On the odd chance you aren’t completely trolling. Anne Frank was a girl going through puberty. She had a crush on her friend and like any normal young person had to deal with scary, unknown, but very normal human feelings and desires of intimacy and love. It’s her own fucking diary, she didn’t self censor herself for prudes in 2024. She had a war and death hanging over her head at any moment.

And if you actually go look at the book, there is nothing graphic about it. To these prudes having these normal feelings and describing them in a diary is what they consider to be graphic. Here’s a Dutch talkshow host absolutely clowning on these people just by showing the passage the controversy is actually about (with English subtitles)

You can certainly try to use the power as much as possible, or sell the energy to a country with a deficit. But the problem is that you would still need to invest a lot of money to make sure the grid can handle the excess if you build renewables to cover 100% of the grid demand for now and in the future. Centralized fuel sources require much less grid changes because it flows from one place and spreads from there, so infrastructure only needs to be improved close to the source. Renewables as decentralized power sources requires the grid to be strengthened anywhere they are placed, and often that is not practical, both in financial costs and in the engineers it takes to actually do that.

Would it be preferable? Yes. Would it happen before we already need to be fully carbon neutral? Often not.

I’d refer you to my other post about the situation in my country. We have a small warehouse of a few football fields which stores the highest radioactivity of unusable nuclear fuel, and still has more than enough space for centuries. The rest of the fuel is simply re-used until it’s effectively regular waste. The time to build two new nuclear reactors here also costs only about 10 years, not 20.

Rather continue with wind and solar and then batteries for the money.

All of these things should happen regardless of nuclear progress. And they do happen. But again, building renewables isn’t just about the price.

Some personal thoughts: My own country (The Netherlands) has despite a very vocal anti-nuclear movement in the 20th century completely flipped now to where the only parties not in favor of Nuclear are the Greens, who at times quote the fear as a reason not to do it. As someone who treats climate change as truly existential for our country that lies below projected sea levels, it makes them look unreasonable and not taking the issue seriously. We have limited land too, and a housing crisis on top of it. So land usage is a big pain point for renewables, and even if the land is unused, it is often so close to civilization that it does affect people’s feelings of their surroundings when living near them, which might cause renewables to not make it as far as it could unrestricted. A nuclear reactor takes up fractions of the space, and can be relatively hidden from people.

All the other parties who heavily lean in to combating climate change at least acknowledge nuclear as an option that should (and are) being explored. And even the more climate skeptical parties see nuclear as something they could stand behind. Having broad support for certain actions is also important to actually getting things done. Our two new nuclear powered plants are expected to be running by 2035. Only ten years from now, ahead of our climate goals to be net-zero in 2040.

People are kind of missing the point of the meme. The point is that Nuclear is down there along with renewables in safety and efficiency. It’s lacking the egregious cover up in the original meme, even if it has legitimate concerns now. And due to society’s ever increasing demand for electricity, we will heavily benefit from having a more scalable solution that doesn’t require covering and potentially disrupting massive amounts of land before their operations can be scaled up to meet extraordinary demand. Windmills and solar panels don’t stop working when we can’t use their electricity either, so it’s not like we can build too many of them or we risk creating complications out of peak hours. Many electrical networks aren’t built to handle the loads. A nuclear reactor can be scaled down to use less fuel and put less strain on the electrical network when unneeded.

It should also be said that money can’t always be spent equally everywhere. And depending on the labor required, there is also a limit to how manageable infrastructure is when it scales. The people that maintain and build solar panels, hydro, wind turbines, and nuclear, are not the same people. And if we acknowledge that climate change is an existential crisis, we must put our eggs in every basket we can, to diversify the energy transition. All four of the safest and most efficient solutions we have should be tapped into. But nuclear is often skipped because of outdated conceptions and fear. It does cost a lot and takes a while to build, but it fits certain shapes in the puzzle that none of the others do as well as it does.

“You know you don’t need to bring a dead horse every time you want catering right, Jim?”

If you’re here because of the AI headline, this is important to read.

We’re looking at how we can use local, on-device AI models – i.e., more private – to enhance your browsing experience further. One feature we’re starting with next quarter is AI-generated alt-text for images inserted into PDFs, which makes it more accessible to visually impaired users and people with learning disabilities.

They are implementing AI how it should be. Don’t let all the shitty companies blind you to the fact what we call AI has positive sides.