site banner
PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   2534 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?

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.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

My descendants in 1000 years will presumably have as little to do with my values, culture, genes, and life as I do to my many ancestors from the year 1025.

I am actually incredibly similar to my ancestors from a thousand years ago - they lived in a different country and spoke a different language, but there are a lot of things we have in common.

one of them might go out into the Nevada desert and drink from a stream that has nuclear waste runoff in it.

Except that nuclear waste runoff won't be limited to that stream. What bodies of water will that stream feed into? What ecosystems will draw upon that river for water? A single stream being rendered unusable would be a perfectly acceptable price to pay for cheap, relatively clean nuclear power - but that's not the price actually being paid, nor is it what we're getting for that price. A single stream feeds into the broader ecosystem and harms there will spread in ways that cause immense damage to the fabric of life in the future. That radioactive water will reach aquifers and groundwater supplies, it will reach the ocean, it will reach the atmosphere as it passes through the water cycle and becomes rain. Nature will adapt, for sure, but humans don't evolve nearly as quickly as wolves or bacteria - and the evolution of radiation resistance via natural selection would involve incredible amounts of human suffering and pain.

You are implying that the person you're responding to doesn't care about the world he bequeaths to his descendants.

I don't think that qualifies as snark - not caring about the fate of the Earth is a fairly common position among a lot of rationalist circles, especially ones who believe we will colonise space or discover AGI in short order.

I am happy to have you here for the debate on cost, because that's the debate that actually matters

Sure, here's the debate: Barring a dramatic increase in EROEI, nuclear power is uncompetitive with solar and other renewables. While it is the appropriate solution for some limited circumstances (nuclear submarines, having a colonial empire that lets you get effectively free uranium, etc), it is no way an actual answer to the energy crisis rapidly approaching the world.

Far from being an irrelevant distraction from the argument, nuclear waste and the proper safekeeping/disposal of it is one of the bigger contributors to the EROEI problems of nuclear power. When the final accounting is done, the costs of that storage could leave nuclear power with a negative EROEI - we would have been better off simply not doing it at all save for the generation of certain medically and scientifically useful isotopes.

I am actually incredibly similar to my ancestors from a thousand years ago - they lived in a different country and spoke a different language, but there are a lot of things we have in common.

I get that. But, as a modern man, I would have no similarity to descendants a thousand years in the future who haven't figured out some easy way to deal with nuclear waste. Maybe they've regressed to feudal peasantry, maybe they're killing each other over the last hydrocarbons - it doesn't matter. They might as well be animals. To share values with us as modern men is to move forward and overcome problems, not to stagnate and regress. I would have nothing but contempt for my descendants if they're mindlessly drinking the runoff from a nuclear waste dump, dressed in furs and oxhide; let the dying sun swallow them.

What ecosystems will draw upon that river for water? A single stream being rendered unusable would be a perfectly acceptable price to pay for cheap, relatively clean nuclear power - but that's not the price actually being paid, nor is it what we're getting for that price. A single stream feeds into the broader ecosystem and harms there will spread in ways that cause immense damage to the fabric of life in the future.

Please, tell me what dreadfully important ecosystems draw on the western Nevada desert for water? It's a desert for a reason. We have an awful lot of waste land going, and we could easily find the most useless parts of it and drill deep holes, if it wasn't for the eternal whining of the native bitter-enders still living out there. We can also just bury it in the Canadian Shield in some area where the watershed drains north, I'd assume the post-apocalyptic Inuit would be happy to hunt walruses that glow in the dark.

That radioactive water will reach aquifers and groundwater supplies, it will reach the ocean, it will reach the atmosphere as it passes through the water cycle and becomes rain.

At this point I'm starting to take you less seriously. Do you actually believe that the storage of depleted nuclear waste deep underground, leaching through the groundwater to aquifers over the centuries, and then to the ocean, diluted in billions of gallons of water, is going to turn into radioactive rain?

having a colonial empire that lets you get effectively free uranium

Raw Uranium is currently $75/lb after China's big buildout has been priced in. Double or triple that to get it in the reactor, and it's still not a major cost in nuclear's economics. It's all capital costs for building and decommissioning, running costs are a rounding error. I'm very open to the argument that the cost of building nuclear power isn't due to excessive regulation, but due to the inherent difficulty of containing a nuclear reaction in a safe vessel. But if your argument for why France's program is cheaper is because the least economically important input is slightly cheaper than getting it from Australia, I think you need better arguments.

