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Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting! NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
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The nuclear discussion completely ignores the point/problem imo. The issue for the US politics thread isn't the science of nuclear energy (or Europe, unless colonizers are going back  ).
The overarching issue is that the US's 2-party FPTP capitalist bourgeois democracy is unable/unwilling to effectuate the policies necessary (for many reasons, campaign finance among them) to avert/mitigate global ecological catastrophe along with a host of other critical issues (healthcare, police brutality, etc). This is exacerbated by the Democrat party failing to even protect the voting rights and bodily autonomy of their voters.
While Democrats failure to follow through on decades of promises on things like reducing racial wealth inequity sucks, it's got nothing on the nightmare scenario of them continuing to fail for decades more on climate.
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On October 13 2021 20:50 GreenHorizons wrote:The nuclear discussion completely ignores the point/problem imo. The issue for the US politics thread isn't the science of nuclear energy (or Europe, unless colonizers are going back ). The overarching issue is that the US's 2-party FPTP capitalist bourgeois democracy is unable/unwilling to effectuate the policies necessary (for many reasons, campaign finance among them) to avert/mitigate global ecological catastrophe along with a host of other critical issues (healthcare, police brutality, etc). This is exacerbated by the Democrat party failing to even protect the voting rights and bodily autonomy of their voters. While Democrats failure to follow through on decades of promises on things like reducing racial wealth inequity sucks, it's got nothing on the nightmare scenario of them continuing to fail for decades more on climate. state vs federal.
Elections are a state matter, how much can Federal Democrats actually do there?
Nor would I blame NY Democrats for Texas Republicans trying to reintroduce an abortion ban through unconstitutional measures, that's up to the courts.
Go protest the Supreme Court refusing to block it from going into effect knowing it will takes ages for the question to make its way to the SC.
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On October 13 2021 18:10 justanothertownie wrote:Show nested quote +On October 13 2021 04:07 Mohdoo wrote:
Nuclear is the way to go both short and long term. No one with a firm understanding of the chemistry/physics of nuclear energy and how it relates to other power sources is actually opposed to it. Solar+batteries will be the golden dream some day, but we aren't there yet. Nuclear will likely always be our best method of dealing with high power needs, too. All my homies who work in solar research say nuclear is great.
Opposition to nuclear is equivalent to people buying in to the propaganda from piece of shit Edison electrocuting an elephant. There is no modern justifiable reason to oppose modern nuclear designs. Please just stop claiming to speak for the whole of science. You are not (saying this as a chemist). Like other people already pointed out ramping up nuclear energy production would be too slow to help us reach our climate goals. Also, no matter what people claim there is no good solution for the waste we currently generate and the power plants once their lifetime has run out. This can be easily seen in Germany right now. We will probably be working on removing the plants for another 40-60 years and one can only imagine how much money and climate damage will accumulate until then. If you say the reactors shouldn't have been shut down Prematurely then I agree with you. But let us not kid ourselves and claim that nuclear is the solution for climate change or a reasonable long term solution for energy production.
Everything is too slow to meet our climate goals. There’s not a single technology other than nuclear, gas and coal that meets our needs 10 years from now. And of course some scientists are against nuclear, same with vaccines. The solution to waste is to shoot it at the sun, which is entirely feasible given sufficient funding and effort. If we as a planet banded together and dealt with waste that way, we’d be just fine. It’s not that nuclear is perfect, it’s that it is superior to our only other 2 options. Solar could probably get there if we decided as a species to limit computer chip manufacturing and focus on solar. That would be wild and awesome. But even then we would need other tech to augment it. Nuclear is better than coal and gas, so nuclear should augment solar rather than the others.
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Norway28561 Posts
I have no technical understanding of this matter but I just googled 'is it possible to launch our nuclear waste into the sun' and now I've read a couple articles making it quite plainly clear that no, it isn't, not for a very, very long time. (The 'astronomical' costs are one factor that could be ignored if we did all band together, but the amount of waste one rocket can carry coupled with how frequently rockets explode before they're supposed to would leave it overwhelmingly likely that we'd have to live with nuclear waste being spread across the planet.)
