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What Bikini Atoll Looks Like Today (2017)
21–30 of 108 posts
Re: What Bikini Atoll Looks Like Today (2017)
#22The note about using C-14 (introduced from nuclear blasts) to date the age of living cells is fascinating.
Sorry, say what? C-14 comes from exposure to radiation also from the sun. Dating by it would make no sense in recent history because it would be too hard. Am I missing something?
Re: What Bikini Atoll Looks Like Today (2017)
#23I wonder why "extinction rebellion" types don't love nuclear power more. When it works right we have unlimited clean energy. And when it goes wrong you have a 50,000 year nature preserve.
Because a lot of environmental movements aren't rooted in utilitarianism, but in deeper beliefs that the endless pursuit of growth is inherently evil. The basic idea is that tigers and wolves have as much right to the planet as we do, and we've already taken too much. Hence the degrowth movement, etc.
This is why many environmental activists see cheap, abundant energy as problematic. It would mean less air pollution or less climate change, but it would allow humans to "consume" more of the ecosystem.
To be clear, this isn't my worldview. But as with most other movements advocating for social change, the underlying ideology is usually more complex than it appears.
Re: What Bikini Atoll Looks Like Today (2017)
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because we talk about the harms of radiation far more than we discuss the harms of pollution and CO2, despite the latter having orders of magnitude more health impacts. We'd have to have hundreds or maybe thousands of chernobyls a year to compete.
If you look only at deaths yes. But radioactive contamination can lead to a lot more damage to health and nature than just deaths. As an example, Fukushima caused 1 death but its pollution was detected all the way across the Atlantic. Yet usually only deaths are factored in. And the biggest issue is that one incident can cause so much of it. Add to the fact that we tend to rely on the lowest bidder who will then inev…
Focusing on anything except damage/kWh tends to increase damage/kWh.
> its pollution was detected all the way across the Atlantic
Ostrich Worship -- using detection limits as a proxy for harm -- implicitly promotes damage that is difficult to quantify over damage that is easy to detect in the most minute quantities. It elevates burying your head in the sand into a principle. The fact that nuclear pollution can be detected in mind-bendingly minute quantities is a very dumb reason to be anti-nuclear.
> one incident can cause so much of it
Headline Bias is usually something people aim to avoid rather than celebrate. Hundreds of thousands of slip-and-fall accidents from contractors running around rooftops can't reasonably be rounded to 0 on account of being individually "boring," yet that's what you do when you focus on the biggest incident. Speaking of which, do you oppose hydro-power on the basis of the Banqiao Dam disaster?
> Edit: oh and uranium mining is also pretty polluting business.
Single Ended Comparisons are the root of all evil. PV cells and windmills don't pop into existence without side effects. Their big problem is that you need a lot of them to generate electricity, leading to a lot of side effects.
> I'm not saying that coal is better. But renewable certainly is.
It's not. Or it wasn't. I'm extremely relieved that after 50 years we finally found a low-CO2 power solution that self-styled greens don't fight tooth and nail, and on that count solar and wind are unbeatable. But we had the solution. We could have been done phasing out CO2-emitting sources if we had just kept up the pace on nuclear rollout. Instead, we have just begun. The 50 gigatons excess CO2 emissions (so far, USA only) in order to wait for solar and wind to become economical were an absolute travesty.
Re: What Bikini Atoll Looks Like Today (2017)
#25The note about using C-14 (introduced from nuclear blasts) to date the age of living cells is fascinating.
Sorry, say what? C-14 comes from exposure to radiation also from the sun. Dating by it would make no sense in recent history because it would be too hard. Am I missing something?
Answering my own question, after rereading TFA. It's more because the C-14 was doubled and not because C-14 did not exist before.
Re: What Bikini Atoll Looks Like Today (2017)
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because we talk about the harms of radiation far more than we discuss the harms of pollution and CO2, despite the latter having orders of magnitude more health impacts. We'd have to have hundreds or maybe thousands of chernobyls a year to compete.
