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Guavanaut posted:Or Big Glass Their latest grift is huge amounts of money on adverts promoting their green credentials, multiple times more than they are actually investing in green technologies, all the while ramping up fossil fuel investments. Jedit posted:No, they're just neoliberal Luddite morons. They do have legitimate concerns about the handling of nuclear waste, but those are averted by putting strong controls on the bodies in charge of generation - which would usually be the government anyway. What Green policies are neoliberal? I get people not liking the nuclear arguments. But can you point me to some examples of the green party being a neo-liberal one please. - Nationalising all public services - Increase corporation tax - Shift various taxes onto the most wealthy, scrap taxes on the poor - End war on drugs - Increase NHS funding - Remove privatisation from the NHS - Increase public wages in-line with inflation These policies don't scream neo-liberal to me. I'm not being antagonistic here, I'm considering joining the Greens and if they are neo-liberal I'd think better of it. Mega Comrade fucked around with this message at 11:35 on Aug 9, 2022 |
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Aug 9, 2022 11:19
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Grey Hunter posted:"True" fusion is also getting closer - they are building a prototype reactor north of Didcot. Hasn't it been 'getting closer' since about the 1950s now?
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Aug 9, 2022 11:26
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feedmegin posted:Hasn't it been 'getting closer' since about the 1950s now? Yeah, but they made a big step forward and doubled the power they got out of the test. they think they may even be able to break even with a larger plant (which they are now building). It's the holy grail of power though, we are pretty sure it can be done, but can't quite get there yet. Also science is slow, unless there's a war on.
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Aug 9, 2022 11:28
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My issue with Nuclear Power is if the Nucelar Waste isn't that dangerous, why is it never kept near the production facility? Sellafield has for decades pumped it's spent waste into the Irish Sea. Which raises a further point, the Irish don't get any benefit from the UK's Nuclear energy facilities....but we do get the cost associated with the waste being dumped near us. I think the world mass switching to Nucelar power is just going to create conditions where rich countries will dump their waste into poorer ones. Which granted, already happens. Just with much more dangerous materials. Not to mention that there will absolutely be a race to the bottom in terms of quality of reactors if they start being mass adopted.
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Aug 9, 2022 11:34
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Usually because of political reasons rather than scientific ones. People are told that the waste is super dangerous so you get nimbyism, whereas with coal waste you can just heap it up and nobody says anything until it collapses and kills a bunch of kids.feedmegin posted:Hasn't it been 'getting closer' since about the 1950s now? Turns out it's the MEMS accelerometers and gyros that ended up everywhere because of smartphones that are key to making a jetpack that doesn't faceplant you into the tarmac on fire, so we kinda have jetpacks now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7N24DsQMkU Similar things with fusion, the precise control loops that keeps plasma stable for more than a fraction of a second is starting to come from videos game technology.
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Aug 9, 2022 11:39
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The Question IRL posted:
I'm not sure what those costs are exactly? The Irish EPA has repeatedly said over the years that Sellafield has no real impact on the Irish sea, marine life, seafood. I guess producing these reports takes time and money, but we have an EPA either way. The Windscale fire in the 50s didn't seem to have any affect here. There were claims of Down Syndrome and leukemia clusters, I'm pretty doubtful that low-level aerosolized radiation could cause meiotic non-dysjunction so I don't buy the DS clusters, the leukemia cases also probably spurious based on the epidemiology done post-Chernobyl
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Aug 9, 2022 11:45
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Failed Imagineer posted:I'm not sure what those costs are exactly? The Irish EPA has repeatedly said over the years that Sellafield has no real impact on the Irish sea, marine life, seafood. I guess producing these reports takes time and money, but we have an EPA either way. The Windscale fire in the 50s didn't seem to have any affect here. There were claims of Down Syndrome and leukemia clusters, I'm pretty doubtful that low-level aerosolized radiation could cause meiotic non-dysjunction so I don't buy the DS clusters, the leukemia cases also probably spurious based on the epidemiology done post-Chernobyl Okay, but if there is no downside to it, why does the UK get to decide to dump it nearer to us than to keep it in their own waters?
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Aug 9, 2022 11:50
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The Question IRL posted:Okay, but if there is no downside to it, why does the UK get to decide to dump it nearer to us than to keep it in their own waters? Dump all nuclear waste in the Thames if it's so safe
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Aug 9, 2022 11:55
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The Question IRL posted:Okay, but if there is no downside to it, why does the UK get to decide to dump it nearer to us than to keep it in their own waters? I guess because "gently caress you", and RoI residents aren't voting for MPs. Why does the UK get to decide to occupy 6 counties of our country? Why UK at all?
