leviathan-supersystem:

squareallworthy:

jaehaerys1:

nonviolentpriusdriver:

otherwise-called-squidpope:

bigwordsandsharpedges:

anti-manlet-action:

higherorder:

I’d love to know how this is “green” and “environmentally friendly”.

God handed us a clean renewable effective energy resource and we keep spitting in his face and destroying the land.

Contrary to popular belief, breeder reactors and fuel reprocessing have made nuclear power effectively renewable.

Between cold war bomb production and inefficient early reactors (which we’re still fucking using), people started to worry about “peak uranium”.

The spurred research into higher fuel inefficiency and better fuel sources. By using both highly efficient breeder reactors, reprocessing existing fuel, and extracting trace radioactive elements from seawater, we concluded that we could supply the world’s electric demand at 1983 levels for 5 billion years.

For a reference of what an incomprehensibly long time that is, the Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old. The earliest undisputed life appeared about 3.5 billion years ago. 1 billion years ago, multicellular plants had not yet evolved to grow on land.

Even if that fuel estimate is off by entire orders of magnitude, and it hypothetically lasts half a billion years, that’s still longer than the entire time animals have lived on land.

Arguing that nuclear isn’t renewable is like saying geothermal isn’t renewable because the Earth’s core will eventually cool down. On a functional human time scale, nuclear is effectively unlimited.

There was an interview on the Tom Woods Show a while back about thorium-powered reactors. The expert said that with first-generation reactor efficiency, there’s enough easily accessible thorium on Earth to power the planet until long after the Sun expands enough to incinerate it.

:| fuck

The headline gives a pretty incomplete picture of what’s going on. From the full article:

 “The figure for trees felled for windfarm development on Scotland’s forests and land, as managed by FLS, over the past 20 years is 13.9 million. However, it should be noted that these trees – being a commercial crop – will have eventually have been felled and passed into the timber supply chain in any case.”

 They added: “That figure for felled trees should also be contrasted with that for the number of trees planted in Scotland over the years 2000 - 2019, a total of  272,000,000, and renewable energy developments fit well with this.

So we are not talking about untamed wilderness here. A small part of Scotland’s commercial timber cropland has been converted to another use.

The trouble with nuclear power is the high price. Comparing unsubsidized costs, nuclear is among the most expensive of power sources, while utility-scale wind and solar are the cheapest.

Coupled with low-cost storage technologies, wind and solar are currently able to supply cheap round-the-clock electricity. Nuclear power is unlikely  to be able to compete with these low prices, barring a major breakthrough.

And thorium reactors, in particular, are an unproven technology for commercial power. I think it makes sense to continue to invest in research into this and other forms of nuclear energy, but with technology we  currently have on hand, it is far from the best solution.

also like, while the dangers of nuclear power are sometimes exaggerated, those dangers aren’t nonexistent, and “population center needs to be quickly evacuated because nuclear reactor melted down” is something that has occurred on more than one occasion in the past, and is an absolute pain in the ass every time it has. nobody ever had to evacuate a town because a windmill went critical you feel me.

mind you, nuclear power will still be a critical part of getting off fossil fuels, but it’s important to be realistic about it’s drawbacks.