She can’t move in ANY direction. For all her power and all the fearsome stories about her, she is limited to only 2 dimensions… She hasn’t even the concept of an UP. That is her greatest weakness.
We’d just be disappointed again. The right would hate him more than Hillary and corporatist Dems still control the DNC. They wouldn’t let him win.
OTOH a common opinion I hear is that he probably has more capability for direct lasting change being where he is, and I can see that being true, so there is that bit of small comfort.
I know it’s just a meme, but Krusty would be a silly and ineffective president at worst. You’d have to combine the worst traits of many of the shows most horrible characters to create someone similar to trump, and even then I’m not sure any character in that show attempted a coup and sent a mob to attack the Capitol.
People are kind of missing the point of the meme. The point is that Nuclear is down there along with renewables in safety and efficiency. It’s lacking the egregious cover up in the original meme, even if it has legitimate concerns now. And due to society’s ever increasing demand for electricity, we will heavily benefit from having a more scalable solution that doesn’t require covering and potentially disrupting massive amounts of land before their operations can be scaled up to meet extraordinary demand. Wind turbines and solar panels don’t stop working when we can’t use their electricity either, so it’s not like we can build too many of them or we risk creating complications out of peak hours. Many electrical networks aren’t built to handle the loads. A nuclear reactor can be scaled down to use less fuel and put less strain on the electrical network when unneeded.
It should also be said that money can’t always be spent equally everywhere. And depending on the labor required, there is also a limit to how manageable infrastructure is when it scales. The people that maintain and build solar panels, hydro, wind turbines, and nuclear, are not the same people. And if we acknowledge that climate change is an existential crisis, we must put our eggs in every basket we can, to diversify the energy transition. All four of the safest and most efficient solutions we have should be tapped into. But nuclear is often skipped because of outdated conceptions and fear. It does cost a lot and takes a while to build, but it fits certain shapes in the puzzle that none of the others do as well as it does.
Some personal thoughts: My own country (The Netherlands) has despite a very vocal anti-nuclear movement in the 20th century completely flipped now to where the only parties not in favor of Nuclear are the Greens, who at times quote the fear as a reason not to do it. As someone who treats climate change as truly existential for our country that lies below projected sea levels, it makes them look unreasonable and not taking the issue seriously. We have limited land too, and a housing crisis on top of it. So land usage is a big pain point for renewables, and even if the land is unused, it is often so close to civilization that it does affect people’s feelings of their surroundings when living near them, which might cause renewables to not make it as far as it could unrestricted. A nuclear reactor takes up fractions of the space, and can be relatively hidden from people.
All the other parties who heavily lean in to combating climate change at least acknowledge nuclear as an option that should (and are) being explored. And even the more climate skeptical parties see nuclear as something they could stand behind. Having broad support for certain actions is also important to actually getting things done. Our two new nuclear powered plants are expected to be running by 2035. Only ten years from now, ahead of our climate goals to be net-zero in 2040.
I think the option of nuclear needs to be on the table, and in some (or many) circumstances it might be the best fit.
Presently in Australia one of our two major parties is campaigning on a “pivot to nuclear” platform, but we’re kind the polar opposite to the netherlands (both figuratively and literally?). The vast majority of Australia is sunny desert, girt by sea, with a tiny population in on the coast. My state is something like 2,000km by 1,250km, with about 2 million people. Nuclear just doesn’t seem like a good fit right now.
My concern is that with this pivot to nuclear we basically just keep burning coal for the next 20 years while we’re building nuclear plants.
It might be a great idea to build several reactors, while we furiously build out wind and solar.
There are some gargantuan solar hydrogen cracking projects not far from here in the planning phase which just sound amazing to me.
My own country (The Netherlands) has despite a very vocal anti-nuclear movement in the 20th century completely flipped now to where the only parties not in favor of Nuclear are the Greens, who at times quote the fear as a reason not to do it. As someone who treats climate change as truly existential for our country that lies below projected sea levels, it makes them look unreasonable and not taking the issue seriously.
I’m not from Netherlands, but very much belive this.
Most greens are very wierd. They claim to be against malnutrition and vitamin deficiency, but when it comes to solutions, they are against them(see golden rice). They are also mostly vegans, but when it comes to insulin, they would rather kill lots of pigs instead of scary-scary GMO yeast. Or when it comes to energy production, they rather would choose one with guaranteed dangers(coal has very nasty byproducts of burning) instead of potential.
I heard some greens in landlocked municipality(or whatever they call it in Britain) ruled against solar in favour of tidal. While same party in costal municipality ruled against of tidal.
I see biggest problem not in production, not in is it nuclear, but in is it buisness as usual. Capitalism knows no end to greed.
Most greens are very wierd. They claim to be against malnutrition and vitamin deficiency, but when it comes to solutions, they are against them(see golden rice). They are also mostly vegans, but when it comes to insulin, they would rather kill lots of pigs instead of scary-scary GMO yeast. Or when it comes to energy production, they rather would choose one with guaranteed dangers(coal has very nasty byproducts of burning) instead of potential.