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Aug 9, 2022 12:02
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It's probably more the case that it's only those sites on the west coast that generate significant amounts of press and controversy. There won't be anything in the Irish press about Torness or Hartlepool venting water into the Irish Sea because they don't and can't. There used to be similar fretting in Southern England about the French site at La Hague, but nothing ever came of it. Ireland benefits from nuclear via the Moyle and EWIC interconnects same as Britain benefits from French nuclear via IFA 1 & 2, and the huge old peat fired stations at West Offaly and Lough Ree did an order of magnitude more damage to people and the environment.
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Aug 9, 2022 12:03
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Nuclear is absolutely the best form of energy creation we have available currently. Greenest too.
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Aug 9, 2022 12:04
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forkboy84 posted:Dump all nuclear waste in the Thames if it's so safe Would it actually make the Thames any worse?
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Aug 9, 2022 12:24
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It might kill the bacteria that put Darius Campbell in a coma.
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Aug 9, 2022 12:26
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The Question IRL posted:My issue with Nuclear Power is if the Nucelar Waste isn't that dangerous, why is it never kept near the production facility? The Netherlands keeps its nuclear waste in a storage facility quite close to its only nuclear power plant, with the same site also storing waste from hospitals, laboratories and a couple of research and medical reactors.
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Aug 9, 2022 12:27
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And works of art, because it's better climate controlled than the gallery and museum storage. https://twitter.com/0ddette/status/1284518784049582083
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Aug 9, 2022 12:30
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Guavanaut posted:It's probably more the case that it's only those sites on the west coast that generate significant amounts of press and controversy. There won't be anything in the Irish press about Torness or Hartlepool venting water into the Irish Sea because they don't and can't. Are they like, liquidizing the spent fuel rods and pouring them into the ocean (it's perfectly legal) or is the reactor just using open cycle cooling with the north sea as the reservoir? Because the latter is like, ok whatever? Not sure why I should be bothered about that.
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Aug 9, 2022 12:33
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piano chimp posted:Would it actually make the Thames any worse? Yes, I'd imagine so. Anyway, because I've no interest in the nuclear chat, have something much worse: Polly Toynbee https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/09/murdoch-press-recession-austerity-brexit-truss-sunak "If the Murdoch press is so panicked about recession, why did it back austerity and Brexit?" GOTTEM POLLY, that'll make Rupert reconsider.
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Aug 9, 2022 12:34
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The Question IRL posted:Sellafield has for decades pumped it's spent waste into the Irish Sea. What? Just... what?
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Aug 9, 2022 12:36
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OwlFancier posted:Are they like, liquidizing the spent fuel rods and pouring them into the ocean (it's perfectly legal) or is the reactor just using open cycle cooling with the north sea as the reservoir? The actual rods enter and leave on the Durham coast line, so they end up in a far scarier place like Darlington.
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Aug 9, 2022 12:40
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Ok yeah that is not "pumping spent waste into the sea" any more than me going to the beach to cool down is pumping my waste into the sea (i do not poo poo or piss in the sea(directly, i have no idea what northumbrian water do with it)) I drive past hartlepool every now and then and 1. there is a very nice nature reserve directly next to it at seal sands, and 2. they are building some weird thing next to it that I don't know what it is but it looks like the world's densest wind farm. E: looking it up on street view I actually think it might be a massive scrappers yard because on the 2021 images the big white poles aren't there but there is instead what appears to be a landbound oil rig.  (the NPP is the big square building on the left) OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 12:51 on Aug 9, 2022 |
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Aug 9, 2022 12:41
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forkboy84 posted:Yes, I'd imagine so. I was only joking. The water quality in the Thames (apparently declared "biologically dead" in the 50s) has improved significantly recently despite the best efforts of Thames Water, to the point where wildlife (including seahorses!) is steadily returning. Probably not my first choice location for dumping nuclear waste.
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Aug 9, 2022 12:46
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forkboy84 posted:Yes, I'd imagine so. God that link is a series of interesting keywords. I'll take "whats wrong with this country" for ten.
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Aug 9, 2022 12:51
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piano chimp posted:I was only joking. The water quality in the Thames (apparently declared "biologically dead" in the 50s) has improved significantly recently despite the best efforts of Thames Water, to the point where wildlife (including seahorses!) is steadily returning. Probably not my first choice location for dumping nuclear waste. The nuclear waste should be stored under the houses of Parliament so they can benefit from the enhanced security there. Edit - also prior to recent events didn't the Chernobyl exclusion zone have some pretty sweet rewilding going on?
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Aug 9, 2022 13:01
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OwlFancier posted:because on the 2021 images the big white poles aren't there they all got sent back din'therr? simples.
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Aug 9, 2022 13:01
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The nuclear waste should be put in a big rocket and shot up the queen's jacksie.
