Good. It's time we realised that we need a good strong stable power grid and clean nuclear energy is absolutely going to be a massive part of this.
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Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
101–110 of 1001 posts
Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This means having a kid loses parents around one quarter to one third of their total lifetime income. There's no better investment.
VWCE
Unfortunately our economic system is a ponzi scheme that requires having children while constantly putting them into deeper and deeper debt. It will eventually collapse and take VWCE with it.
Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Having kids is a financial and ecological disaster. As an outside observer it's remarkable to me people are still having any kids at all, which speaks to the strong subjective factors overpowering whatever objective considerations one might have about it. Objectively if no-one has kids then there will be no more humans. I guess you could consider that an ecological win. If you don't, then someone has to have kids.
No, there will be plenty of Hindus and Muslims, cos they largely don’t give a fuck about any of this noise. But Christianity and Western Civilisation can kiss its own arse goodbye if it thinks this is a reasonable ideology to instil in to its young people. Don’t have kids because it’ll economically ruin your life, and it’s bad for the environment anyway. Righteo then, get on ya spaceship n fuck off to Mars then . Fre…
"No, there will be plenty of Hindus and Muslims, cos they largely don’t give a fuck about any of this noise."
Have you looked at the TFRs in India and more developed Muslim countries lately?
Mostly under 2 and still dropping like a stone. Turkey, Iran or UAE are every bit as much on the road to disastrous demography as Europe is, only with some delay.
Does not surprise me... in both Europe and East Asia, the worst and deepest drops in fertility happened in previously very socially conservative societies (Spain, South Korea), while the trend was less sharp and sudden in, say, Scandinavia.
Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s absolutely related. It's constantly being excused by politicians as a solution to labor shortages.
What do labor shortages have to do with nuclear power?
The OP was drawing a connection between how the West has become less energy independent (not producing nuclear, importing energy) and how it’s become less labor independent (not producing people, importing them instead). The two are related because they are both caused by complacency, and they’re both destabilizing to the West.
Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
#105Interesting fact: Belgium's neighbor Germany has commenced a search for a suitable place to store nuclear waste indefinitely in the 1970s. Given that such a place must be safe for hundreds of thousands of years, they have not yet found one.
All the nuclear waste they've got is stored in temporary places (above ground) at former nuclear reactor sites.
The search is not expected to conclude before 2040 at the very earliest.
Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humankind should depopulate, we cannot sustain infinite growth and are already destroying our planet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation
There’s more forested land in Europe today than there has been since the middle ages
I wouldn't focus on the Europe's forests though.
The biodiversity and nature loss around the world are staggering, and the meagre gains on one tiny continent don't offset that.
Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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> And the West is also largely not keen on producing new humans (time and costs as much as anything else). > And seems to think it can just import people from other, far, away places. That seems fundamentally OK? The #1 problem leading to humans not having enough to live comfortably is that we have an enormous number of humans and limited resources. We can't unlimit resources. There isn't a very nice way to force peo…
> The #1 problem leading to humans not having enough to live comfortably is that we have an enormous number of humans and limited resources. We can't unlimit resources. There isn't a very nice way to force people to stop having children.
>People are choosing not to have kids. That's workable.
It sounds like one of those not very nice ways you describe more so than an active societywide choice. People aren't exactly choosing in the wide sense of the word. Their states population keeps going up despite often many decades of below replacement birthrates (thus aleviating pressure in places that retain higher birthrates) whilst they feel like they struggle with housing, childcare, pressure on their wages trough migration (and other things) and leave the parental nest at historically late times.
Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
What nuclear disasters? Exactly? Name one nuclear disaster at an old nuclear plant whose lessons weren’t applied to the whole fleet.
Fukushima. It was a Gen 1 plant which already has the issue that a thermal runaway is possible. There were other examples of this happening like TMI. The backup for Fukushima was onsite generators which were flooded and ultimately failed causing the meltdown. The safety lessons we learned from all gen 1 reactors was to apply passive shutdown mechanism where if input power fails fission ultimately stops. That's not so…
Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was NOT using Generation I reactors.
"Gen I refers to the prototype and power reactors that launched civil nuclear power. This generation consists of early prototype reactors from the 1950s and 1960s, such as Shippingport (1957–1982) in Pennsylvania, Dresden-1 (1960–1978) in Illinois, and Calder Hall-1 (1956–2003) in the United Kingdom. This kind of reactor typically ran at power levels that were “proof-of-concept.”"
https://www.amacad.org/publication/nuclear-reactors-generati...
Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do labor shortages have to do with nuclear power?
The OP was drawing a connection between how the West has become less energy independent (not producing nuclear, importing energy) and how it’s become less labor independent (not producing people, importing them instead). The two are related because they are both caused by complacency, and they’re both destabilizing to the West.
That's a leap of logic. Europe also imports consumer goods, digital services, and much else. Why not talk about that?
Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
#110The most important question is: who the hell decided to do such a stupid thing and in the name of what. When we have an answer maybe we can look on other ideas the same people figured out and also rethink them. Say, sorting thrash. EU new idea is to make Europeans to sort thrash into 12 separate beans. So what that all trash goes through sorting process before being dumped, and there are very modern and efficient sor…
Sorting machines are in fact used in these countries. But most of the trash separating efforts were introduced many decades ago, long before the capabilities of modern AI systems.
I would be more worried about the fact that a lot of the garbage that first gets separated ends up getting burned anyway because recycling is not even possible in a lot of cases.