(https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/09/20/this-is-why-we-dont-shoot-earths-garbage-into-the-sun/ + https://www.universetoday.com/133317/can-we-launch-nuclear-waste-into-the-sun/ )
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On October 14 2021 00:18 Liquid`Drone wrote:I have no technical understanding of this matter but I just googled 'is it possible to launch our nuclear waste into the sun' and now I've read a couple articles making it quite plainly clear that no, it isn't, not for a very, very long time. (The 'astronomical' costs are one factor that could be ignored if we did all band together, but the amount of waste one rocket can carry coupled with how frequently rockets explode before they're supposed to would leave it overwhelmingly likely that we'd have to live with nuclear waste being spread across the planet.) (https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/09/20/this-is-why-we-dont-shoot-earths-garbage-into-the-sun/ + https://www.universetoday.com/133317/can-we-launch-nuclear-waste-into-the-sun/ )
First of all that is 2017, lots has happened since then. Second of all, of course its expensive. It is not remotely infeasible. And there's also the fact that the current issues with nuclear waste disposal/storage are purely matters of cost. We could have 0% risk of breach if we put the right money into it. Every failure we have experienced so far has been due to budget constraints. None of this is impossible. There just isn't enough political will to put the money down.
Here's the main thing, again:
There are no other options. You have 3 options for the next 10 years:
Coal
Gas
Nuclear
Nothing else actually exists. Everything else goes way beyond fantasy. It simply isn't possible, solar included. I say this as someone who worked in solar research for years.
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On October 14 2021 00:18 Liquid`Drone wrote:I have no technical understanding of this matter but I just googled 'is it possible to launch our nuclear waste into the sun' and now I've read a couple articles making it quite plainly clear that no, it isn't, not for a very, very long time. (The 'astronomical' costs are one factor that could be ignored if we did all band together, but the amount of waste one rocket can carry coupled with how frequently rockets explode before they're supposed to would leave it overwhelmingly likely that we'd have to live with nuclear waste being spread across the planet.) (https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/09/20/this-is-why-we-dont-shoot-earths-garbage-into-the-sun/ + https://www.universetoday.com/133317/can-we-launch-nuclear-waste-into-the-sun/ )
Yeah, and honestly that suggestion alone made me lose a lot of respect in Mohdoo. Anyone who seriously suggest the solution to any kind of trash is to shoot it into the sun has no clue whatsoever what they are talking about.
Shooting stuff into space is hard enough and not feasible for all the reasons you mentioned. But even once you are in space, getting the stuff towards the sun isn't as easy as one would think, either.
Edit: Also, once you start launching nuclear waste into space using massive rockets, i highly doubt that the climate calculations for that energy are that good.
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On October 14 2021 00:32 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On October 14 2021 00:18 Liquid`Drone wrote:I have no technical understanding of this matter but I just googled 'is it possible to launch our nuclear waste into the sun' and now I've read a couple articles making it quite plainly clear that no, it isn't, not for a very, very long time. (The 'astronomical' costs are one factor that could be ignored if we did all band together, but the amount of waste one rocket can carry coupled with how frequently rockets explode before they're supposed to would leave it overwhelmingly likely that we'd have to live with nuclear waste being spread across the planet.) (https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/09/20/this-is-why-we-dont-shoot-earths-garbage-into-the-sun/ + https://www.universetoday.com/133317/can-we-launch-nuclear-waste-into-the-sun/ ) Yeah, and honestly that suggestion alone made me lose a lot of respect in Mohdoo. Anyone who seriously suggest the solution to any kind of trash is to shoot it into the sun has no clue whatsoever what they are talking about. Shooting stuff into space is hard enough and not feasible for all the reasons you mentioned. But even once you are in space, getting the stuff towards the sun isn't as easy as one would think, either.
Totally wrong. We have shot some very big things into space. What you are saying is "there is no easy way to do this with the tools we have sitting on a shelf right now". Of course that is true. How many space ships did we have laying around prior to making them? You are making a completely ridiculous point here. We have the capability to do this, we just haven't done it yet. It is expensive, sure, but the issues at hand are way more expensive. Have you seen any estimates of how much climate change will cost us in 50 years?