I get that. But, as a modern man, I would have no similarity to descendants a thousand years in the future who haven't figured out some easy way to deal with nuclear waste

How exactly would you have no similarity to people who haven't figured out some easy way to deal with nuclear waste when YOU haven't figured out some easy way to deal with nuclear waste?

To share values with us as modern men is to move forward and overcome problems, not to stagnate and regress.

The USA is currently stagnating and regressing right now. Manufacturing capacity and the real economy has been completely hollowed out and sold to China, and political gridlock means you can't even successfully set up advanced chip fabrication technology - ever read about the troubles TSMC has had getting set up in America? American infrastructure is falling apart, the political system is unable to meaningfully address any real problems (Israel not having enough money doesn't count as a real problem) and levels of societal cohesion are in the toilet compared to 70 years ago. Is there any serious analysis which doesn't identify the US as in decline?

Please, tell me what dreadfully important ecosystems draw on the western Nevada desert for water?

Do you know what the climate of the western Nevada desert is going to look like in a thousand years? At current levels of global warming, there's a decent chance that the desert could actually be green in a thousand years. My paleoclimatology knowledge of America isn't the best because I don't actually live there, but I don't think there's anything implausible about places like that turning into more human-useful environments in the future.

Do you actually believe that the storage of depleted nuclear waste deep underground, leaching through the groundwater to aquifers over the centuries, and then to the ocean, diluted in billions of gallons of water, is going to turn into radioactive rain?

This conversation was, in my mind at least, in the context of a polluted river - if it has already reached the surface and created an irradiated river, absolutely. If you're proposing that we replace fossil fuels with nuclear, the amount of waste created would be far higher than the relatively tiny amounts we have now, especially over hundreds of years.

But if your argument for why France's program is cheaper is because the least economically important input is slightly cheaper than getting it from Australia, I think you need better arguments.

France was paying roughly 2 dollars a kilo - and they still had to go through financial restructuring due to economic problems. If you want to disprove my argument, simply point to the successful nuclear program that is currently generating power at a profit healthy enough that it does not need any government subsidies. That's all you need to completely destroy my position!

How exactly would you have no similarity to people who haven't figured out some easy way to deal with nuclear waste when YOU haven't figured out some easy way to deal with nuclear waste?

You're not seeing what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that the essence of modern man is a commitment to moving forward, to striving for improvement, such that we can solve problems in the future we can't solve now. Without that, the only thing left for humanity is to stagnate, run out of energy, and eventually regress back into apes. I have sympathy for potential future descendants on the ape-path, but I wouldn't sacrifice even a cent of the next generation's prosperity to ease that benighted future.

The USA is currently stagnating and regressing right now.

We agree on this. I'm not happy about it at all. If nuclear, even financially unprofitable nuclear, would help, we should go all in on it. If it doesn't, we shouldn't.

Do you know what the climate of the western Nevada desert is going to look like in a thousand years? At current levels of global warming, there's a decent chance that the desert could actually be green in a thousand years.

I'm not a paleoclimatology expert, but my understanding is that it will never, ever be green, because the limiting factor isn't temperature, it's that it's a high desert where mountains on both sides intercept any humid air. A sort of double rain shadow effect. It doesn't matter. There are a lot of seismically inactive, human-worthless places we could bury waste, such that any one not working just means we find another. Put it in the Canadian Shield, far up enough that if climate change the area profitable for large-scale civilization most of the world is already screwed. Put it in Siberia. Get rid of the country of New Zealand - I never liked those hobbit bastards. Any of these options are trivial sacrifices compared to the promise of nuclear energy, if that promise is real.

If you want to disprove my argument, simply point to the successful nuclear program that is currently generating power at a profit healthy enough that it does not need any government subsidies. That's all you need to completely destroy my position!

