Hello from Japan! :)

Wait, I’m seeing a lot of people being very against nuclear. From what I’ve gathered, I see no downsides compared to fossil fuels

Is this a joke?

literally the least efficient in terms of cost and time.

battery backed renewables are a fraction of the price and are being deployed right now.

https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/GenCost

edit: the tech is cool as hell. go nuts on research reactors. nuclear medicine has saved my sisters life twice… but i’m sorry, its just not a sane solution to the climate crisis.

Thats not even funny. It’s not even a meme. It’s just straight outright corporate propaganda. F off with that, Pinkerton!

The Simpsons shows it’s safe and efficient 😅

I would rather see more investment on better renewable tech then relaying on biohazard.

You would be surprised to know the amount of scientific research with actual solutions that aren’t applied cause goes against the fossil fuel companies and whatnot. Due to the fact that they have market monopoly.

Agreed. Developing countries need clean and affordable energy

Deep level irony that you used a Simpsons meme, which takes place in a city that suffers from a Nuclear Power Plant that doesn’t dispose of nuclear waste properly.

Every form of energy generation is problematic in the hands of capital. Security measures can and are often considered unnecessary expense. And even assuming that they will respect all safety standards, we still have the problem of fuel: France, for example, was only able to supply its plants at a cheap cost because of colonialism in Africa. Therefore, nuclear energy potentially has the same geopolitical problems as oil, in addition to the particular ones: dual technology that can and is applied in the military, not necessarily but mainly atomic bombs.

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Also, I thought memes were supposed to be funny…

I’m sure nuclear can be super safe and efficient. The science is legit.

The problem is, at some point something critical to the operation of that plant is going to break. Could be 10 years, could be 10 days. It’s inevitable.

When that happens, the owner of that plant has to make a decision to either:

1. Shut down to make the necessary repairs and lose billions of dollars a minute.
2. Pretend like it’s not that big of a deal. Stall. Get a second opinion. Fire/harass anyone who brings it up. Consider selling to make it someone else’s problem. And finally, surprise pikachu face when something bad happens.

In our current society, I don’t have to guess which option the owner is going to choose.

Additionally, we live in a golden age of deregulation and weaponized incompetence. If a disaster did happen, the response isn’t going to be like Chernobyl where they evacuate us and quarantine the site for hundreds of years until its safe to return. It’ll be like the response to the pandemic we all just lived through. Or the response to the water crisis in Flint Michigan. Or the train derailment in East Palestine.

Considering the fallout of previous disasters, I think it’s fair to say that until we solve both of those problems, we should stay far away from nuclear power. We’re just not ready for it.

@spicytuna62 It’s not the best we got. The best we got is to stop the wasteful overproduction and stop letting society being about building building building.

We should rather reframe society into being about growing and localizing the economy. Focusing on living with nature, not at it’s expense.

Where the fuck we gonna put all the waste product? I’m not saying nuclear power is bad, far from it, but we have two problems here:

• Its cost prohibitive to build new Third Generation reactors that are fault tolerant, and moreso to assure that all the Second Generation reactors are fully fault tolerant given how adjacent they are to flood plains and fault lines in the US
• Where the fuck are we gonna put the waste at? Yucca Mountain is off the table for good, WIPP is nearing capacity for a pilot plant, and we have nothing like Onkalo planned out despite the funding being there many times over

It’s interesting watching the discussion in this thread evolving and polarizing. Yesterday the discussion started as ‘nuclear is one solution in a portfolio of solutions to combat climate change. vs. nuclear is always bad.’ and developed into ‘nuclear is good and you’re dumb. vs. nuclear is bad and you’re evil’.

I like your pitch black humour.

My issue with nuclear energy isn’t that it’s dangerous or that it’s inherently bad. The world needs a stable source of energy that compensates for wind and solar fluctuations anyways. For the current realistic alternatives that’s either going to be nuclear or coal/oil/natural gas. We have nothing else for this purpose, end of discussion.

My problem is the assumption underlying this discussion about nuclear energy that it somehow will solve all of our problems or that it will somehow allow us to continue doing business as usual. That’s categorically not the case. The climate crisis has multiple fronts that need to be dealt with and the emissions is just one of them. Even if we somehow managed to find the funds and resources to replace all non renewable energy with nuclear, we would still have solved just 10% of the problem, and considering that this cheap new energy will allow us to increase our activities and interventions in the planet, the situation will only worsen.

Nuclear energy is of course useful, but it’s not the answer. Never has technology been the answer for a social and political issue. We can’t “science and invent” our way out of this, it’s not about the tech, it’s about who decides how it will be used, who will profit from it, who and how much will be affected by it etc. If you want to advocate for a way to deal with the climate crisis you have to propose a complete social and political plan that will obviously include available technologies, so stop focusing on technologies and start focusing on society and who takes the decisions.

One simple example would be the following: no matter how green your energy is, if the trend in the US is to have increasingly bigger cars and no public transport, then the energy demands will always increase and no matter how many nuclear plants you build, they will only serve as an additional source and not as a replacement. So no matter how many plants you build, the climate will only deteriorate.

This is literally how the people in charge have decided it will work. Any new developing energy source that is invented serves only to increase the consumption, not to replace previous technologies. That’s the case with solar and wind as well. So all of this discussion you all make about nuclear Vs oil or whatever is literally irrelevant. The problem is social and political, not technological.