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1000 square miles is a square 32 miles long or a circle 36 miles in diameter. The size of an average county in the US Midwest. So if you’re that worried about

1000 square miles is a square 32 miles long or a circle 36 miles in diameter. The size of an average county in the US Midwest. So if you’re that worried about it, find the least populated place in western Kansas or Nevada or Maine and build the biggest plant you can. Worst case scenario it turns into Chernobyl and you fence it off and call it a day. Alternatively, we can keep using slave labor in China to build solar panels fabricated with toxic compounds obtained via strip mining that require natural gas and coal power plants to actually function on hot days. Either you care about climate change or you just hate nuclear power. Discussions like these are great at revealing where folks stand on the issue when push comes to shove.

rtpg 4y ago
Alright, you find the county to be declared a no-mans land. Remember, you need a bunch of staff to run the plant, a source of water for the cooling towers, and of course you need to spend all that money actually building the plant. Let's not get into the fact that the primary reason people don't build nuclear power plants is that they're extremely expensive to build in the first place! A serious question I don't have an answer to: is Chernobyl the worst-case scenario? Is there a way for there to be an even worse disaster? I do not know. Though really we can walk and chew bubble gum. Build reactors and more renewables. I can't put a nuclear reactor on the roof of my home after all! I just really feel like this trope that anti-nuclear sentiment is why we don't have nuclear reactors everywhere has always felt weird when we're talking about market-based economies. Maybe it's just that unworkable in general! Why else would we not build these supposed money printers?
- MisterMower 4y ago
  More renewables requires more slave labor from China. If we produced those solar panels here under US environmental and labor regulations, nuclear would be very competitive. That we have to buy them from China for solar power to even make remote economic sense here in the US should tell us something. A counter question to yours: How many Chinese slave laborers would you tolerate before you'd accept another Chernobyl style disaster as a tradeoff? When you talk about substituting solar power for nuclear power, that's exactly the tradeoff you're making.
  - rtpg 4y ago
    I don't think that solar panel enthusiasm has to answer for the cross-sector near-universal effect of outsourcing of industrial production outside of the US, for Americans. According to a google search: > American-made solar panels generally cost from $0.50 to $0.80 per watt (W) – about $0.10 to $0.30 more per watt than imported panels. The highest quality, ‘premium’ American panels may even come in around $1.00/W. I would be more than happy to pay that premium (though really I would like to see working conditions improve across the globe). I do not live in the US so my calculus is perhaps different from yours. I have heard statements about labor being huge factors of solar panel installation, but google is saying 15%. And I would like to restate that I think we can walk and chew bubble gum here. The problems with nuclear being more expensive are real, maybe resolvable, but cannot simply be handwaved away in our current economic models. But hey, if we can get a good mix going on I'm all for it. It's not an either/or! And hey, if we had a full planned economy, there would be a lot of things that we could do differently that would also have great effects.

rtpg 4y ago

Alright, you find the county to be declared a no-mans land. Remember, you need a bunch of staff to run the plant, a source of water for the cooling towers, and of course you need to spend all that money actually building the plant. Let's not get into the fact that the primary reason people don't build nuclear power plants is that they're extremely expensive to build in the first place! A serious question I don't have an answer to: is Chernobyl the worst-case scenario? Is there a way for there to be an even worse disaster? I do not know. Though really we can walk and chew bubble gum. Build reactors and more renewables. I can't put a nuclear reactor on the roof of my home after all! I just really feel like this trope that anti-nuclear sentiment is why we don't have nuclear reactors everywhere has always felt weird when we're talking about market-based economies. Maybe it's just that unworkable in general! Why else would we not build these supposed money printers?

MisterMower 4y ago
More renewables requires more slave labor from China. If we produced those solar panels here under US environmental and labor regulations, nuclear would be very competitive. That we have to buy them from China for solar power to even make remote economic sense here in the US should tell us something. A counter question to yours: How many Chinese slave laborers would you tolerate before you'd accept another Chernobyl style disaster as a tradeoff? When you talk about substituting solar power for nuclear power, that's exactly the tradeoff you're making.
- rtpg 4y ago
  I don't think that solar panel enthusiasm has to answer for the cross-sector near-universal effect of outsourcing of industrial production outside of the US, for Americans. According to a google search: > American-made solar panels generally cost from $0.50 to $0.80 per watt (W) – about $0.10 to $0.30 more per watt than imported panels. The highest quality, ‘premium’ American panels may even come in around $1.00/W. I would be more than happy to pay that premium (though really I would like to see working conditions improve across the globe). I do not live in the US so my calculus is perhaps different from yours. I have heard statements about labor being huge factors of solar panel installation, but google is saying 15%. And I would like to restate that I think we can walk and chew bubble gum here. The problems with nuclear being more expensive are real, maybe resolvable, but cannot simply be handwaved away in our current economic models. But hey, if we can get a good mix going on I'm all for it. It's not an either/or! And hey, if we had a full planned economy, there would be a lot of things that we could do differently that would also have great effects.