If you look only at deaths yes. But radioactive contamination can lead to a lot more damage to health and nature than just deaths. As an example, Fukushima caused 1 death but its pollution was detected all the way across the Atlantic. Yet usually only deaths are factored in. And the biggest issue is that one incident can cause so much of it. Add to the fact that we tend to rely on the lowest bidder who will then inev…
Being detectable isn’t very interesting. Modern technology can detect vanishingly small concentrations of weird isotopes. No harm came to anybody on the other side of the ocean from that stuff.
Now consider a pollutant like mercury. It goes far beyond being merely detectable. There’s so much mercury in the oceans that it’s unsafe to eat seafood too often. Most of that came from human activity. A huge chunk of it came from burning coal. An entire category of food poisoned planetwide!
Re: What Bikini Atoll Looks Like Today (2017)
#27I wonder why "extinction rebellion" types don't love nuclear power more. When it works right we have unlimited clean energy. And when it goes wrong you have a 50,000 year nature preserve.
Because a lot of environmental movements aren't rooted in utilitarianism, but in deeper beliefs that the endless pursuit of growth is inherently evil. The basic idea is that tigers and wolves have as much right to the planet as we do, and we've already taken too much. Hence the degrowth movement, etc. This is why many environmental activists see cheap, abundant energy as problematic. It would mean less air pollution…
I only personally know one person who had been an active member in Extinction Rebellion and I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. It seems like they all agree that the amount of growth we have today is unsustainable, but what sustainable growth exactly is and in turn how much growth needs to be compromised is not agreed upon. So I don't believe that endless pursuit of growth is against most of their members opinion, they just have a much stricter view on what sustainable growth is (and that some degrowth might be needed to achieve sustainable growth in the long term).
Re: What Bikini Atoll Looks Like Today (2017)
#28What, did Medium just copy over Stanford's alumni magazine? Here's the original story.[1] [1] https://stanfordmag.org/contents/what-bikini-atoll-looks-lik...
1. This is the official Medium publication for the Stanford Alumni Magazine.
2. The Medium version of this story was published 1 month before the stanfordmag.org version, so this is the "original" story.
Re: What Bikini Atoll Looks Like Today (2017)
#29I wonder why "extinction rebellion" types don't love nuclear power more. When it works right we have unlimited clean energy. And when it goes wrong you have a 50,000 year nature preserve.
Because a lot of environmental movements aren't rooted in utilitarianism, but in deeper beliefs that the endless pursuit of growth is inherently evil. The basic idea is that tigers and wolves have as much right to the planet as we do, and we've already taken too much. Hence the degrowth movement, etc. This is why many environmental activists see cheap, abundant energy as problematic. It would mean less air pollution…
I think this is probably a misrepresentation of degrowth. Perhaps there are some that take an extreme view like that, but it is more that we are very very obviously beyond the limits of sustainable living and something will have to give, now, or worse in the future as we deplete even more resources.
Some of these differences won't be "degrowth" but changes, like shifting to high speed rail and buses over personal cars. Reducing meat in our diets. Giving nature some breathing room. In other words, a different way of living that might take some adjustment but would also be perfectly fine.
Furthermore, we need to consider developing societies. If we continue to consume finite natural resources unsustainably, we cut into the share that could be used to better the lives of the poorest societies on Earth.
I'm not involved in XR though. However, I think it's important to present a highly materialist viewpoint. It's not only about morality, but about ensuring as many people as possible can live decent lives in a renewed balance with nature.
Re: What Bikini Atoll Looks Like Today (2017)
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because a lot of environmental movements aren't rooted in utilitarianism, but in deeper beliefs that the endless pursuit of growth is inherently evil. The basic idea is that tigers and wolves have as much right to the planet as we do, and we've already taken too much. Hence the degrowth movement, etc. This is why many environmental activists see cheap, abundant energy as problematic. It would mean less air pollution…
I only personally know one person who had been an active member in Extinction Rebellion and I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. It seems like they all agree that the amount of growth we have today is unsustainable, but what sustainable growth exactly is and in turn how much growth needs to be compromised is not agreed upon. So I don't believe that endless pursuit of growth is against most of their members opin…
The Sustainable Development Index had Cuba and Equador as the sole sustainable economies in years past.
There's no way we're going to convince the middle classes of the central economies to reduce consumption to that level, or even to convince people in that class of development economy to stop aiming for more.