I think this is where we disagree. Perhaps I haven't been clear at getting my position across, and so you see me as some generic opponent. What I want to do here is to disaggregate the arguments you're making. Here:

  1. Nuclear power is not cost-effective. This is the one I'm interested in. I've talked to a fair few experts in the field who are nuclear-skeptical without being anti-nuke fanatics, and this is the biggest one. The capex and maintenance of a nuke plant is far, far higher than comparable alternatives. We can argue whether that's necessity or regulation, and look at cost comparisons between the US, where it's illegal to build anything, France, Canada, China, etc., but this is a genuinely interesting question that deserves a lot of consideration. It would also explain why nuclear power needs subsidies in practice, if it does in fact need them due to inherent economics and not due to excessive regulation.
  2. Nuclear power isn't cost-effective because uranium is expensive. I think this is nonsense. Per wiki, raw uranium amounted to 14% of average operating costs in 2014. To be fair, the uranium price has risen mildly since then, mostly on speculative moves related to China's buildout (at least, according to the commodity traders involved). This margin simply cannot explain nuclear's profitability (if the French are getting it for free) or lack of profitability (if we aren't) compared to other sources. Oil/gas regularly skyrocket above/below that 14% margin. It has to be capex or non-fuel opex, the fuel cost argument makes no sense.
  3. Nuclear power isn't cost-effective because of waste disposal. This is purely political. We can't dispose of nuclear waste cheaply in a "good enough" way because boomers are scared because communists can't even boil water right. As for disposing of nuclear waste in a way that we won't poison some mad max caveman in a thousand years - you've seen my argument.
  4. Nuclear is not cost-competitive with renewables. This makes sense to me in the long run. But we have to get there, and we need baseload power until then. Nuclear, in an ideal world where we can just wave away the regulators killing it, is a way to bootstrap ourselves into that renewable future, over the course of a hundred years or so.

1 is interesting and really makes me chew on my own thinking. 2 and 3, to me, do not hold up, and I haven't heard a single argument from you that adequately reinforces them. 4 is a question of strategy that depends on 1 (but isn't entirely dependent - if nuclear power is only somewhat unprofitable, it makes more sense to subsidize it than it does solar panels). The sense I get is that you are just motivated to believe every negative thing you can find about nuclear power at once, and don't really care whether or not they fit together, and so you're not able to make a strong and focused case against it. If I'm wrong, I hope you stick around and provide an alternative perspective to the forum.

You're not seeing what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that the essence of modern man is a commitment to moving forward, to striving for improvement, such that we can solve problems in the future we can't solve now.

I disagree - but this is a really complicated topic that would best deserve a thread to itself and goes very far afield from the original topic of conversation. If you really want to talk about what defines the essence of humanity, that would make for a great philosophical debate, but I will have to simply agree to disagree in the context of this discussion.

We agree on this. I'm not happy about it at all.

At least we can be happy about finding a point of agreement.

I'm not a paleoclimatology expert, but my understanding is that it will never, ever be green, because the limiting factor isn't temperature, it's that it's a high desert where mountains on both sides intercept any humid air.

I think that the world on the other side of climate change is going to be incredibly different - changes in climate and rising sea levels will produce an incredibly difficult to predict set of changes to the environment, especially when potential human interventions are taken into account. Of course, a thousand years is chump change when compared to the actual scale of the problem - some of the products of nuclear waste remain dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years, substantially longer than the entirety of recorded human civilisation and potentially for longer than the existence of anatomically modern humans. I am not certain that we can actually predict exactly how the Nevada desert ends up by the time these byproducts cease being dangerous.

The sense I get is that you are just motivated to believe every negative thing you can find about nuclear power at once, and don't really care whether or not they fit together, and so you're not able to make a strong and focused case against it.

The main focus of my arguments on this topic is simply Energy Returned on Energy Invested. Financial viability is a fairly good proxy for whether or not a given source of energy provides enough of a return to make its exploitation viable, and the other arguments are simply pre-emptive attacks on the common means of breaking the link between energetic viability and financial viability. Point number 2? The price of uranium being rendered comically low by colonial exploitation is a way of masking the true input costs. That is only relevant in the case of France, but their nuclear power system was the most prominent example of a financially viable nuclear power system (that has since gone into restructuring - c'est la vie). Point number 3? The costs of storage and maintenance being ignored or offloaded onto the rest of society obscures the true expenses of nuclear power generation and can create a temporary illusion of profitability. Avoiding paying those costs simply shifts the burden onto others, and in many cases magnifies them.

