Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Based on an exchange in the main thread, I've been reminded by how different some of the views I hold on technological progress are from the rest of this forum (and I suppose society in general). I don't think we will ever colonize space (and have started to view people who take space colonization seriously in a negative light), AI will be an expensive nothinburger, and we will spend our lives in an environment of declining energy availability and increasing ecological catastrophe. I'm not full doomer by any means, but I find the vague nature that many on the forum treat the material basis of our reality to be baffling. One of the best and most palatable speakers I find on this topic is Nate Hagens and his Great Simplification podcast. Every week he has a variety of guests on the show that deal with various aspects of our predicament, many of whom strongly disagree with him. I would really recommend that almost everyone here check him out.
What views do you hold that you feel are orthogonal to most people on this forum (or society at large)? Who is the best speaker/writer that you feel like captures your point of view?
We've had the answer to this since the discovery of nuclear fission, we just gaslight ourselves into pretending we don't by regulating it off the board and saying "it just isn't profitable 🤷♂️"
Amusingly, the West may finally come to its senses on this matter as it's under threat of losing the entire game board to China. Civilisational suicide would be totally cool in a vacuum, but when there's a rival, it looks like you're just coping for losing, rather than virtuously killing yourself, which is totally not cool.
Tangentially, this is why I view fusion as basically irrelevant: if we get fusion, we'll just make that illegal, too.
I'm not sure I believe that regulation is the reason why we don't have fission. US has more fission power by GW than China and so does France. France's electricity mix is actually 70% fission and is dealing with various climate change related problems such as being unable to run the reactors in the summer because the water level is so low in the various inflow rivers to the nuclear power plants can't be used for steam generation. Even with a government that doesn't give a shit about safety regulations (China and the Soviet Union) fission clearly actually isn't that effective of a technology. Fission has actually declined as a share of China's energy mix recently (probably because of build out of solar), so I have a hard time believing it is a wunderkind energy source. @FirmWeird has posted a lot about this in this in the past.
I have, and I have eaten numerous downvotes for it. My point has always been that nuclear energy has too low an EROEI to be a viable answer to the energy needs of a modern industrial society, and I haven't seen any convincing evidence to the contrary. France's nuclear system was only viable because they got their uranium for cents on the franc from Nigeria, and even then it ran out of money and had to be restructured when I was posting about it last. This doesn't necessarily mean that there's no place for nuclear power - having a source of power that isn't reliant on fossil fuels could prove to be particularly useful in a future where fossil fuels are harder to come boy or the Middle East is in a state of war. Similarly, nuclear submarines which don't actually have to make enough money to justify their continued existence but place a huge emphasis on the density of their energy source are another good use for them. If China actually manages to get those molten salt reactors working, that would be fantastic as well. But right now I haven't seen any convincing evidence that nuclear power is a sustainable answer to the depletion of fossil fuels - and a large graveyard of failed attempts.
This is the reason why France has the nuclear system it does- it was de Gaulle's baby precisely because the US doesn't have French (or European) interests at heart. France was under [his] military dictatorship at the time, which helped get things moving.
He was right, of course; both in 1973 with the US-caused oil shortage and then in 2022 with the US-caused LNG shortage.
It's not so much that as it is completely obviating the need to resupply with fuel. And, especially relevant for submarines, nuclear power functions even with a complete lack of oxygen, so doing that is a no-brainer.
It's the only alternative that can work anywhere on the Earth's surface on a calm, cold night. Lighting a fire is the classic method to get energy at that time, but "magic hot rock" is fine too.
I once heard stated that the reason it's difficult to get good output from nuclear is because they simply can't run the reaction hot enough- hence the emphasis on exotic coolants (molten salt, etc.)- whereas with LNG the exhaust heat is sufficiently hot that you can heat the steam driving a secondary turbine to the point where it's very, very efficient. Of course, because we want to reserve the right to quench the reactor if it gets too hot for... certain reasons, we'd like a coolant that doesn't make the problem worse if we do that. At least with LNG you can turn the gas off and the reaction will stop.
"Work" is the key sticking point here - does it provide enough energy to pay for itself? To pay for the extraction of the raw material from the ground, refinement into usable fuel pellets, transportation to the plant, the construction of the plant, the lives of the people who run it and then on top of that provide usable power for the rest of the society that sustains it? The answer is, at present, "No."
That's the entire basis of my objection - even if you just handwave away the problem of storing dangerous radioactive waste that lasts for millenia and hope it doesn't leak into the rest of the environment, nuclear just can't pay for itself. Every single existing nuclear program I'm aware of is made viable on the basis of government subsidies or exploitation (i.e. the hilarious prices France paid for Nigerian uranium). Every single proposed nuclear program that doesn't have these problems (fusion, molten salt, thorium, etc) is 20 years in the future, and has been 20 years in the future for the past 60 years.
The whole nuclear waste discussion is immensely frustrating to me. Yes, depleted fuel remains dangerous for a long time, but the implication that we therefore need to also develop containment solutions that last for millennia is completely and utterly bonkers. The part that most scares people about radioactive substances is that they can cause injury and death by just being present in their vicinity. However, spent fuel is dangerous to the touch for a few decades at best, after that, the health and containment concerns are identical to those of any other chemical waste (basically, making sure it does not come into contact with the food supply and drinking water). Except, there is a universal method to detect radioactive contamination. Compare this to detecting chemical contamination, where one could run hundreds of tests and still miss the presence of a lethally toxic substance. Some toxic waste, particularly heavy metals, remains dangerous indefinitely. However, you never see any heated political debate about ways to permanently isolate entire waterways. The only reason we even have this discussion with nuclear power is because the physical amount of high level waste is tiny and because it's one of the only energy sources where most of the waste it produces stays neatly contained in a single building.
I don't want to be needlessly antagonistic, but the nuclear waste argument needs to die and whenever anyone brings it up in a discussion I also die a little inside.
I mean sure I'll be dead by the time that problem shows up, but I do actually care about the world that we will bequeath to our descendants.
Yes, that is the entire problem! And sure, we can detect it - but that doesn't stop the river that could have supplied entire communities with life turning into a source of cancer instead.
I am an environmentalist who does actually care about this issue. You're right, that is a big problem - but I'm not particularly moved by claims of hypocrisy when I have actively protested against this kind of thing in the past.
If my descendants in a thousand years' time haven't figured out some futuristic technological solution to disposing of nuclear waste, then fuck 'em. Presumably they're going through some horrible Max Max/Dark Ages thing to have regressed so far, and a bunch of radiation deep underground in the desert is the least of their problems. This is just papier-mache moral grandstanding, hence your need to resort to snark - it's much more reasonable to care about giving clean, reliable power (bracketing the cost question) to your actual immediate descendants than to prioritize some hypothetical 3035 descendant who finds themselves building a hut in whatever godforsaken place we put a waste dump in.
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