I'd like to reiterate that what makes your perspective so silly is that you are presupposing some other solution. Let me ask you this, what's the other solution? What do you have cooked up in your head as an alternative here? If you are relying on anything other than the big 3, it doesn't exist and isn't actually technically feasible.
So far these are the arguments you guys have put forth:
1) "I googled it and Forbes says it is hard"
2) "Waste is big"
That is not remotely sufficient given the scale of the issues are currently facing.
Edit: One thing that is abundantly clear from this conversation is that I appear to be the only one in this conversation who has actually ever been involved with assessing what it means for a power generation source to be implemented and what sorts of logistics/research go into that. If you guys hear "but how do we afford getting it into space?" and think that is anywhere close to the issues with everything else we are working with, you are in for a very rough awakening in 10 years when nothing else happens. I will patiently await the other options you guys think will happen in the next 10 years. I look forward to reading that.
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The problem for the US isn't that it doesn't have the technological capacity to address the problem, it's a social, political, and economic (structure, not resources) deficiency.
Focusing on the technical aspects might be mollifying for some (or bewildering after the launching waste into the sun bit) but it isn't really the issue.
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On October 14 2021 00:51 GreenHorizons wrote:
The problem for the US isn't that we don't have the technological capacity to address the problem, it's a social, political, and economic (structure, not resources) deficiency.
Focusing on the technical aspects might be mollifying for some (or bewildering after the launching waste into the sun bit) but it isn't really the issue.
You didn't actually make a single suggestion here. What are you saying should be done? Is this your typical "go do revolution, ok see ya" response, or is there some sort of meat on this? What are you saying generates enough power 10 years from now, other than coal, gas or nuclear?
If you are saying "We just need to convince people to use only 10% of the energy we currently use", it is hilarious that you would try to criticize shooting waste into space. You may as well say "Well have we asked leprechauns if they can help? Maybe their pots of gold can fund some UBI programs?"
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Norway28561 Posts
I read three and linked two articles (I actually read them in their entirety, one from forbes, one from 'universe today'). They don't describe it as 'within the realm of possibility if we start working on it', more like
Considering that the United States alone is storing about 60,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste, it would take approximately 8,600 Soyuz rockets to remove this waste from the Earth. Even if we could reduce the launch failure rate to an unprecedented 0.1% (from the 2-3% it is today), it would cost approximately a trillion dollars and, with an estimated 9 launch failures to look forward to, would lead to over 60,000 pounds of hazardous waste being randomly redistributed across the Earth.
Unless we're willing to pay an unprecedented cost and accept the near-certainty of catastrophic environmental pollution, we have to leave the idea of shooting our garbage into the Sun to the realm of science fiction and future hopeful technologies like space elevators. It's undeniable that we've made quite the mess on planet Earth. Now, it's up to us to figure out our own way out of it.'
or the costs - $1.2 trillion to launch the high-level waste into the Sun on a trajectory that takes a long long time.
The bottom line is that blasting our nuclear waste off into space, into the Sun, is just too expensive – by several orders of magnitude.
I mean, I already stated that I'm not an expert at all on this. Which is why I went to helpful friend google for advice. I've never googled this in the past, so I'm guessing I haven't really influenced the results from prior searches, but nothing I could see from the first page of hits seemed to indicate that this was in the realm of possibility - it was all a bunch of different 'this is why we don't do it' - results. I'm not really invested in these findings though - as I have no personal expertise, I'm just going based on what I read, from sources that seem reasonably reputable, with math to back up their claims. If you want to convince me, or anyone else I guess, then it'd probably be good for you to back it up by something other than you stating 'we have the capability to do this'. How about you give a source that is more reliable than forbes or universetoday stating that 'yeah, we can totally launch our nuclear waste into the sun'?
