17 ms·

Oliver Stone Releases Trailer for His Pro-Nuclear Energy Movie

100 points by melling 4y ago

sam_lowry_ 4y ago
That same Oliver Stone that praised Putin until the 24-Feb-2022 and even a bit after?
- gexaha 4y ago
  and also the same Oliver Stone that helped making conspiracy theories mainstream!
  - jesusofnazarath 4y ago
    [dead]
- 0xDEF 4y ago
  It's sad that nuclear energy has been so ostracized that only Hollywood's compulsive contrarian support it.
  - asdff 4y ago
    Most of people's understanding of nuclear energy seems to have come from The Simpsons. Big glowing leaky drums and 3 eyed fish.
  - givemeethekeys 4y ago
    You can support nuclear and not be a Hollywood contrarian like, apparently, Oliver Stone.
- inpdx 4y ago
  My thoughts exactly. I enjoyed his 80s films. He lost it sometime after that.
- vfclists 4y ago
  Is Oliver Stone the only person to have praised Putin?
  - sam_lowry_ 4y ago
    Nope, but he went to great lenths, not only supporting publicly, but visiting Putin and making a pro-Putin documentary.
10g1k 4y ago
Countries with nuclear reactors: 32. Countries which have had nuclear leaks or meltdowns: 15. Number of nuclear leaks and meltdowns since 1952 (only those which resulted in loss of human life or >US$50K property damage): ~100. About 60% of those have been in the USA, allegedly the most advanced country in the world. Note that the USA requirements for nuclear reactor waste (yes, they produce toxic waste; they are not clean), last time I checked, required the canisters to be able to survive for 300 years. The waste lasts longer than 300 years. Two years ago the USA had a leak which spilled ~400,000 gallons of radioactive water into a major river system, and it was covered up for two years. Finally: If you are not willing to have a nuclear reactor right beside your house, but are willing to have one beside someone else's house, you are a coward and are not really in favour of nuclear power.
- melling 4y ago
  I don’t want to live next to a coal power plant either. 40% of the electricity globally is generated with coal. It also produces something like 25% of greenhouse emissions. It has been like this for half a century? Waiting for the renewables and batteries really isn’t working out. We’ve squandered decades, and could have bought ourselves an extra few decades.
  - 10g1k 4y ago
    Not liking apples is not a pro-orange argument.
    - kbelder 4y ago
      It is is you have to eat and your choices are limited.
    - mrDmrTmrJ 4y ago
      But if we both want to consume electricity - than we do have to make a choice about that source of electricity. And the data constituently says nuclear is far safer than coal, even though coal is far more common. So it really is 'apples vs. oranges' when comparing nuclear v. coal.
hermitcrab 4y ago
Having watched "JFK" I'm not really interested in anything Oliver Stone has to say.
- atleastoptimal 4y ago
  regardless of whether you agree with the message it was a great movie
- karaterobot 4y ago
  Why not? I thought the movie was excellent, even if I'm not persuaded by it. I don't want to assume you're saying "I don' want to listen to people I disagree with", but that was my first reaction.
  - flangola7 4y ago
    People who have a history of deeply irrational thinking can be safely presumed will continue being irrational, until proven otherwise. If someone derails a serious work project and is combative and doubles down when the boss tells them what they did wrong, they don't get to lead the next one.
- jMyles 4y ago
  I think JFK is a great movie with a few flaws. Things that are covered well and faithful to the evidence: * Basically all the parts of the movie which are set in Dealey Plaza (reconstructed like no other film has done before or since) * Oswald's background and enigmatic lifestyle * The activities at the Carousel Club * Dean Andrews * Sylvia Odio and the Mexico City incident * Guy Banister, Jack Martin, and the 544 Camp Street leaflets * Vernon Bundy * The voter registration witnesses * The apparent Oswald impersonations * George de Mohrenschildt * The autopsy Things that aren't covered so well: * Claw Shaw (some of the evidence against him is just fabricated in the film, which is very frustrating) * David Ferrie (some parts good, others not) * Jim Garrison's personal life (eg incorrectly depicting the Shaw interview as happening on Easter Sunday to win personal favor - nauseating) * "Janet and Bill Williams", obviously the Paines * "Mr. X", while an accurate portrayal of Fletcher Prouty, it gives an inaccurate impression of the timeline of the case Many people object to the composite character ("Willie O'Keefe") played by Kevin Bacon, but this doesn't bother me. I think it's about as good as you can do with those characters without making the film another hour longer to tell each of their backgrounds. Overall, I think that JFK does a good job of presenting the most important evidence that Kennedy was killed as the result of a conspiracy (something I assert is very likely), and does so in a way which is likely to prompt viewers to do additional research. It's not as hard on every fact as I wish it were, but it's still way above the mean for a historical film. Stone has also published a 600 page book in response to the hullaballo surrounding the film, inviting and platforming his strongest critics (and responses to them), along with a painstaking bibliography of essentially every fact asserted in the film. [0] I think that deserves commendation; commitment to this degree of dialogue is very rare for a Hollywood film. 0: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/430224.JFK https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/430224.JFK
