealing to neolibs (good luck with that, they don't turn up to anything but brunch).
I don't have a problem with nuclear power technology, but y'all are familiar with the companies running the plants, right?
Very much recommend checking out The Dollop PG&E episodes
Pt 1
Pt 2
I assume we all agree that they should be state-run, and that PG&E will continue to kill people regardless of the types of power generation they use.
THE CLIMATE CRISIS has propelled nuclear energy back into fashion. Its proponents argue we already have the technology of the future and that it only needs perfection and deployment. Nuclear Is Not the Solution demonstrates why this sort of thinking is not only naïve but dangerous.
Even beyond the horrific implications of meltdown and the intractable problem of waste disposal, nuclear is not practicable on such a large scale. Any appraisal of future energy technology depends on two important parameters: cost and time. Nuclear fails on both counts. It is more costly than its renewable competitors wind and solar. And, importantly given the need for rapid transformation, it is slow. A plant takes a decade to come online. If you include permits and fundraising, this adds another decade. And we should not forget the deep roots it has in the defense industry.
M. V. Ramana’s powerful book destroys any illusion that nuclear is our answer to climage change, untangling technical arguments into simple and sensible language. Importantly, Nuclear Is Not the Solution also unmasks the powerful groups with vested interests in the maintenance of the status quo, currently working hard to greenwash a spectacularly dirty industry.
At least this doesn't seem as stupid as the German green plan of just shutting down nuclear plants before there is a renewable source to replace it. I would rather wind and solar are the focus of a transition. (plus a healthy reduction of energy consumption)
Nucular
Most people support nuclear but I'm 100% behind this book and it's thesis. Done a lot of research, and I wish information about this topic was more widespread.
For real. It’s not a solution, and in the time it would take to nuclearize our grid, we could have fully transitioned to clean energy and long term battery solutions multiple times over, for less money to boot, and with significantly less creation of sacrifice zones like the still currently irradiated lands of the indigenous peoples in the southwest. You cannot cleanly mine nuclear fuel. You cannot cleanly store nuclear waste. I live within 50 miles of a nuclear dump site, and there’s a bar across the street that still to this day has elevated cancer rates, despite it now being “safe” enough that they’ve decided to build houses in the area.
Nuclear requires you to care less about the health of the vulnerable than your own, full stop. I understand that if the choice were between coal and nuclear, nuclear would win. Good thing we don’t have to make that choice.
Oh and the current entire planets known fuel including what is in the ground would power our current use of power for less than 10 years.
what type of long term battery solutions are you thinking about? batteries are not light enough, efficient enough, or environmentally sustainable enough for mass networks like some people talk about for EVs and solar storage. even if nickel hydride is a perfect battery, slapping batteries on everything will not save us from the fact that solar, wind, and wave energy have peaks and valleys unrelated to consumption. nuclear is a competitor in the field of non-scalable power, so it’s not like one solves problems of the other.
nuclear waste can be stored safely, by salt injection at the very least. it’s worth mentioning many of the worst forms of radioactive waste come from reactors that were designed for weapons production and from oil production. the fact that radioactive waste is poorly stored is because of massive regulatory failure in the US. for instance, oil waste legally cannot be hazardous in USamerica, so the workers and sites that handle the waste don’t have to worry about radiation. similarly, a lot of the southwestern contamination you’re talking about is from weapons testing and production. any just society wouldn’t have set off dozens of nuclear weapons anywhere. the bit about running out of fuel is based on humanity never improving reactor designs. pebble bed reactors have been designed to use the byproducts from the military’s depleted uranium. if and when the political will is there for it, there are plans to build a reactor near the plant in kentucky where they have acres and acres of uranium.
i appreciate your concern for the real effects nuclear power and energy have had in the US, but they didnt happen because nuclear power can’t ever be used. they happened because the US has been reckless and evil about it
You cannot cleanly mine nuclear fuel. You cannot cleanly store nuclear waste.
solar panels and wind turbines famously do not require any colossal amounts of mining of hazardous materials in developing countries
all those rare earth elements that China is processing magically rose up out of the ground in their purified form instead of scarring the landscape and poisoning the water
human existence on this planet necessities environmental destruction until asteroid mining and orbital habitats become viable. you can pretend that X solution has little environmental impact while Y is extremely dangerous and bad but your opinion does not impact a 12 year old Congolese worker digging cobalt out of the earth with his bare hands in the slightest. the green revolution will be paid for in blood and contaminated soil and giant quarries, just as the fossil fuel revolution was paid for in blood and oil spills and carbon dioxide. of course, I think it's worth it, but it's generally not my blood being spilled nor my land being contaminated or quarried
What you are saying goes against decades of industry funded hasbra. How dare you question the narrative and actually use facts and reality in you rhetoric.
I have actually learned some things reading the comments here
Counterpoint: It is
Also, I want my superpowers and I'm not going to get them from freak solar accident, so nuclear is the route to take
