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> Humans find can find a way too. Yeah, humans find a way to mess up. Lots of things are in theory perfectly safe, and yet end up playing the lead role in a di

• TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > Yeah, humans find a way to mess up. Lots of things are in theory perfectly safe, and yet end up playing the lead role in a disaster. Sure. This is part of how we learn. We could do better in many aspects, but in general, stumbling on the boundaries is how you expand them. (Not to mention, "nature" / "god" is 100% growth by mistakes and disasters. Evolution means continuously throwing random mutations at a wall in hopes some will stick. We can't possibly do worse than nature.) Also, "disaster" is quite a misleading term here... > Deepwater Horizon and Fukushima were both caused by a corporation cutting costs on safety measures. ... neither of those were disasters in terms of loss of life[0]. All of those were disasters in terms of unnecessary destruction, but they don't prove oil rigs or nuclear energy are fundamentally bad ideas. They only prove corporate greed (in the former case) and paranoia (in the latter case) are problems. > That is the thing humans always find a way to do. Among many other things, including clean victories with no loss of life or ecological damage. -- [0] - Hydroelectric plants are disasters in terms of loss of life, if you want to look at specific failures. Solar PVs are a disaster, if you know how to add numbers. Coal power plants are a disaster, if you know how to integrate.
  • ben_w 3y ago
    > Solar PVs are a disaster, if you know how to add numbers. First time I've heard this claim, can you go into more depth?
  • mcv 3y ago
    Before Fukushima happened, I'd heard lots of people claim that nuclear power could be completely safe. Chernobyl was a fluke; it was because of the old model, the communist system and the unsafe experiment they did, but a modern reactor in a modern country could be perfectly safe, and Fukushima proved that a lie. People will cut corners, they will cut costs, and anything that can go wrong, will at some point go wrong. And yes, Fukushima and Deepwater Horizon were absolutely disasters. Trying to paint them as not disasters is ridiculous. There's no winning argument for you there. And we can absolutely do worse than nature.
    • TeMPOraL 3y ago
      > Before Fukushima happened, I'd heard lots of people claim that nuclear power could be completely safe. Chernobyl was a fluke; it was because of the old model, the communist system and the unsafe experiment they did, but a modern reactor in a modern country could be perfectly safe Still true. > and Fukushima proved that a lie. People will cut corners, they will cut costs, and anything that can go wrong, will at some point go wrong. Yeah, a quite unlikely course of events cracked a plant open enough to cause a leak. Approximately all of the actual negative consequences have came from unnecessary evacuation of a large area. Or were there some new, ground-breaking discoveries made about Fukushima in the last 2 years, of which I'm not aware? > And yes, Fukushima and Deepwater Horizon were absolutely disasters. Trying to paint them as not disasters is ridiculous. Please read with comprehension. "Disaster" as in ecological damage, yes (or sort of, in the case of Fukushima). "Disaster" as in direct cause of large amount of death and sickness? Nope. That's what I said. Two different meanings of the world all too often used to equivocate. > There's no winning argument for you there. And we can absolutely do worse than nature. Yes, there is, and nah, we generally can't, because nature is dumb and doesn't care. It would take a lot of combined malice and ingenuity to outdo it. (Okay, I can accept the argument that we're sorta able to do worse than nature now, because our technology is finally starting to work on comparable scales. Though so far, most of us doing bad is driven by higher-level evolutionary forces - we can't coordinate for shit at scale, so we instead play a lot of "survival of the fittest" games.)