Nuclear power does have a problem where perceptions of danger greatly outweigh the actual danger.
Trying to make nuclear power sound safe by saying that a nuclear bombing isn't that bad is not helping. I fucking hate these two dipshits.
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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Right? I'm not an anti-nuclear person in general (although I think it's becoming mores superfluous as other methods become more efficient), but "thousands of people died and then they built a new city, so don't worry" is so fucking stupid.
(although I think it’s becoming mores superfluous as other methods become more efficient),
Yeah, nuclear power plants are expensive and slow to construct. 20 years ago, hell, 10 years ago, I would've said "Yes, building new plants or making major expansions is still a good idea." Now? Renewables are advancing so fast that it's probably economically unwise to make major investments in nuclear power.
Nuclear energy has insane energy density in terms of MJ/kg (something like 3.9 x 10^6 ) versus chemical fuels (4.5 x 10^1), but it's grossly inefficient because most of the output is waste heat and "hot" isotopes-- the last things we need. I don't have hard numbers on hand but I wouldn't say nuclear is more than a few tens of percent efficiency. Then there's the capital costs to build, maintain and operate plants PLUS costs to source, refine, transport, and store the fuel, and then transport and discard (contain) waste product. Not worth it at scale.
Versus Solar, Wind and Tidal which are far less energy dense per unit mass of working fluid¹, but enjoy up to 80% efficiency, and are relatively easy to scale.
Nuclear still makes sense, I think, in interior areas like the American Midwest where wind and solar are fickle, and transportation (transmission) costs for tidal would be unsustainable.
¹ Not a fair comparison because solar efficiency is quantized on intensity x area / time, while wind and tidal would quantized on flux density, or (mass / area) x velocity (over time?).
I think it would make the most sense at high latitudes. Where they don't get enough sun for solar and maintenance on iced-up turbine blades would be a pain in the ass.
Nuclear still makes sense, I think, in interior areas like the American Midwest where wind and solar are fickle, and transportation (transmission) costs for tidal would be unsustainable.
There's another downside to depending on nuclear power that wasn't so much an issue in the past, but is now, and will be even more in the future: the required cooling capacity to operate a nuclear reactor.
The reason nuclear power plants are built next to large bodies of water is that the waste heat needs to be dispersed somewhere. The heat is transferred to the body of water (lake, river, sea or ocean). Except now with climate change the bodies of water are already warmer so they cannot take away as much heat. In other places drought is reducing the amount of water, meaning less waste heat can be carried away. If you can't get rid of waste heat from your reactor, you have to turn it off until you have sufficient heat dispersal available.
This isn't theoretical. Its been happening sporadically for almost a decade. Here's an article from 2018 detailing Finland having to turn off reactors because of ocean temperatures too high to operate.:
"Finland's Loviisa power plant, located about 65 miles outside Helsinki, first slightly reduced its output on Wednesday. "The situation does not endanger people, [the] environment or the power plant," its operator, the energy company Fortum, wrote in a statement. The seawater has not cooled since then, and the plant continued to reduce its output on both Thursday and Friday, confirmed the plant's chief of operations, Timo Eurasto. "The weather forecast [means] it can continue at least a week. But hopefully not that long," he said."
I don't know why more people aren't talking about this when they recommend nuclear power for a climate changing world. Its only going to get hotter from now on, which means we'll be able to effectively only use less nuclear power plant capacity.
exactly. it isn't that they're unsafe, its that there's more effective options that aren't oil.
not as scary as people think
This painting/drawing is from artist Kichisuke Yoshimura, who said of it, “Their clothes ripped to shreds, their skin hanging down. On the riverbank I saw figures that seemed to be from another world. Ghost-like, their hair falling over their faces, their clothes ripped to shreds, their skin hanging. A cluster of these injured persons was moving wordlessly toward the outskirts.”
Not scary: some people were vaporized leaving only a shadow, others badly burned as the painting shows, people were maimed and amputated by the blast, and a big part of the city was blown and burned down. Plus the poor souls who would die horribly from acute radiation poisoning over the following days.
And let's not forget those nuclear weapons were some of the very first ever made. Modern atomic weapons can range from Hiroshima-size to turning a mountain into a radioactive lake range. Thankfully no hydrogen bomb has even been used in anger because that would be a completely different level of horror (and likely the trigger to the end of human civilization).
