Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tell people around you to stop implicitly trusting centralized power.
But whom has the power to clean something like this up except for centralized power?
The people that created it.
U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open
111–120 of 120 posts
Re: U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tell people around you to stop implicitly trusting centralized power.
But whom has the power to clean something like this up except for centralized power?
I see the point, without centralized power you wouldn't have messes at this scale, there would be local messes that local power would be incentivised to clean up because it's in their backyard and it stinks.
Re: U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open
#113Re: U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open
#114The people who designed it have now passed on so it has met its designed lifetime.
Re: U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Solar and nuclear are complementary technologies. Nuclear produces power at night when solar doesn't, solar produces power during the day when the demand is higher. It significantly reduces the amount of storage batteries you need, which is the primary impediment to using solar exclusively. Solar is also problematic during winter. We need to replace fossil fuels as a heat source, but when heating with electricity at…
Storage is easy for renewables, regardless of local geology, using already existing tech. In many places, the winds blows powerfully at night. With a capable grid like the one China has build in the last 10 years, that energy can be efficiently moved a thousand miles.
> Storage is easy for renewables, regardless of local geology, using already existing tech.
By the time you generate power from some actual generation source, pay the conversion losses both ways and then pay the equipment, land and maintenance costs of the storage technology, it isn't cost-competitive. And then people keep burning carbon.
> In many places, the winds blows powerfully at night. With a capable grid like the one China has build in the last 10 years, that energy can be efficiently moved a thousand miles.
Wind is regionally intermittent. If it's a still night in one place there is a significant probability that it will also be a few miles from there. But transmitting power over a thousand miles isn't cost-competitive. Both the infrastructure cost and the transmission losses scale with the distance, making the cost quadratic with the transmission distance. On top of that, it multiplies your costs for the generation, because if you're not going to use storage you need enough generation in Region A to power both Region A and Region B when it's a still night in Region B, but you also need that much in Region B for when it's still in Region A. Even if that only happens one night out of five.
There are also national security implications. For all but a small handful of countries "1000 miles away" is in another country. Who does Israel connect its grid to? Or Japan? Does Germany enjoy buying power from France? What do you do when your neighbor raises the price?
Then everyone, including the bigger countries, takes on a large-scale dependency. Lose the long-distance transmission lines and the brownouts aren't just regional, it's the whole continent. There are ways to harden against that but then we're raising the cost even more.
Re: U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Who goes around implicitly trusting central power. In any aspect of their lives. It's required for the government to provide a "social safety net" and more broadly for the Progressive vision of society. That includes Progressive-era reforms in education and retirement, as well as Progressive inspired reforms in healthcare and welfare, esp. the Great Society. These reforms are predicated on the notion of a governmen…
None of that stuff really requires any great level of centralization at all. Many components, like social security, are effectively mandatory requirement savings and could be replicated at the level of an individual if they didn't exist, simply by using the money not paid in social security tax to buy an annuity. The primary thing you would require any government for at all would be redistributive programs, but that…
To be clear, I wasn't arguing whether policy should be one way or the other or what anyone should do, just whether or not people do commonly trust central authority.
You bring up a fair objection: the Progressives' big pushes for central planning were around 100 years ago, and there's no reason the same goals couldn't be met with a distributivist approach, and many novel programs rely far less on central planning.
All true, and you're going to find hundreds of people on HN who could go into far greater detail.
Outside this techno-libertarian bubble, most people have no notion of distributed anything. If you ask most people, "how can we do a major program," their conception will be a big government agency planning it out.
And they'll have reasonable arguments for why, such as economies of scale and standardization.
> Meanwhile you could implement redistributive programs even at the level of a city.
I think this hits at a problem with the original concept of "trusting a central authority" as you bring up what is a smaller central authority, but nevertheless somewhat central.
Re: U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open
#117Re: U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't see why solar isn't now the leading candidate. Nuclear is cool and all, but the simplicity of a butt-tonne of solar in a field can't be overlooked. It's not likely to fail catastrophically, maintenance is modular and low-impact. The skills needed are trades not degrees and if we can get the power output/battery/backup balance right, as a society we have clean, reliable energy indefinitely. I say that knowing…
Solar and nuclear are complementary technologies. Nuclear produces power at night when solar doesn't, solar produces power during the day when the demand is higher. It significantly reduces the amount of storage batteries you need, which is the primary impediment to using solar exclusively. Solar is also problematic during winter. We need to replace fossil fuels as a heat source, but when heating with electricity at…
Nuclear is a poor complement to solar. To compensate for solar's fluctuations, you need anti-corelated and throttable power sources as well as storage.
Re: U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ironically, if we did go full nuclear, the oceans probably wouldn't have risen, saving us from a cracking nuclear dome and an untold number of other hassles. Sure, nuclear power is not 100% safe, but its "worst case" pales in comparison to fossil fuel's "guaranteed outcome by 2100." I'm OK with building, say, solar instead of nuclear. I'm definitely NOT OK with keeping fossil fuel where nuclear is available, while pa…
> Ironically, if we did go full nuclear, the oceans probably wouldn't have risen Unlikely. I think the consensus is that the globe was already warming, humanity may have just sped it up.
By many orders of magnitude, so the rise of the ocean would have been negligible by human scales.
Re: U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes you think this site would be "run by the UN"? The WNA is a nuclear industry lobbying organization. Nothing more, nothing less.
My personal experience with interacting with the WNA revolves around their interactions with the WNU, which is the World Nuclear University. It's a partnership between the WNA, IAEA, and others. Their goal is to promote education in the field and having significant experience with the WNU, and having noticed no irregularities, it would be very unlikely if the WNA was simply making things up, or if they were spreading…
What is "pro-climate" today if the main line of this recent out of "nothing" nuclear hype is: "It's either nuclear or coal", which is a lie painting people who don't want to have nuclear as some kind of idiots with a phobia.
> If you still don't believe me, feel free to drop your email and I can setup a time for you to meet several physicists or engineers in the NYC area for lunch, for an educational session free of charge.
Oh please...what are the chances that the person is even close to the NCY area...? I'm from Germany. You know...the country with no nuclear issues at all anymore...besides with the waste of it of course.