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Aug 9, 2022 13:03
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Z the IVth posted:Edit - also prior to recent events didn't the Chernobyl exclusion zone have some pretty sweet rewilding going on? Yes and no. The animals there have a lot of health problems; birth defects, low bone density, just generally poor health. But they are still living there, because there are no people.
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Aug 9, 2022 13:09
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keep punching joe posted:The nuclear waste should be put in a big rocket and shot up the queen's jacksie.  HRH Queen Elizabeth II of the House of Windsor
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Aug 9, 2022 13:10
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Make it in to little briquettes and hand them out to pensioners to heat their homes this winter.
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Aug 9, 2022 13:11
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radmonger posted:Yes, that’s the key. Beware of any one who describes a thing as ‘uneconomical’ without specifying whether they mean _expensive_ or merely _unprofitable_. Iceland is largely powered by geothermal and hydroelectric energy, which have stable supply. Consumer prices are half what they are in the UK, leaving the near-monopoly energy supplier with a paltry 2 digit profit. i don't have much to add other than this is a really good post and basically hit the nail on the head. nuclear is great but i think what irritates me about this discussion is it's so maximalist, proponents always represent nuclear power as the question, the answer and everything in between. there are lots of places where we can use nuclear power but there are lots of other places where it makes more sense to leverage other sources. it's about both having some redundancy if one source has an unforeseen issue and also what fits the local context; not just sort by tonnes of concrete poured and then optimise on that likewise there's a lot of idealised talk about how nuclear should be run and it often doesn't actually match up practice, we're not particularly good at making it work long term. france has invested heavily in nuclear power and is currently in a complete state. i'm sure the answer is to fix those specific issues rather than total about face but clearly there is more to it than just minmax on this one particular technology
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Aug 9, 2022 13:37
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forkboy84 posted:The Luddites were right though, the new technology was great for the people who owned it, but for everyone else unemployment rose, conditions for those working in mills were notoriously grim. At a time before trade unionism had even really coalesced as an idea industrial sabotage was a valid response when the government of the day did gently caress all for the unemployed, the role models of the Tories. I kind of hate this argument. Every time some wild anti-technologist gets called a luddite someone pops up to say "actually the Luddites weren't what you think and they were right!" It's true of course, but we obviously aren't talking about the historical Luddites, or early-19th century politics. Sucks for the long-dead Luddites I suppose that their movement has been misrepresented but it's been 200 years and words change meaning over time. Anyway, nuclear power is great, and provides very low carbon energy for reasonable cost (in the long term). The downside is that it takes a long time to build plants, longer than we have to fix the problem now. So it's not the solution to the climate crisis. We should still build it though because, lol: https://twitter.com/mlanetrain/status/1556381583585804291 However, nuclear was the solution, or a big chunk of the solution anyway, and the reason we didn't go all-in on nuclear back when it really could have helped is in large part down to the green movement. The green movement has at its core an anti-technology (and yeah, luddite) ideology where the ideal is that everyone lives in some kind of bucolic pre-industrial fantasy. The problem with that fantasy is that that kind of lifestyle is fundamentally incapable of supporting 8 billion people. So the green movement usually moves into "well, there should be fewer people" where things start to get pretty loving spicy. We've been here before. In the 70s there was the concern of the "Population Bomb" - based on then-current trends, it appeared that global population growth would soon outstrip the ability to produce enough food to feed that amount of people. Was the green movement's solution to radically improve farming techniques and technology? No, it was to let India starve. The Green Party still supports organic farming (it's in the manifesto on their website), which basically means pre-1970s farming practices even though it's incredibly inefficient and bad for the environment, and widespread use would starve billions. They managed to wait out nuclear power until it was no longer a major solution to climate change, but they always hated it because it was scary technology, even though it could help save the wider environment. They opposed fusion power research for the same reason, even though it fixed even the minor downsides of fission nuclear. Fundamentally, the dream of the traditional green movement are everyone being lovely Tom and Barbara living out the Good Life but in the actual countryside, and if that requires radically fewer people living on the planet, well, it's probably not going to be the people like Tom and Barbara who are going to have to not be around any more. Comrade Fakename fucked around with this message at 13:58 on Aug 9, 2022 |
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Aug 9, 2022 13:45
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Generally my view is that we need to build as much as we can of every non-carbon power source that we have currently available, and that includes nuclear, rather than waiting for new technology that may or may not solve our problems. e: and saying that nuclear takes too long to build is also a bad argument because it's not like we'll have reached net zero by 2032 SixFigureSandwich fucked around with this message at 13:48 on Aug 9, 2022 |
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Aug 9, 2022 13:45
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Yeah I don't really understand the argument of "energy source X takes Y years to build, but we need energy now" against X. I can confidently say we won't have fixed the world's energy supply needs in Y years, so we should probably plan ahead a little bit? It's not just nuclear - geothermal also takes 5-10 years to get up and running, medium hydro plants up to 5 years, basically anything that isn't already approved and just waiting for somene to show up at the site with a golden shovel will need feasibility studies, surveys, funding provisions, environmental impact studies, local consultation, engineering and architectural plans, etc. Even a small wind farm can easily take two years from proposal to the first watt being generated.