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Apparently he bashes wind and solar which is not particularly helpful. Makes his experts look like kooks if they claim "mostly nuclear" is the way forward.
- Georgelemental 4y ago
  It is the way forward if you want a reliable grid. Solar and wind are intermittent, and the storage technology we would need to make them the primary source of power just doesn't exist yet.
  - _Microft 4y ago
    What happens if a nuclear power plant in your area has to be shut down for maintenance?
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
      Ever heard of wires? You can send electricity over them.
      - _Microft 4y ago
        These are nuclear wires, right? Because apparantely this does not work for solar and wind as I understand?
        2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
        Yes.
        gweinberg 4y ago
        Most of the time when it's night where you are, it's also night 100 miles away.
    - HPsquared 4y ago
      There's usually more than one plant, and each plant usually has more than one unit (so they go on a sort of rota), and the maintenance is planned months in advance.
vld_chk 4y ago
Very sad to see that such important topic and message are going to be delivered by such freak. Now people who are against nuclear power will have even more emotional arguments against it. P.S. Specially for people who “if you don’t live nearby: shut up”, I have lived near NPP my entire childhood and both of my parents worked 30+ years in this industry.
- epistasis 4y ago
  I agree that this is not a beneficial contribution to improving the public debate about nuclear. However the public debate around nuclear is pretty much meaningless until there's a revolution in nuclear technology: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35159449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35159449 Research on nuclear tech is continuing apace, without being influenced by public debate. There are plenty of sites that would love to have new nuclear if such a tech revolution happens, especially at existing NPP.
  - erentz 4y ago
    Vogtle is an outlier in most regards. A tech revolution isn’t really needed, the tech works fine. Simplifications of existing tech like the BWRX-300 seem to be gaining a lot of traction (in theory should be more expensive per watt, but can be contracted in more palatable sizes). TVE is pushing ahead with plans to build BWRX-300s. Canada is returning to building nuclear again. As is France. Poland. So on. Sadly it seems the US may lag but that’s the way with a lot of things in this country. It will still be good if other countries can make the advancements. [1] https://twitter.com/_hannahritchie/status/1637121202052374529 https://twitter.com/_hannahritchie/status/163712120205237452...
    - epistasis 4y ago
      That tweet is a hopelessly optimistic reshaping of the data. The Nordhaus paper linked to in a reply is a far better assessment. France's attempts inside France, Finland, and the UK all look like Vogtle. There's all Summer in the US, which fared even worse than Vogtle. For US construction, Vogtle is a best case scenario, matching the disasters of the very last US disasters as well as European construction costs. There is no financial backer that will continue to throw away money like what was done at Vogtle. The next US reactor definitely needs to be something massively different. The SMR might be the next tech, and the BWRX-300 is somehow dubiously cast as an SMR, but "pushing forward" is just some press releases without much chance of success. And that's the fundamental problem with nuclear, it's all hopes and dreams and press releases, along with missing deadlines and budgets if a sufficiently large fool can be found to front the money.
stephc_int13 4y ago
I do think that Nuclear energy is better than fossil fuels, in almost all aspects. Nuclear power is not really that clean, and long-term maintenance or dismantling of nuclear power plants is problematic. Also, while I think we've been under the influence of powerful lobbies linked to oil/coal interests, nuclear power is also an industry with powerful and active lobbies. We should not discount solar and wind based energy production, they are beating expectations and are turning out to be a serious option.
Blackstrat 4y ago
Oliver Stone? As the old saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day. That nuclear energy is a practical way forward may be true. That solar and wind will never meet the world’s energy requirements is also true. But when a wacko like Stone comes out in favor, it raises the question of why.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  > That nuclear energy is a practical way forward may be true. It's not. > That solar and wind will never meet the world’s energy requirements is also true. It isn't.
  - Blackstrat 4y ago
    And your evidence of that?
    - timbit42 4y ago
      We will figure out better ways to store solar and wind energy for when it is night and there is no wind. There are already technologies to do it but I haven't seen any that seem practical to scale globally yet. Ultimately, we will build enough solar and wind capacity to provide more energy than we need for when the days aren't windy or sunny enough.
