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"lifting a longtime ban on financing the construction of nuclear power plants in developing countries." Nothing will kill nuclear faster than having these buil
by jariel 6y ago
"lifting a longtime ban on financing the construction of nuclear power plants in developing countries."
Nothing will kill nuclear faster than having these built in developing nations with political and operational instability.
Why do we think that that can't keep an electricity grid regular, will be able to manage this? They will do that 'one little thing' wrong and it will end up in disaster.
This is the paradox of Nuclear: if you build a safe kind of reactor (CANDU anyone?) in a stable area, with stable political regimes (Canada?), with excessive oversight, then, you're going to get the benefits of nuclear. (We still have to figure out a few things and there is more work to do).
But the messy, poor places of the world who ostensibly need it the most ... have too much risk.
In fact, it's not really a paradox at all: 'more power' usually means 'more consequence' and therefore likely 'more responsibility'.
Why do we presume that 'high concentrated power', orders of magnitude greater than the concentration of energy in Fossil Fuels, would be anything but 'very dangerous'?
A society can only use the power sources its responsible enough to harness.
There has to be strong credibility in all the surrounding institutions to make it work.
Also - 'terrorism' in all its forms has not gone away, some group 'hates' some group somewhere, the theft of some dirty spent fuel, simply 'put' in NYC could make city blocks a 'no go zone' for 100 years.
The worst thing we can do is build Nuclear power in Columbia or Morocco. At very least, they could be built in 'International Zones' where the land is declared sovereign (like a diplomatic house) managed by some other nation literally troops from that 'other nation' can guard the place.
Of course, that has really ugly echoes of colonialism, and issues of sovereignty etc., which is why it won't work.
It only takes one stupid dictator, wanting to 'grab it all for himself' to build an insanely dangerous operation.
I'm very cynical about this move, I think it's just big business lobbying so they can make money.
Instead of 'foreign financing' - they should be spending on R&D for safer reactors and fuel processing - as well as establishing rigid operational guidelines and oversight so that 100 solid reactors can be built in the US. With rigour in place, unit price can be brought down.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y agoWho the fuck are you to decide what to build in Morocco, or not? When I look at [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morocco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morocco it looks rather civilised now. And has for long times, until western colonialism meddled with it. Very rich history! They even have an expanding high speed rail service operating at 200mph. Beat that! Also: Masters of Kif!