It's quite possible that if most people owned a solar roof with batteries and redundancy across a specified and localized grid, there would be less need for large power plant owners and fewer donations to political parties. In short, it is easier for politicians to get donations from a small group of people than from a large group.
After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform
121–130 of 489 posts
Re: After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s already a disinvestment in fossil fuel going on. You have to compare nuclear with renewables.
Your assuming we can run on renewable, which we can't, and won't be able to in our life time. Germany is a good example.
How is Germany a good example? Renewables were less than 20% 10 years ago and are now more than 50%. Meanwhile it has one of the most stable electricity network.
Re: After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform
#123For the uninitiated, nuclear power is actually much, much safer than it was in the previous century, and fossil fuel power plants have killed exponentially more people through pollution than all nuclear power accidents combined – it's just not something that happens all at once so it doesn't seem like a big deal to most people. We will not be able to "defeat" climate change and keep this planet inhabitable for future…
We have Hyman G. Rickover, Admiral in the US Navy to thank for steering nuclear energy research away from thorium to uranium. He very much wanted the Navy to be in command of nuclear wessels carrying nuclear missiles. If I can remember correctly from research in US energy policy history in college, the US had sunk about 10 years into thorium reactor research when Hyman came along. Seems rather important to not ignore…
I’m with you, but this:
> On the upside, the Navy has never had a nuclear accident. We’ve proven it’s doable.
can really be put down to sheer, dumb luck when you hear about all the close calls.
Re: After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform
#124For the uninitiated, nuclear power is actually much, much safer than it was in the previous century, and fossil fuel power plants have killed exponentially more people through pollution than all nuclear power accidents combined – it's just not something that happens all at once so it doesn't seem like a big deal to most people. We will not be able to "defeat" climate change and keep this planet inhabitable for future…
What does it mean to say that fossil fuel plants killed exponentially more people? Isn’t this just the triviality that any two points (with different y values) are exponentially related?
I believe the intended meaning is “orders of magnitude more.”
Re: After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dam failures would like a word.
You can live on that land unlike on radioactive wasteland.
Ironically enough, you can only live on it if the dam fails. Otherwise you're consigning up to thousands of square kilometers of often prime real estate underwater indefinitely.
Re: After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nuclear also got much, much more expensive than it was in the previous century, making it economically completely unreasonable in the west. Nuclear is also the only energy source where people get displaced from their homes in thousands of square kilometers in catastrophic events.
> Nuclear also got much, much more expensive than it was in the previous century, making it economically completely unreasonable in the west. Because we stopped building them. Of course costs are going to explode when every time you do it the people on the project are doing it for the first time.
No, the reason is construction costs are rising faster than inflation because construction hard to automate.
Re: After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Look at Fukushima for example. It seems hard to imagine a nuclear power plant design, even Gen III or IV that would be immune to any possible natural disaster. For Fukushima, it seems that the panicked response of the local authorities (evacuating the whole area ...) was what caused the most problems.
The magnitude and extent of the radioactive release was largely unknowable in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. The local authorities were put in an impossible position, either gamble with everyone's health or evacuate at great cost. The root cause of the dilemma is that the worst case scenario for traditional nuclear is so severe and nobody can tell decision-makers with high confidence whether or not you've j…
The fundamental, unsolvable difficulty of making decisions with imperfect information seems to be often under analyzed. Are there any related fields that study this decision making difficulty?
Re: After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It seems to me that when we allow ourselves to be distracted by the category conflicts, we are distracted from the fight between those trying to maximize our well-being and those happy to throw us all under the bus to optimize for their individual circumstance. That's a reasonable point I agree with. But you're just practicing bothsideism here. It is quite obvious that the ones throwing everyone under the bus to op…
It's quite clearly not limited to one party. Taking coal as an example.. Pro-climate folks would throw the livelihood of coal mining families under the bus, too, to achieve climate policies that pro-climate folks believe will help them long-term.
> Taking coal as an example.. Pro-climate folks would throw the livelihood of coal mining families under the bus, too, to achieve climate policies that pro-climate folks believe will help them long-term.
Let me fix that for you: ... that pro-climate folks believe will help EVERYONE short to medium-term. As in, stopping the burning of coal will slow the rate of climate change, which will keep our planet more habitable. For example, avoid having the bulk of Florida underwater in a few decades. Avoid ever more powerful storms, forest fires, droughts, floods.
Calling this 'throwing the livelihood of coal mining families under the bus to help themselves' is disingenuous. Again, this is just bothsideism.
Because those pro-climate people also tend to be Democrats, who are the ones who actually care about providing enough unemployment assistance to allow people to live while they are looking for work. Who fund programs that allow people to learn new skills so they can start new careers.
Republicans are the ones cutting benefits, from SCHIP to regular unemployment benefits, and are going out of their way to make getting benefits as incompatible as possible with the daily life of someone struggling to get by. Have you looked at the hoops that some of the red states make the poor and unemployed jump through?
And finally, Democrats want to provide high quality, affordable health care for everyone, not just those people rich enough to afford it, which is the Republican platform. Coal mining is an unhealthy job. Are the coal companies going to pay for all the health care retired miners need?
Re: After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
> nuclear accidents can make a place uninhabitable for thousands of years Note that this is not special to nuclear materials; it's true for a good chunk of industrial chemistry in general as well. > peak uranium I'll need to look up some more up-to-date numbers, but going by https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_162.shtml , there's more than enough for couple centuries (and new reactor designs can make one-two order…
>Note that this is not special to nuclear materials; it's true for a good chunk of industrial chemistry in general as well. Hmm interesting. Where has this happened on the scale of Chernobyl or Fukushima? I can't thinking of any exclusion zones in once populated areas caused by industrial chemicals. Is the fact that plants are built near populated areas a factor?
You might google Superfund sites in Montana [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites_in_Mon...
]. There is no shortage of towns that have been made uninhabitable, but perhaps not in densely populated areas.
Re: After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform
#130My uneducated gut feeling is that the only way nuclear is going to be relevant is if they perfect micro-nuclear reactors.
I remember reading about these 10 years ago [1], and have seen a few more since. Basically they propose small "nuclear batteries" kin of design - this avoids catastrophic scenarios and benefits greatly from economies of scale.
The only issue I see with this approach is political - you would have a lot more nuclear material spread around, spreading this kind of teach where it's easily accessible and hard to protect doesn't sound reasonable with the political situation in the world.