I think this is probably because they represent a more dangerous and legitimate opposition to the powers that be, and, as a result, tend to be one of the most astroturfed groups on the planet. Couple that with a kind of extremism, where they will oppose golden rice or GMO yeast on the basis of evergreening IP laws (a fair complaint, imo), and then you can kind of see why they keep opposing things that are presented as solutions and keep getting hit with the terminally annoying “well, why don’t you have any solutions, then?” style of criticism.
In germany we use more space for golf courses and christmas trees than renewables. Compared to the land used tongrow animal feed thats a drop in a bucket. You could eat a little less meat and have more than enough room for 100% renewables.
Sorry, but that is far from correct. Of course you can throttle wind and solar production if you want, but the problem of to much energy is a nice to have. You could create Hydrogen or desalinate water in large scales if you got energy left over Regarding nuclear power: If you calculate the cost of nuclear and include that you need to store the waste for thousands of years it’s not cheap either. And you also need to source the fuel from somewhere. Uranium is not abundant. And also it takes 20 years to build an new plant. By then it will be even lest cost effective. Rather continue with wind and solar and then batteries for the money.
If you calculate the cost of nuclear and include that you need to store the waste for thousands of years i
This hasn’t been true for decades.
High Level Nuclear waste, aka spent fuel, can be run through breeder reactors or other new gen types to drastically reduce their radioactive half-life to decades and theoretically years with designs proposed in the last few years. Only reason reactors don’t do this is lack of funding and demand for such things, the amount of high level waste produced is miniscule per year. And there are theories proposed already that could reduce ot further but nuclear phobia pushed by the oil lobby prevents proper funding and RnD to properly push those advancements to production.
You can certainly try to use the power as much as possible, or sell the energy to a country with a deficit. But the problem is that you would still need to invest a lot of money to make sure the grid can handle the excess if you build renewables to cover 100% of the grid demand for now and in the future. Centralized fuel sources require much less grid changes because it flows from one place and spreads from there, so infrastructure only needs to be improved close to the source. Renewables as decentralized power sources requires the grid to be strengthened anywhere they are placed, and often that is not practical, both in financial costs and in the engineers it takes to actually do that.
Would it be preferable? Yes. Would it happen before we already need to be fully carbon neutral? Often not.
I’d refer you to my other post about the situation in my country. We have a small warehouse of a few football fields which stores the highest radioactivity of unusable nuclear fuel, and still has more than enough space for centuries. The rest of the fuel is simply re-used until it’s effectively regular waste. The time to build two new nuclear reactors here also costs only about 10 years, not 20.
Rather continue with wind and solar and then batteries for the money.
All of these things should happen regardless of nuclear progress. And they do happen. But again, building renewables isn’t just about the price.
My issue with nuclear energy isn’t that it’s dangerous or that it’s inherently bad. The world needs a stable source of energy that compensates for wind and solar fluctuations anyways. For the current realistic alternatives that’s either going to be nuclear or coal/oil/natural gas. We have nothing else for this purpose, end of discussion.
My problem is the assumption underlying this discussion about nuclear energy that it somehow will solve all of our problems or that it will somehow allow us to continue doing business as usual. That’s categorically not the case. The climate crisis has multiple fronts that need to be dealt with and the emissions is just one of them. Even if we somehow managed to find the funds and resources to replace all non renewable energy with nuclear, we would still have solved just 10% of the problem, and considering that this cheap new energy will allow us to increase our activities and interventions in the planet, the situation will only worsen.
Nuclear energy is of course useful, but it’s not the answer. Never has technology been the answer for a social and political issue. We can’t “science and invent” our way out of this, it’s not about the tech, it’s about who decides how it will be used, who will profit from it, who and how much will be affected by it etc. If you want to advocate for a way to deal with the climate crisis you have to propose a complete social and political plan that will obviously include available technologies, so stop focusing on technologies and start focusing on society and who takes the decisions.
One simple example would be the following: no matter how green your energy is, if the trend in the US is to have increasingly bigger cars and no public transport, then the energy demands will always increase and no matter how many nuclear plants you build, they will only serve as an additional source and not as a replacement. So no matter how many plants you build, the climate will only deteriorate.
This is literally how the people in charge have decided it will work. Any new developing energy source that is invented serves only to increase the consumption, not to replace previous technologies. That’s the case with solar and wind as well. So all of this discussion you all make about nuclear Vs oil or whatever is literally irrelevant. The problem is social and political, not technological.
So I work for a large enterprise type software with a database. And because our installer is trash, we don’t trust clients to do it. It’s very common for the installer to error out with SQL error messages and we have to go fix things in the database. Think stupid things like if a value is null in one field, installer crashes.
So they call in, get paperwork for a test upgrade (we require they upgrade a test database first), then after they email that paperwork and it’s approved by management, the call to schedule the test appointment happens. Then 3 days before the actual appointment, we can call them and transfer via Bomgar the files they need. Because we don’t wanna give them the needed files early for… reasons never explained properly to me.
Then the actual install/upgrade call happens.
Then we do it all over again for the live.
Welcome to corporate policy that’s been building over 20 years, and never cut back. Things get added to the install process, never removed.
Well for the same reason lots of not great software is used.
It was once the best (or only) in the market, and now it’d cost literally millions of dollars to change in training/conversion/hardware changes. As long as we keep above the “We cause less damage than a change costs” folks stay.
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