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Notes -
I caught this exchange after the previous thread had mostly closed, and I'd like to push back on the claim a little.
BinaryHobo:
The_Nybbler:
(How do we do the fancy quotes with user, timestamp, and maybe a link? It'd be useful here.)
It's true that hydroelectric power sources, as in dams, have saturated the supply of naturally-occurring American sites. You need a river in a rocky valley, and there are only so many of those to go around, and once they're used up, it's very hard to create more of them.
What haven't been exhausted, and in fact what can be readily found or exploited, are height differentials in general. Hills, mountains, exhausted mines, deep valleys with no water supply, all offer significant height differentials, are naturally occurring, and can be readily built out into large-scale closed-loop pumped-hydro storage, with a closed reservoir at one extreme and a closed reservoir at the other, and a reversible turbine to generate potential energy in times of excess and power in times of deficit. Should those be exhausted, off-shore dropoffs are an enormous resource of the same, at the cost of more difficult installation and operation in every regard. And if we exhaust THOSE, water towers at sea or underground reservoirs on land can be constructed as well.
All of this, of course, is dumb and America should just take the leash off nuclear, as argued here. (I've not read it yet, but I expect it to make the points I would inline here.) That we haven't yet is a shame and a testament to our collective idiocy and Puritan hangover.
I wonder, is there anyone on The Motte who opposes nuclear power? Either because of concerns relating to safety, waste disposal and other "environmentalist" canards, or because it's supposedly uneconomical.
And if everyone here is pro-nuclear, why is that? Are mottizens just more rational than everyone else, or is it because of chronic contrarianism?
Like embedding a Tweet? I don't think you can do that. But there's a "Copy link" button under every comment and you can put an @ in front of a username so that it links to their profile and they get notified.
As a pro-nuclear «chronic contrarian»: we can't be relied upon to distinguish the latter from the former. But I'd say it's the diminished vulnerability to threat models that appear poorly substantiated. We don't put much stock in «something may happen» stories.
For the same reason many here tend to pooh-pooh «the coof», Trump's «attempt at fascist insurrection», the danger of Russia or China, AGI risk, climate change, whatever, even school shooting and violence. On the other hand, we are highly suspicious of risk narratives that seem to justify reduction of freedom in all senses – from direct political ones to basic freedoms of exploring space and enjoying material abundance; degrowth ideology doesn't appeal to us at all. Inasmuch as there are conservatives and reactionaries here who profess to respect Chesterton's fences and the precautionary principle, it's not consistent but restricted to domains where change and action is heavily enemy-coded and in some ways still Puritan, statist and restrictive (e.g. CRT programming in schools).
Put another way, we aren't very contrarian. We're just non-neurotic males with a typical masculine attitude toward minor risks and risky-seeming things. The broader society and its consensus is… less like this.
Case in point:
Nuclear is quite bad if 1) you focus on tail risk of disasters (Chernobyl, Three Mile, Fukushima…) or mistaken estimates for base level harmfulness (such as consequences of waste leaks) and/or 2) evaluate nuclear by its cost per unit of output in the context of prohibitively expensive safety measures predicated upon its danger (assessments, plant designs and, again, secure waste storage over millenia). Put in the proper quantitative context, it's less dangerous per unit of power than most other energy sources. But there's no way to make coal or solar seem so spooky to a layman. I mean –wind, sun, it's all so nice, living in harmony with nature, what could go wrong! So what if we'll need to restrain our capitalist greed and consume a little less, give some rest to our mother Earth! Indeed, it'd be a positive if we got rid of capitalism even without any ecological benefit, some could say that's the whole point. Also, the precariousness of nature also means one can feel morally superior on account of normie unambitious urbanite life choices.
The optics accessible to midwits are just bad, built into every facet of culture from fiction tropes about evil power sources to signs on trash containers; whatever your nerdy arguments, generations of shallow artists competing for NGO grants (with the intent to suffocate, debase and diminish humanity under the guise of rational planning) have conscientiously labored to make it this way.
Not much to do about it now but remind them of the human cost of their actions, meticulously calculated.
Well, yeah; they don't currently perceive the barbarians are at the gates.
And unfortunately for those [men] whom the existence of barbarians is a time-tested way to extract payment and investment from broader society in exchange for security guarantees (and has been since the dawn of humankind), they're correct; this is why the entire society must rationalize its newly-enabled refusal to pay them.
Hence, degrowth as religion; men staying in one's parents' household until they're dead would in a normally-functioning society be hideously perverse, but it's certainly a clear reminder of the human cost of the actions of their social cohort (and probably the rational thing to do in a society like this).
Yes, investing in growth is objectively the right thing to do, and will make the society even stronger in the long run, but why do that when you can just hoard your gains until death takes them from you?
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