4 ms·

People think about this completely upsides down IMO. Nature is killing more people every year than have been killed by nuclear in all its time. The sun is kill

People think about this completely upsides down IMO. Nature is killing more people every year than have been killed by nuclear in all its time. The sun is killing more people than dies of nuclear (Melanomas and skin cancer) I could go on. Nuclear isn't as dangerous as it's been claimed and with never reactors the actual security procedure is physical. On top of that investments into thorium and fusion could have gotten us much further. It's not that bigger is better it's that bigger is safer from a number of perspectives. Nuclear is by far the safest, greenest, most scalable, reliable energy source we know how to use and it's many times safer than the very mother nature everyone seems to want to save. Nature doesn't give us a safe, friendly environment we then make unsafe it gives us a hostile and dangerous environment which we then make safe. Funny how disagreement in this always gets met with downvotes rather than at least argument or reasoned disagreement. Why is it so hard for people to disagree about this without it turning into a downvote competition?

pjc50 8y ago
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1514492/20-years-on-Britain-still-feels-the-effects-of-Chernobyl.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1514492/20-years-on-... https://www.guernicamag.com/the-fallout/ https://www.guernicamag.com/the-fallout/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior The problem with nuclear has always been trust, and repeated breaches of trust - often in regards to weapons proliferation, from which fission can never really be separated. See the ongoing efforts to prevent Iran's nuclear programme, for example. It also has a nasty habit of cost overruns, because projects don't scale down. How overrun is Hinckley Point C now again? Whereas solar cells scale down to the level of a few square milimeters on a watch or calculator. The great lesson of silicon valley - AWS and everything else - is that "big bang" projects always get beaten by things that can start tiny and scale incrementally. We need to deploy solar and wind now. Maybe in the 25 year lifetime of a solar panel we can get a nuclear plant finished. Maybe fusion will work. Maybe someone will find a way to stop Thorium reactors dissolving their own plumbing.
- ThomPete 8y ago
  That's not a problem with nuclear that's a problem with people. Cost overruns come from extreme security legislation and the fact that we haven't built enough so those are simply not proper arguments. Add on top of that that solar will never, as in never ever be able to deliver cheap (at scale), clean, plentiful and consistent energy which is the minimum requirement for any type of energy any sane person would support. Promoting something that is currently not providing more than 1% of the worlds energy being heavily favored politically and with plenty of subsidies and which will never support maybe more than 10% of the worlds energy needs which is being very generous sounds like something the world will look back at in a hundred years and think "What the hell were they thinking".
  - pjc50 8y ago
    > That's not a problem with nuclear that's a problem with people. This is very much the "true communism has never been tried" argument, isn't it? Unless you know a way of building it without people?
    - ThomPete 8y ago
      No its not at all the same cause thats not what i mean. I mean that people are ignorant to the dangers not that its dangerous. Has nothing to do with communism, wind and solar on the other hand do.
      - starbeast 8y ago
        >Has nothing to do with communism, wind and solar on the other hand do. Showing your hand there.
        ThomPete 8y ago
        No but you are. Having no problem with misrepresenting what other say. I was replying to this: "This is very much the "true communism has never been tried" argument, isn't it? " Which you very well know. So yeah thanks for showing your hand.

pjc50 8y ago

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1514492/20-years-on-Britain-still-feels-the-effects-of-Chernobyl.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1514492/20-years-on-... https://www.guernicamag.com/the-fallout/ https://www.guernicamag.com/the-fallout/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior The problem with nuclear has always been trust, and repeated breaches of trust - often in regards to weapons proliferation, from which fission can never really be separated. See the ongoing efforts to prevent Iran's nuclear programme, for example. It also has a nasty habit of cost overruns, because projects don't scale down. How overrun is Hinckley Point C now again? Whereas solar cells scale down to the level of a few square milimeters on a watch or calculator. The great lesson of silicon valley - AWS and everything else - is that "big bang" projects always get beaten by things that can start tiny and scale incrementally. We need to deploy solar and wind now. Maybe in the 25 year lifetime of a solar panel we can get a nuclear plant finished. Maybe fusion will work. Maybe someone will find a way to stop Thorium reactors dissolving their own plumbing.

ThomPete 8y ago
That's not a problem with nuclear that's a problem with people. Cost overruns come from extreme security legislation and the fact that we haven't built enough so those are simply not proper arguments. Add on top of that that solar will never, as in never ever be able to deliver cheap (at scale), clean, plentiful and consistent energy which is the minimum requirement for any type of energy any sane person would support. Promoting something that is currently not providing more than 1% of the worlds energy being heavily favored politically and with plenty of subsidies and which will never support maybe more than 10% of the worlds energy needs which is being very generous sounds like something the world will look back at in a hundred years and think "What the hell were they thinking".
- pjc50 8y ago
  > That's not a problem with nuclear that's a problem with people. This is very much the "true communism has never been tried" argument, isn't it? Unless you know a way of building it without people?
  - ThomPete 8y ago
    No its not at all the same cause thats not what i mean. I mean that people are ignorant to the dangers not that its dangerous. Has nothing to do with communism, wind and solar on the other hand do.
    - starbeast 8y ago
      >Has nothing to do with communism, wind and solar on the other hand do. Showing your hand there.
      - ThomPete 8y ago
        No but you are. Having no problem with misrepresenting what other say. I was replying to this: "This is very much the "true communism has never been tried" argument, isn't it? " Which you very well know. So yeah thanks for showing your hand.