For the grander question of 'what do we do about climate change'
+ Show Spoiler +
my opinion is something like 'immediate, drastic cuts to consumption, everyone stops travelling by plane unless they have to, turn beef into a luxury product that is eaten for special occasions, lots of investing in trains, stop using coal immediately, accept some continued gas and oil during the transition (but absolutely don't go looking for more oil fields), continued massive investments into solar and ocean wind power and I'm guessing other sources, and sure, nuclear as well'.
I accept that this would entail a significant drop in living standards, also for myself (and while I love meat and travelling, I haven't flown since 2018, and that's because of climate, not covid, I don't have a driver's license, and I guess my meat consumption has dropped by 80% the past 5 years) but I consider climate change a possibly existential crisis, so even if my cure sucks ass, it's imo still preferable.
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Getting things into space is one of the most expensive, involved and polluting activities humans have ever done.
I'm generally quite pro-nuclear because honestly having a few kilotons of radioactive waste to deal with is nothing compared to the effect of us continuing to burn coal. But not because I think we can launch the waste into the fucking sun. Lol.
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Norway28561 Posts
Also, regarding climate change, I believe anything short of 'travel back in time 30 years and implement massive changes back then' will fall short and lead to disaster. It's a question of damage control. I'm totally on board with nuclear power as part of that. I just think 'store the waste on earth and hope future us manages to detoxify it somehow' seems a whole lot more plausible than 'shoot it into the sun', and if you're gonna make assertions like the latter and lord your scientific experience over us to validate the suggestion, then you have to back it up by a source.
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On October 14 2021 01:04 Liquid`Drone wrote:I read three and linked two articles (I actually read them in their entirety, one from forbes, one from 'universe today'). They don't describe it as 'within the realm of possibility if we start working on it', more like Show nested quote +Considering that the United States alone is storing about 60,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste, it would take approximately 8,600 Soyuz rockets to remove this waste from the Earth. Even if we could reduce the launch failure rate to an unprecedented 0.1% (from the 2-3% it is today), it would cost approximately a trillion dollars and, with an estimated 9 launch failures to look forward to, would lead to over 60,000 pounds of hazardous waste being randomly redistributed across the Earth.
Unless we're willing to pay an unprecedented cost and accept the near-certainty of catastrophic environmental pollution, we have to leave the idea of shooting our garbage into the Sun to the realm of science fiction and future hopeful technologies like space elevators. It's undeniable that we've made quite the mess on planet Earth. Now, it's up to us to figure out our own way out of it.' or the costs - Show nested quote +$1.2 trillion to launch the high-level waste into the Sun on a trajectory that takes a long long time.
The bottom line is that blasting our nuclear waste off into space, into the Sun, is just too expensive – by several orders of magnitude. I mean, I already stated that I'm not an expert at all on this. Which is why I went to helpful friend google for advice. I've never googled this in the past, so I'm guessing I haven't really influenced the results from prior searches, but nothing I could see from the first page of hits seemed to indicate that this was in the realm of possibility - it was all a bunch of different 'this is why we don't do it' - results. I'm not really invested in these findings though - as I have no personal expertise, I'm just going based on what I read, from sources that seem reasonably reputable, with math to back up their claims. If you want to convince me, or anyone else I guess, then it'd probably be good for you to back it up by something other than you stating 'we have the capability to do this'. How about you give a source that is more reliable than forbes or universetoday stating that 'yeah, we can totally launch our nuclear waste into the sun'? For the grander question of 'what do we do about climate change' + Show Spoiler +
my opinion is something like 'immediate, drastic cuts to consumption, everyone stops travelling by plane unless they have to, turn beef into a luxury product that is eaten for special occasions, lots of investing in trains, stop using coal immediately, accept some continued gas and oil during the transition (but absolutely don't go looking for more oil fields), continued massive investments into solar and ocean wind power and I'm guessing other sources, and sure, nuclear as well'.
I accept that this would entail a significant drop in living standards, also for myself (and while I love meat and travelling, I haven't flown since 2018, and that's because of climate, not covid, I don't have a driver's license, and I guess my meat consumption has dropped by 80% the past 5 years) but I consider climate change a possibly existential crisis, so even if my cure sucks ass, it's imo still preferable.
