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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 31st, 2023

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  • Yes, given there is no ‘empty land,’ you are always destroying something if you create a windfarm on land. On the other end of this, offshore windfarms unironically create local ecosystems. If your goal is not just decarbonization, but decarbonization in order to better the health of the planet, which it should be, then offshore would be the best option.

    See: Germany tearing down land wind farms in order to mine more coal. Those turbines aren’t going to be repurposed, they’re going to scrap yards.


  • I am in the EU. There is literally no storage for highly radioactive waste.

    Pay to store it in Finland, like everyone else is doing. They currently have a facility that isn’t even a quarter full and can be heavily expanded.

    That’s not true. Nuclear waste can also contaminate ground water, if stored incorrectly. And as we discussed: we have no storage solution for the highly radioactive waste and thus can’t store it correctly.

    Solar panels can contaminate ground water if stored incorrectly, that’s a useless statement.

    And as discussed there are thousands of storage facilities available. Just because your specific economic union has not built one yet, does not mean you cannot use one of the commercial ones, and by the way these long-term storage facilities aren’t the part that store the waste safely. The containers do, and short of a nuclear bomb going off the waste isn’t escaping them. So much so that despite waste existing since the 1960s, there has never been an incident of nuclear waste escaping containment. Ever. Coal spillages have caused more radioactive contamination than nuclear waste.


  • Except can you really say “genociding native americans”

    As a country, the US has spent more of its existence genociding native Americans than allowing women to vote, or having a standing army.

    and “slavery” are a part of American culture?

    The US currently has fully legalized privatized slavery. You, specifically you, can own a slave in the US right now. You can even treat them as if the constitution does not apply to them in any way. Simply buy a prisoner and get a judge to commit that prisoner to you for the length of their sentence. It’s so ingrained in our culture, we’ve never stopped the practice.



  • which is hugely worse for nuclear? What is your point?

    Objectively not. Precious metal mining is more than a thousand times worse for the environment than Uranium or Thorium mining.

    Nuclear power plants require eye watering amounts of concrete.

    Sure, in the 1950s. Modern nuclear reactors can be built in existing Coal plants. Most reactor types don’t require any additional shielding besides what is already present.

    They require continuous (and ever-increasing) extraction of fissile matter such as uranium ore (a limited resource, by the way - if we used nuclear power instead of fossil fuels we would run out pretty quickly, too, all things considered).

    We have mined enough Uranium to power the entire world for the next 10,000 years; there is currently enough Uranium in just known mines for the next 1,000,000 years of current global power usage. And that’s just Uranium. Thorium is a viable technology with the first reactors already online for commercial use.

    Nuclear power also consumes (and irradiates) vast quantities of water.

    No, it doesn’t. This is just outright a lie, one I have no idea where you got. The internal loop never leaves the building, the external loop is never irradiated.

    They are huge nightmares for biodiversity as they are massive projects usually flattening large swathes of land.

    They have a smaller impact than solar or wind farms, by a factor of 100.

    They produce waste which is not only irradiated and hazardous but also a major security risk, so it has to be safeguarded… and/or sealed into a hole in the ground where it will remain a risk for years to come.

    They produce less toxic waste than Coal power plants, and all of the world’s projected nuclear waste for the next 100,000 years fits into existing facilities.

    The building projects themselves are astronomical in scale and require huge quantities of materials to be shipped by fleets and fleets of trucks followed by a lot of industrial work. Then in a couple of decades the site has to be decommissioned which is even more work.

    This is the exact same for renewables, worse, arguably, since wind farms have to be off shore to be efficient and cargo ships are more than a thousand times worse for the environment than any form of overland transport.




  • This is a serious problem I think isn’t actually talked about enough. There is a ‘ring of trust’ on most social media now that in my opinion goes far too far; if you don’t have enough algorithmically determined ‘trust,’ you’ll be booted off without a way to appeal. Reddit shadowbans the vast majority of new accounts, but hasn’t been able to cut down on spambots; Facebook by its nature needs ridiculous amounts of personal information but even then doesn’t actually use it to assign more trust since bot-owners can supply generated information that’s equally as valid; really all social media, especially if you do anything at all to protect your privacy, assumes you’re a spambot first, then only lets you participate after you prove beyond a shadow of a doubt you might be a human. I understand we’re already half way into developing a dead internet, but there’s no reason we need to go full throttle into it by limiting actual humans from signing up past a certain point in a product’s lifespan.




  • Storage, we have less Lithium than you seem to think, and pumped hydro is not a solution – not that it’s not a universal solution, it’s simply not a solution. Implementation costs more than a nuclear reactor and maintenance and security costs are way, way higher than a nuclear reactor. We, unless you want to adopt a powerless overnight lifestyle, need on-demand power generation. Nuclear is the best, safest, cleanest, most feasible option for that until we remove all precious metals from energy storage technology.




  • Nuclear power is exactly as renewable as solar power; and ‘highly’ radioactive waste is a fraction of a fraction of the waste generated, with most waste being less harmful than living within 50 miles of a coal mine, or 100 miles of a coal power plant. It’s also entirely defeated by a relatively small amount of one of the most common metals on Earth. Additionally, if we were to power the entire world with just nuclear power, the amount of unusable waste generated per year globally would be smaller than a compact sedan, requiring a little less than a box-truck sized container to store it safely anywhere on the planet. It would take several tens of billions of years to accumulate to a problematic size for safe storage.


  • The short answer is the fossil fuel industry and those who support it desperately want to encourage any kind of infighting among any and all people concerned with the climate; Greenpeace itself has been funded massively by the oil and coal industries throughout its lifetime specifically to oppose nuclear power. It’s news now because as we look towards energy generation over the next 50 years we can either have large amounts of LNG and coal power plants while we pretend there’s enough Lithium on Earth to support a renewable-based grid, or we can essentially eliminate 100% of natural gas, coal, and oil-based power plants in the next 15 years and work towards renewable grids with post-lithium power storage over the next 150 years. That latter scenario would nearly eliminate the global coal and natural gas industries, and severely harm the oil industry. So the more ‘division’ they can sow to delay a decision in either direction, the better it is for them.