      - schiffern 4y ago
        >I haven't seen any that seem practical to scale globally yet See Tesla Master Plan Part 3.[0] LiFePO4 batteries can easily scale to the required level, and require no scarce minerals (namely cobalt and nickel). Lithium itself is abundant even outside of China. [0] https://youtu.be/BoGNEZF2XFQ https://youtu.be/BoGNEZF2XFQ
    - Blackstrat 4y ago
      And the land area required to produce even the current power levels, which is unequivocally insufficient to eliminate gasoline powered cars and stoves?
micromacrofoot 4y ago
Oliver Stone would probably do more good for nuclear energy by making a movie against it
isanengineer 4y ago
I don't really care about Oliver Stone, but as a longtime climate activist (and engineer) I'm glad to see any publicity promoting nuclear. I can't take seriously any proposal for reducing fossil fuel generation that doesn't involve nuclear power. The Messmer Plan in France shows that this can be done in a relatively short time frame. They built huge capacity between the 1980s and 2000s and still get 72% of their electricity from nuclear today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messmer_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme... Meanwhile Germany decided to phase out their nuclear generation over decades due to environmental concerns, and ended up re-commission old coal plants to meet demand. The full story of this is complicated and is also thanks to the current gas crisis in Europe, but the fact remains that the decision to phase out nuclear has lead to more carbon emissions, not less. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/qa-why-germany-phasing-out-nuclear-power-and-why-now https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/qa-why-germany-phasing-... I think the US view of nuclear power has been really complicated by the anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s, where nuclear power was (not unreasonably) linked to the military industrial complex. That said, I think the largest obstacle to nuclear power in the US is the federal structure of the government. The US still doesn't have a centralized location for the long-term storage of nuclear waste thanks to Harry Reid killing the Yucca Mountain project in the late 2000s. No state representative has any incentive to allow a facility like that to be constructed in their state, and the federal government is unable or unwilling to force the issue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r... I'm heartened to see climate activists slowly but surely starting to take nuclear seriously. I want to plug Emergency Reactor as doing to difficult work of trying to turn the tide of public perception and make nuclear central to the climate change discourse. https://www.emergencyreactor.org/ https://www.emergencyreactor.org/
- greenthrow 4y ago
  Nuclear takes way too long to come online. If we decide today to build 40 new reactors around the world it will be decades before they are online and operational. Nuclear is also way too expensive. Building those 40 reactors would cost way, way more than building equivalent production in wind and solar. Renewables and storage are cheaper, faster and yes, safer. There is absolutely no rational reason to keep building new nuclear reactots.
copymoro 4y ago
I'm pretty sure that the real drive behind the pro-nuclear push is and has always been about centralizing electricity "generation" (i.e. conversion); ultimately for reasons of creating authority and/or centralizing power.
- twerkmonsta 4y ago
  Are you sure it’s not because it’s many times more efficient than any other source of electricity “generation”?
  - copymoro 4y ago
    not anymore there are too many government-sized subsidies all over the allegedly (but not really, not at all) free energy market. the energy market is too important to allow 'the market' to fully control it; so it's intervened with subsidies, tax-breaks, and other such kinds of influences (soft controls). so many, and I know/understand so little about this, that I don't think it's necessarily more efficient. the centralized aspect of it (the historical norm for electrical grids) creates POWER besides the electrical.
- mikewarot 4y ago
  There are several centralized control points already in use. There are only 4 railroads that control most of the coal deliveries in the US. Refineries for petroleum are centralized choke points, as are the distribution networks. The same tends to be true for natural gas. The energy return on investment for oil has been falling, from 100:1 for the early wells, to as little as 2:1 in fracking. We need to give up fossil fuels.
  - copymoro 4y ago
    I say we need to give up fuels of all kinds. nuclear is still based on fuel.
- timbit42 4y ago
  Eventually solar and wind will be so inexpensive that most homes will generate and store all it needs and not require the grid. There are already roof mountable wind turbines that can be used in urban areas with no visible moving parts such as the Halcium PowerPod: https://youtu.be/vg7wW2nnrPU https://youtu.be/vg7wW2nnrPU
pentagrama 4y ago
I don't listen to Joe Rogan podcast, but one day I stumbled upon an interview to Oliver Stone and was instantly glued to him, a mix of wacky and elocuent.
mycall 4y ago
I wonder what he things about Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and how this could happen in other places during war.