Point number 4 does have the least substantial link to my main point, but the relevance of renewables is that they make the opportunity cost of pursuing nuclear power even starker. If we already have power systems which give us a better deal than nuclear, nuclear becomes an even worse idea.

The main focus of my arguments on this topic is simply Energy Returned on Energy Invested. Financial viability is a fairly good proxy for whether or not a given source of energy provides enough of a return to make its exploitation viable.

That's not what I'd call focusing on Energy Returned on Energy Invested, that's focusing on financials, claiming, but never proving, it's a good proxy, and calling it a day. Make the case in KWh, and we might get somewhere.

That's not what I'd call focusing on Energy Returned on Energy Invested, that's focusing on financials, claiming, but never proving, it's a good proxy, and calling it a day.

You're right, I don't actually go and prove that it is a good proxy. But the reason why I believe that is simple - that's the only real way we have to determine if a given power source can function viably in a modern western society, and the points where that connection breaks are fairly easy to identify and take precautions around. Actually measuring KWh is definitely worthwhile and there are analyses you can make with regards to it, but it gets exceedingly complicated in a way that finances avoid. How much energy went into constructing the vehicles which mined and transported that uranium? How reliably was that power generated? Was it limited to specific times (power that can only be generated in off-peak hours and can't be stored isn't as useful)? For the purposes of determining whether or not a given power source can feasibly supply power to a first world economy, finances are one of the best tools we have. But that said, to the best of my knowledge nuclear EROEI as measured in KWh still isn't very good. Mining, transporting and enriching uranium tends to consume enough energy that the return isn't terribly worthwhile.

You're right, I don't actually go and prove that it is a good proxy. But the reason why I believe that is simple - that's the only real way we have to determine if a given power source can function viably in a modern western society, and the points where that connection breaks are fairly easy to identify and take precautions around. Actually measuring KWh is definitely worthwhile and there are analyses you can make with regards to it, but it gets exceedingly complicated in a way that finances avoid.

Well, while it's true that financial profit is the only way to have a power source function in a modern society, but the reasons are completely different than "Energy Returned on Energy Invested" and are subject to rather dramatic changes. Something as simple as an increase of energy prices can completely change the result, and that's without going into all the way by which costs of nuclear power have been artificially increased. By contrast a negative EROEI means you're up against the laws of thermodynamics and there's literally nothing you can do to make that power source work. Yes, it's complicated to calculate it in KWh, but it's really the only way to properly make the argument. A financial analysis does not avoid any of the pitfalls of actually measuring energy requirements, and it introduces many inaccuracies of it's own.

How reliably was that power generated? Was it limited to specific times (power that can only be generated in off-peak hours and can't be stored isn't as useful)? For the purposes of determining whether or not a given power source can feasibly supply power to a first world economy, finances are one of the best tools we have.

I don't think financies measure any of these things at all, which is why I think you should stop claiming it's about EREOI (or actually show the negative energy returns). Finances measure opportunity costs, and not even relative to other energy sources, but relative to all other things in the economy, so it's not really a good tool for this sort of analysis at all.

Mining, transporting and enriching uranium tends to consume enough energy that the return isn't terribly worthwhile.

Transport costs next to nothing in terms of energy. If you want to make the argument that it's because of mining or refining, be my guest, by provide numbers in terms of actual energy.

A financial analysis does not avoid any of the pitfalls of actually measuring energy requirements, and it introduces many inaccuracies of it's own.

You're right, though it is more useful for things like "Is this worth using in the world we actually live in as opposed to the one filled with spherical cows" - hence my preference.

Transport costs next to nothing in terms of energy. If you want to make the argument that it's because of mining or refining, be my guest, by provide numbers in terms of actual energy.

As far as I can tell from the literature I have available to me, nuclear has an EROI ranging from 5-15 when you ignore the studies that give a wildly inflated amount by leaving out key steps of the process (if you judge it solely by how much energy is in a given amount of uranium fuel pellets it blows oil out of the water - but that's not really helpful).

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats