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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   990 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 7, 2025

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?

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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 will spend our lives in an environment of declining energy availability and increasing ecological catastrophe

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'm not sure I believe that regulation is the reason why we don't have fission

I'm one degree removed from the industry and I'm sorry, but regulation => cost is the reason why we don't have more fission.

Then why doesn't China have more fission? Hell, since the US is so rich in fossil resources: why didn't RUSSIA ever get more fission?

Over five percent of China's power comes from fission plants, and that's underrating it since they've got very high uptime compared to on-demand plants. As for why it hasn't scale up faster, China's political classes had very obvious mixed feelings about dependence on foreign-produced infrastructure for a long time, which only went harder once . While they've theoretically had 'domestic' production of nuclear plants since the mid-90s, they didn't actually manage serious production of the CNP-600s until 2010-2012... at which point the Fukushima disaster and its political fallout lead them to go back to the drawing board and start the production cycle again.

But they've put >3 GW of fission power online just in the last year. As bad as their political situation is for power construction, it's still beating the west's.

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