Many nuclear powers have policies to fire nukes on warning. That means they would shoot back even before the enemy nuke hits them. Shoot when the nukes are confirmed to be incoming.
Republicans love to regularly talk down the World-ending horror that would be using atomic weapons in war. During Bush Jr.'s "war on terror" they were already talking about using bunker-buster nukes and tried to diminish the well-deserved stigma of nuclear weapons.
Renaming them atomic weapons "Musk bombs" sounds hilariously misguided.
John Hersey's book, Hiroshima, which is a book of personal accounts he recorded just one year after the event from six people who were there, is one of the most haunting things you will ever read.
some children where at home after the bomb fell and they said a horrific burnt figure on fours came crawling in and died. It was so burnt black and horrifically melted they thought it was a dog. It was their mother.
absolutely sickening these “men” I wish i could just absolutely take it to these pieces of shit and beat them senseless.
He should be strapped to a spacex rocket and sent to the sun. It isn't as scary as you think.
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I have an idea Elon - how about we bomb your house with you in it? I'm sure after a while some other people will build another house there and move in, so it's all good, right?
Yea, it wouldn't be as bad as he thinks.
They're really working on making World War III attractive. That's not a joke. They long for war.
It's the absolute decadence of having a generation of youngsters offered up to the blood God for your personal indulging of geopolitical prowess
We already had two World Wars and civilization still exists. It's not as scary as people think, basically. /s
It would be really fun to punch him in the face for like 30 minutes.
The internet has come full circle!
There used to be a game in the 90's where you punch Bill Gates in the face.
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The World Trade Center was destroyed by terrorists, but they built a new one. Not as scary as you think.
Elon is like that greasy kid in high school who would correct the History teacher with facts he learned by posting on /pol/. "Actually, the slaves loved being slaves because they got free housing and healthcare."
Can someone please line his shit ass up against the wall already?
There is a reason people call them Weird. Anyone who calls the death of hundreds of thousands of people "not as scary as people think" needs their heads examined. And with those two, I would not mind if that would be perfomed in the autopsy department.
Simply flee the country on a private jet or crawl into your billion-dollar bunker and the blast cannot impact you, what's the problem? It's only going to kill hundreds of thousands of poors, NBD.
Wait, that's the old tech... it's only going to kill millions of poors, NBD.
I'd like to take a moment to share this video about what happens to the human body at different zones of the blast. It's pretty horrific, but simulated.
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Can people stop trying Musk like he is some sort of "cool bro" idol?
Big difference between the original atomic bombs he's talking about and current (or even decades-old) thermonuclear weapons. This is just ignorant rambling from someone that wants to be "smart".
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Somebody should let these geniuses know that nuclear weapons are now a thousand times stronger, and there are thousands of times as many spread all over the world.
Plus they’re doing the old people thing where they pretend the past was all great. Plus there’s probably some kind of bigoted/xenophobic undertone, because after all it didn’t happen to the people that matter to them. (Which is very few people honestly)
Ok, so now that's Japan, EU, UK and Brazil that hate elon's guts. He's gonna start to run out of democracies to fuck with, will he move on to dictators or is that friendly fire?
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Let's associate a nuclear power plant with Elon's record of dumping mercury in waterways and not giving a shit about safety.
If Elon musk goes into nuclear energy I guarantee you, the plant he would make will have a meltdown that would make Fukushima and Chernobyl look tame by comparison.
The Japanese people witnessing those events might have a second opinion.
This guy studied physics at MIT right? Doesn't know how dangerous atomic bombs are?
He didn't study at MIT. He studied at UPenn and lied about having graduated from there two years earlier than he did, for some reason
Ah my mistake. Reading his wikipedia right now, it says, "he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League university in Philadelphia, where he earned two degrees: a Bachelor of Arts in physics, and a Bachelor of Science in economics from the university's Wharton School." Had no idea Bachelor of Arts in physics was a thing. But economics is Bachelor of Science? What happened there? Is that a mistake? Physics is a hard science.
At some schools, any major can result in a BA or BS depending on which electives you take.
Definitely resulted in huge pile of BS with Musk.
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He's gonna run for president some time in the future, mark my words. And he's gonna be a lot worse than Trump.
He can't right? Born in South-Africa, so he's ineligible.
That would count on the Supreme Court not to mess with this for a Republican candidate.
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Cool story Elon. Tell us, how bad would it be if a Fat Man bomb was detonated over your house? Pretty bad? Yeah now STFU.
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