100 points by melling 4y ago

sam_lowry_ 4y ago

That same Oliver Stone that praised Putin until the 24-Feb-2022 and even a bit after?

gexaha 4y ago
and also the same Oliver Stone that helped making conspiracy theories mainstream!
- jesusofnazarath 4y ago
  [dead]
0xDEF 4y ago
It's sad that nuclear energy has been so ostracized that only Hollywood's compulsive contrarian support it.
- asdff 4y ago
  Most of people's understanding of nuclear energy seems to have come from The Simpsons. Big glowing leaky drums and 3 eyed fish.
- givemeethekeys 4y ago
  You can support nuclear and not be a Hollywood contrarian like, apparently, Oliver Stone.
inpdx 4y ago
My thoughts exactly. I enjoyed his 80s films. He lost it sometime after that.
vfclists 4y ago
Is Oliver Stone the only person to have praised Putin?
- sam_lowry_ 4y ago
  Nope, but he went to great lenths, not only supporting publicly, but visiting Putin and making a pro-Putin documentary.

10g1k 4y ago

Countries with nuclear reactors: 32. Countries which have had nuclear leaks or meltdowns: 15. Number of nuclear leaks and meltdowns since 1952 (only those which resulted in loss of human life or >US$50K property damage): ~100. About 60% of those have been in the USA, allegedly the most advanced country in the world. Note that the USA requirements for nuclear reactor waste (yes, they produce toxic waste; they are not clean), last time I checked, required the canisters to be able to survive for 300 years. The waste lasts longer than 300 years. Two years ago the USA had a leak which spilled ~400,000 gallons of radioactive water into a major river system, and it was covered up for two years. Finally: If you are not willing to have a nuclear reactor right beside your house, but are willing to have one beside someone else's house, you are a coward and are not really in favour of nuclear power.

melling 4y ago
I don’t want to live next to a coal power plant either. 40% of the electricity globally is generated with coal. It also produces something like 25% of greenhouse emissions. It has been like this for half a century? Waiting for the renewables and batteries really isn’t working out. We’ve squandered decades, and could have bought ourselves an extra few decades.
- 10g1k 4y ago
  Not liking apples is not a pro-orange argument.
  - kbelder 4y ago
    It is is you have to eat and your choices are limited.
  - mrDmrTmrJ 4y ago
    But if we both want to consume electricity - than we do have to make a choice about that source of electricity. And the data constituently says nuclear is far safer than coal, even though coal is far more common. So it really is 'apples vs. oranges' when comparing nuclear v. coal.

hermitcrab 4y ago

Having watched "JFK" I'm not really interested in anything Oliver Stone has to say.

atleastoptimal 4y ago
regardless of whether you agree with the message it was a great movie
karaterobot 4y ago
Why not? I thought the movie was excellent, even if I'm not persuaded by it. I don't want to assume you're saying "I don' want to listen to people I disagree with", but that was my first reaction.
- flangola7 4y ago
  People who have a history of deeply irrational thinking can be safely presumed will continue being irrational, until proven otherwise. If someone derails a serious work project and is combative and doubles down when the boss tells them what they did wrong, they don't get to lead the next one.
jMyles 4y ago
I think JFK is a great movie with a few flaws. Things that are covered well and faithful to the evidence: * Basically all the parts of the movie which are set in Dealey Plaza (reconstructed like no other film has done before or since) * Oswald's background and enigmatic lifestyle * The activities at the Carousel Club * Dean Andrews * Sylvia Odio and the Mexico City incident * Guy Banister, Jack Martin, and the 544 Camp Street leaflets * Vernon Bundy * The voter registration witnesses * The apparent Oswald impersonations * George de Mohrenschildt * The autopsy Things that aren't covered so well: * Claw Shaw (some of the evidence against him is just fabricated in the film, which is very frustrating) * David Ferrie (some parts good, others not) * Jim Garrison's personal life (eg incorrectly depicting the Shaw interview as happening on Easter Sunday to win personal favor - nauseating) * "Janet and Bill Williams", obviously the Paines * "Mr. X", while an accurate portrayal of Fletcher Prouty, it gives an inaccurate impression of the timeline of the case Many people object to the composite character ("Willie O'Keefe") played by Kevin Bacon, but this doesn't bother me. I think it's about as good as you can do with those characters without making the film another hour longer to tell each of their backgrounds. Overall, I think that JFK does a good job of presenting the most important evidence that Kennedy was killed as the result of a conspiracy (something I assert is very likely), and does so in a way which is likely to prompt viewers to do additional research. It's not as hard on every fact as I wish it were, but it's still way above the mean for a historical film. Stone has also published a 600 page book in response to the hullaballo surrounding the film, inviting and platforming his strongest critics (and responses to them), along with a painstaking bibliography of essentially every fact asserted in the film. [0] I think that deserves commendation; commitment to this degree of dialogue is very rare for a Hollywood film. 0: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/430224.JFK https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/430224.JFK

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

Apparently he bashes wind and solar which is not particularly helpful. Makes his experts look like kooks if they claim "mostly nuclear" is the way forward.

