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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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The feeling of disillusionment can happen to everyone. I can give an example unrelated to OP's beliefs but which came to mind reading the post: Caring about CO2 emissions because it poses some existential risk for humanity, and discovering that environmental groups oppose the most feasible solution: nuclear. This discovery caused me to believe most environmentalists are not serious; they're motivated by vibes.

The problem I see with the mainstream environmental movement isn’t vibes, it’s a lack of people who understand engineering and other scientific concepts. The people I’ve talked to who are environmentalists are by and large humanities students and similar. They’re unable to understand that nuclear energy works. They don’t understand the difficulties of solar. They don’t know where the things they use come from. And while I don’t think most care enough to find out, they don’t know because they’re not engineers.

Nuclear was the most feasible solution between about 50 and 10 years ago, but other power sources genuinely have gone through massive technological improvements since then and are viable competitors in many areas.

No doubt nuclear should be a part of the overall green energy portfolio and it shores up a lot gaps in the other methods. But it's no longer the simple 'just use nuclear for everything, duh' situation that was true for a while there.

Nuclear is still the only CO2-free baseload... and once you have it, you don't really need anything else except peakers. There's no room for eco-approved renewable energy in a world with plentiful nuclear, at least not until storage is solved.