Not a fan of nuclear power, sorry.
Ohio, Chernobyl, Fukushima, etc show how shitty fiat engineering can make a large swath of the country uninhabitable for decades.
Let’s revisit when we move to a Bitcoin standard.
Discussion
It is still much, much safer than fossil fuels (in terms of deaths per TWh produced).
Even if true, a nuclear disaster has much greater ecological, political and social implications. Affected regions don’t recover for generations, if ever.
Very different from people living slightly sorter lives due to pollution.
Part of the problem has been it’s stifling. Without a proper industry, we haven’t had the students or innovation or research that we should have had.
That’s because it’s antithetical to the fiat model. Planned obsolescence won’t be a thing on a bitcoin standard, and regulatory capture much more difficult.
Nuclear is perfect for a bitcoin world. 100 year infrastructure that gives us energy abundance. We need it to stop being stifled by the US who want to be in charge of who has this tech.
I want the Navy’s approach to nuclear. Everyone responsible for running it has to live right next to it along with their families. The general manager of the nuclear plant should have a mansion right next to the damn thing. And so on in concentric circles with the lowest level janitors furthest away.
I want them all making every decision as if their lives, and the lives of their loved ones, all depend on them doing the right thing.
I’d include the politicians responsible for any decisions related to it too. Put it next to city hall and make the politicians live close to it too.
The citizens who benefit from the cheap power should also be forced to accept the risks that go along with that cheap power. No more NIMBYs sticking risky shit far from where they live and making it someone else’s problem if they decide to underfund the maintenance. Treat the power plants like a temple and put them in the city center so everyone knows how interwoven their lives are with both the benefits and the risks.
Too many people are doing too many dangerous things far from where they live. There is a deadly lack of skin in the game.
People will never be convinced by “the experts say it will fail in a safe way”. In the midst of fiat collapse, anyone who is should probably not be trusted.
Let everyone who benefits from and is responsible for the cheap power prove it is safe.
#[4]
Listen to this:
I would also recommend that you listen to this podcast @girevik because, with all due respect, your misconceptions of nuclear power are showing.
Listening to this interview corrected and contextualized what's true about nuclear power for me, correcting misconceptions I didn't realize I had, thank God.
Vastly more people die in car crashes _every year_ in the US than all the nuclear accidents that have ever happened _combined_.
Modern tech makes the possibility of something like Chernobyl not possible anymore.
Sure, and then Fukushima happened, and in a country famous for its technology and engineering prowess. Humans are still too dumb and careless to play around with nuclear.
How many car accidents, massive pile ups, oil spills, rare earth metal mining go on and no one bats an eye? The risk of these accidents happening are extremely small - as evinced by nuclear plants running world wide all the time and nothing bad is happening. Humans aren’t still dumb, risk management isn’t a yes/no matter for nuclear.
The apologetic replies to this note … 🤦♂️
Nuclear is yucky energy. It’s just not elegant. The waste, the risks, … all to heat water which runs turbines. It’s stupid.
Yes if it had advanced as we all thought it would then it would be different … but it hasn’t.
And calculating deaths per TWh is so much an oversimplification it’s just retarded.
Whtaboutism and contrafactual daydreaming just do not solve challenges. Damning nuclear energy is as stupid as the attempt of whitewashing it.
Ohio was from the bare minimum preventative maintenance and it’s cheaper to ship large quantities via rail than truck.
Chernobyl was a known flaw but buried because it was a cheaper design. Still wouldn’t have happened if safety protocols were followed.
Fukushima happened because the backup generators were on the second floor and the potential for sea water to get that high was either not considered or thought to be low probability.
It’s almost always cost demands that is the root cause which is exasperated in fiat but never really going to go away
But why did they choose to detonate the excess rather than cleaning it up?
You’re asking about Ohio? There was a risk of a very large explosion so it was decided that a controlled burn was preferable to a uncontrolled detonation. Neither are good but they chose the lesser
Yeah, being from Ohio it’s really unnerving to hear that the “controlled burn” did not go as planned.
People are freaking out no matter how far away they are from the accident.
They should be. They were hauling some nasty stuff and you don’t really want to be breathing the fumes or have it in your drinking water. Exposure is based on route, quantity, and length of time so impact should be minimal but not zero.
All the details aren’t out yet but it sounds like the clean up crew chose the lesser evil out of few options on a limited time budget. Hopefully we will know more about what happened soon and that it wasn’t driven by cost concerns.
How is Ohio related to nuclear power?
My understanding is more and more mining is being powered by nuclear. Cleanest and cheapest option by far. Once upon a time data centers were common with organizations having their own. Cloud has changed that and mining has an enormous overhead cost. Nuclear make sense. EU is bringing back and beefing up their plants, too. Energy is big
You're assuming the technology will always be of those type capable of melting down. There are passively safe designs like LFTR that if power goes out the material safely drains by melting an ice plug.
At least you know where to stay away from. Hard to choose what air to breath when the world increases coal power generation.
I always wondered, whether mass producing combustion engines, many petrol based plastics, building large nuclear reactors: Why play with something toxic at such lethal scale?
Paracelsus correctly observed in the 16th century: “The dose makes the poison”.
So radioactive materials, forever chemicals, petrol engines might have their small justifiable edge cases, but no civilized society should even have structures in place that enable large scale concentration and control of these inarguably deadly materials.