Georgelemental 4y ago
It is the way forward if you want a reliable grid. Solar and wind are intermittent, and the storage technology we would need to make them the primary source of power just doesn't exist yet.
- _Microft 4y ago
  What happens if a nuclear power plant in your area has to be shut down for maintenance?
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    Ever heard of wires? You can send electricity over them.
    - _Microft 4y ago
      These are nuclear wires, right? Because apparantely this does not work for solar and wind as I understand?
      - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
        Yes.
      - gweinberg 4y ago
        Most of the time when it's night where you are, it's also night 100 miles away.
  - HPsquared 4y ago
    There's usually more than one plant, and each plant usually has more than one unit (so they go on a sort of rota), and the maintenance is planned months in advance.

vld_chk 4y ago

Very sad to see that such important topic and message are going to be delivered by such freak. Now people who are against nuclear power will have even more emotional arguments against it. P.S. Specially for people who “if you don’t live nearby: shut up”, I have lived near NPP my entire childhood and both of my parents worked 30+ years in this industry.

epistasis 4y ago
I agree that this is not a beneficial contribution to improving the public debate about nuclear. However the public debate around nuclear is pretty much meaningless until there's a revolution in nuclear technology: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35159449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35159449 Research on nuclear tech is continuing apace, without being influenced by public debate. There are plenty of sites that would love to have new nuclear if such a tech revolution happens, especially at existing NPP.
- erentz 4y ago
  Vogtle is an outlier in most regards. A tech revolution isn’t really needed, the tech works fine. Simplifications of existing tech like the BWRX-300 seem to be gaining a lot of traction (in theory should be more expensive per watt, but can be contracted in more palatable sizes). TVE is pushing ahead with plans to build BWRX-300s. Canada is returning to building nuclear again. As is France. Poland. So on. Sadly it seems the US may lag but that’s the way with a lot of things in this country. It will still be good if other countries can make the advancements. [1] https://twitter.com/_hannahritchie/status/1637121202052374529 https://twitter.com/_hannahritchie/status/163712120205237452...
  - epistasis 4y ago
    That tweet is a hopelessly optimistic reshaping of the data. The Nordhaus paper linked to in a reply is a far better assessment. France's attempts inside France, Finland, and the UK all look like Vogtle. There's all Summer in the US, which fared even worse than Vogtle. For US construction, Vogtle is a best case scenario, matching the disasters of the very last US disasters as well as European construction costs. There is no financial backer that will continue to throw away money like what was done at Vogtle. The next US reactor definitely needs to be something massively different. The SMR might be the next tech, and the BWRX-300 is somehow dubiously cast as an SMR, but "pushing forward" is just some press releases without much chance of success. And that's the fundamental problem with nuclear, it's all hopes and dreams and press releases, along with missing deadlines and budgets if a sufficiently large fool can be found to front the money.

stephc_int13 4y ago

I do think that Nuclear energy is better than fossil fuels, in almost all aspects. Nuclear power is not really that clean, and long-term maintenance or dismantling of nuclear power plants is problematic. Also, while I think we've been under the influence of powerful lobbies linked to oil/coal interests, nuclear power is also an industry with powerful and active lobbies. We should not discount solar and wind based energy production, they are beating expectations and are turning out to be a serious option.