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Aug 9, 2022 14:01
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SixFigureSandwich posted:Generally my view is that we need to build as much as we can of every non-carbon power source that we have currently available, and that includes nuclear, rather than waiting for new technology that may or may not solve our problems. Absolutely. Go tits on building as much and as varied energy generation as we can until we've got more than enough to be energy self-sufficient without importing gas or oil or even electricity directly. Sell the excess back to other countries and be glad of it in the future when our energy needs inevitably continue to grow. And obviously run it all as a national industry. It'll be expensive as hell but that doesn't actually matter at all, and it'll be cheaper than not doing it.
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Aug 9, 2022 14:01
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Yeah this. People tend to be maximalist on nuclear, but that's an understandable reaction to decades of people like Greenpeace chatting pure shite and implying that La Hague is entirely staffed by burly Frenchmen tipping nuclear waste barrels into the Channel while laughing in French, or that every amount of radiation gives you cancer and plants release it on purpose. We shouldn't build nuclear and then just rest on our laurels, it's long past time to do that, but SMRs are part of a strategy that includes wind and solar until we can get the other big types on line.
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Aug 9, 2022 14:11
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People always snub their nose at the idea of de-population being a means of solving climate change, but hear me out. What if we just took the top wealthiest 10% from each country, and just threw them into the sea? They are the most polluting sector of people, I could see it having quite an effect.
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Aug 9, 2022 14:29
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Wouldn't work in the UK as they have gills.
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Aug 9, 2022 14:32
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Can't wait until Dounreay is safe enough to be a brownfield site in 2330!
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Aug 9, 2022 14:45
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The Question IRL posted:My issue with Nuclear Power is if the Nucelar Waste isn't that dangerous, why is it never kept near the production facility? You know far less than you think you do, and you don't seem to be confident in your knowledge to begin with. The effects of dumping waste coolant in the ocean are literally meaningless. I am not using literally metaphorically. There is no difference you can measure after a few hours, mostly due to the energy from sunlight. Processed nuclear waste isn't entirely safe, it's nearly as bad as coal ash, but we do have safe ways of permanently getting rid of it... but it's a lot cheaper to just dump it in a deep enough hole, and frankly, that's fine. Most of the risk is in transporting it to the right hole. You can make arguments about what will happen in ten thousand years, and if you think that's a legitimate reason to not just store it in a hole, that's because you're ignorant and listening to oil company propaganda. Because it's nowhere close to being as dangerous as fossil fuel related waste. We could produce all the power we use today with nuclear power and keep it up for centuries before we had enough nuclear waste to rival the problems of fossil fuel waste, even without generating any new fossil fuel waste. I'm picking my words carefully there - we could sustain current levels of power use, but power use has been increasing at a rate we can't sustain, even with nuclear. The worry about rich countries dumping their waste onto poor countries isn't realistic - there just isn't enough nuclear waste for that to make any sense, you'd need to be a Captain Planet villain to turn it into a problem. Now, that whole bit about the reactors needing constant safety inspections by competent, dedicated, well-funded people is a perfectly valid concern. It's still far cheaper than fossil fuels when considering the cost to society, but someone needs to keep the government honest about power generation.
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Aug 9, 2022 14:47
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endlessmonotony posted:
Captain planet villain you say? https://imemc.org/article/un-report-israel-using-syrian-golan-for-radioactive-nuclear-waste-dump/ Fun fact, until 1982, the UK accounted for 73% of radioactive waste dumping into the Atlantic. So far it's not had too much of an impact. Hopefully we are all dead by the time the concrete containers errode away.  (Ocean nuclear waste dumping has been banned internationally these days, not to be confused with cooling water dumping which is still allowed) Mega Comrade fucked around with this message at 15:14 on Aug 9, 2022 |
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Aug 9, 2022 15:04
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endlessmonotony posted:The effects of dumping waste coolant in the ocean are literally meaningless. I am not using literally metaphorically. There is no difference you can measure after a few hours, mostly due to the energy from sunlight. That's not quite true, warm water being dispersed into the ocean can have an pretty significant adverse effect on local marine life (thermal pollution is the phrase to look up). Moreso if you're discharging into a river or lake. Of course, that's as true of any other thermal power plant using steam as it is of nuclear - coal, geothermal, even solar.
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Aug 9, 2022 15:12
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