Blackstrat 4y ago

Oliver Stone? As the old saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day. That nuclear energy is a practical way forward may be true. That solar and wind will never meet the world’s energy requirements is also true. But when a wacko like Stone comes out in favor, it raises the question of why.

goodpoint 4y ago
> That nuclear energy is a practical way forward may be true. It's not. > That solar and wind will never meet the world’s energy requirements is also true. It isn't.
- Blackstrat 4y ago
  And your evidence of that?
  - timbit42 4y ago
    We will figure out better ways to store solar and wind energy for when it is night and there is no wind. There are already technologies to do it but I haven't seen any that seem practical to scale globally yet. Ultimately, we will build enough solar and wind capacity to provide more energy than we need for when the days aren't windy or sunny enough.
    - schiffern 4y ago
      >I haven't seen any that seem practical to scale globally yet See Tesla Master Plan Part 3.[0] LiFePO4 batteries can easily scale to the required level, and require no scarce minerals (namely cobalt and nickel). Lithium itself is abundant even outside of China. [0] https://youtu.be/BoGNEZF2XFQ https://youtu.be/BoGNEZF2XFQ
  - Blackstrat 4y ago
    And the land area required to produce even the current power levels, which is unequivocally insufficient to eliminate gasoline powered cars and stoves?

micromacrofoot 4y ago

Oliver Stone would probably do more good for nuclear energy by making a movie against it

isanengineer 4y ago

I don't really care about Oliver Stone, but as a longtime climate activist (and engineer) I'm glad to see any publicity promoting nuclear. I can't take seriously any proposal for reducing fossil fuel generation that doesn't involve nuclear power. The Messmer Plan in France shows that this can be done in a relatively short time frame. They built huge capacity between the 1980s and 2000s and still get 72% of their electricity from nuclear today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messmer_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme... Meanwhile Germany decided to phase out their nuclear generation over decades due to environmental concerns, and ended up re-commission old coal plants to meet demand. The full story of this is complicated and is also thanks to the current gas crisis in Europe, but the fact remains that the decision to phase out nuclear has lead to more carbon emissions, not less. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/qa-why-germany-phasing-out-nuclear-power-and-why-now https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/qa-why-germany-phasing-... I think the US view of nuclear power has been really complicated by the anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s, where nuclear power was (not unreasonably) linked to the military industrial complex. That said, I think the largest obstacle to nuclear power in the US is the federal structure of the government. The US still doesn't have a centralized location for the long-term storage of nuclear waste thanks to Harry Reid killing the Yucca Mountain project in the late 2000s. No state representative has any incentive to allow a facility like that to be constructed in their state, and the federal government is unable or unwilling to force the issue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r... I'm heartened to see climate activists slowly but surely starting to take nuclear seriously. I want to plug Emergency Reactor as doing to difficult work of trying to turn the tide of public perception and make nuclear central to the climate change discourse. https://www.emergencyreactor.org/ https://www.emergencyreactor.org/

greenthrow 4y ago
Nuclear takes way too long to come online. If we decide today to build 40 new reactors around the world it will be decades before they are online and operational. Nuclear is also way too expensive. Building those 40 reactors would cost way, way more than building equivalent production in wind and solar. Renewables and storage are cheaper, faster and yes, safer. There is absolutely no rational reason to keep building new nuclear reactots.

copymoro 4y ago

I'm pretty sure that the real drive behind the pro-nuclear push is and has always been about centralizing electricity "generation" (i.e. conversion); ultimately for reasons of creating authority and/or centralizing power.

twerkmonsta 4y ago
Are you sure it’s not because it’s many times more efficient than any other source of electricity “generation”?
- copymoro 4y ago
  not anymore there are too many government-sized subsidies all over the allegedly (but not really, not at all) free energy market. the energy market is too important to allow 'the market' to fully control it; so it's intervened with subsidies, tax-breaks, and other such kinds of influences (soft controls). so many, and I know/understand so little about this, that I don't think it's necessarily more efficient. the centralized aspect of it (the historical norm for electrical grids) creates POWER besides the electrical.
mikewarot 4y ago
There are several centralized control points already in use. There are only 4 railroads that control most of the coal deliveries in the US. Refineries for petroleum are centralized choke points, as are the distribution networks. The same tends to be true for natural gas. The energy return on investment for oil has been falling, from 100:1 for the early wells, to as little as 2:1 in fracking. We need to give up fossil fuels.
- copymoro 4y ago
  I say we need to give up fuels of all kinds. nuclear is still based on fuel.
timbit42 4y ago
Eventually solar and wind will be so inexpensive that most homes will generate and store all it needs and not require the grid. There are already roof mountable wind turbines that can be used in urban areas with no visible moving parts such as the Halcium PowerPod: https://youtu.be/vg7wW2nnrPU https://youtu.be/vg7wW2nnrPU

pentagrama 4y ago

I don't listen to Joe Rogan podcast, but one day I stumbled upon an interview to Oliver Stone and was instantly glued to him, a mix of wacky and elocuent.

mycall 4y ago

I wonder what he things about Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and how this could happen in other places during war.