I appreciate you writing this out. I will try to explain the process of power generation and whatnot without typing 4 billion pages.
When you try to get funding for something, you are basically always competing with coal and gas. Since you get money from either companies (looking for 10 year ROI) or government (extremely cheap, unreliable, small dollars most times) you need to be economical. As an example, look how little money cold fusion research gets. Funding for big, glorious solutions gets poor funding as along as cheaper things exists.
When it comes to nuclear waste, we are always competing with just putting it in the ground. In reality, we have an insane amount of room to continue storing nuclear waste. We could run the world on nuclear and not run out of space to safely store nuclear waste for like 100 years if we tackled the issue as a planet. But it feels shitty to be working against a clock, so people get weird about nuclear waste.
So when people are like "Hey I need some funding to figure out shooting waste into space", the people you're asking money from point to the cost of not shooting it into space and say "Why bother".
Next topic: functionalized technologies.
We don't have existing products intended purely for shooting something into orbit, then attaching it to something else to shoot towards the sun. If we look at the current technologies we have, none of them are for this purpose. Imagine if we didn't have oil tankers. How many boats would it take to transport oil, if we just used normal passenger boats? What if we just put barrels on a boat, rather than making a boat which itself is a barrel? How expensive would it be to use boats instead of aircraft carriers, to transport aircraft?
When you are trying to develop a new technology, you are generally able to pull pieces from a bunch of existing things, then make a few new things, to create your new idea. In the case of transporting waste into space, it is technically feasible in every way, we just don't have a specialized, well thought out way to do it. Making a spitball determination as to whether something is feasible is not done by looking at what we currently do. It is done by looking at the tools we have and what tools we don't have.
Dealing with nuclear waste by sending it into space is not something that we could bust out with a quick department of energy grant. It would be a global effort to establish the infrastructure and technology to do it. But it is entirely feasible and we likely don't have other options from what I understand.
To clarify why we don't have any other options, I will state my underlying assumption: We will not sufficiently meet our power needs for the next 25 years without the use of coal, gas or nuclear energy. If it turns out this underlying assumption is wrong, everything changes. But I want to be clear this is the assumption I am using. From my experience working in solar power research, and being involved with what kinds of metrics we need to meet, after how long, everyone always ends up concluding "renewables can reduce our reliance on goal/gas/nuclear, but we still need a lot of the big 3 for the next 25 years".
I can understand how if you are assuming we can just coat on renewables in 25 years, none of what I am saying about nuclear makes sense. I would vote for moving to the system you described, no air travel and stuff like that. I think it won't happen. It is the same as GH hand waving "go do revolution". It is a fun thought experiment, but if we are trying to say "What can we ACTUALLY do, and what do we ACTUALLY see happening in the next 25 years", your situation does not feel worth talking about. But I wish it were.
On October 14 2021 01:09 Ciaus_Dronu wrote:
Getting things into space is one of the most expensive, involved and polluting activities humans have ever done.
I'm generally quite pro-nuclear because honestly having a few kilotons of radioactive waste to deal with is nothing compared to the effect of us continuing to burn coal. But not because I think we can launch the waste into the fucking sun. Lol.
IMO we don't actually need to worry about the feasibility of launching stuff into space right now because we can store nuclear fuel for a very long time before we run out of space. Even in 50 years the science/logistics/cost of launching stuff into space will be incomparably better than today. I am pointing out with nuclear, we can launch it into space. With gas/coal, we can not launch the externalities into space. It is unresolvable. Nuclear, we have options, even if difficult. We don't have any such luxuries with coal and gas.
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fwiw I'm not "hand waving go do revolution" I'm just pointing out that the technical discussion is pettifogging the actual issues of the social, political, and economic (structural, not resources) barriers (and their disheartening impacts) I was discussing with ChristianS.
I think the whole discussion on nuclear is almost entirely irrelevant to the barriers preventing substantial progress on climate change from the US and to the thread generally.
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On October 14 2021 01:42 GreenHorizons wrote:
fwiw I'm not "hand waving go do revolution" I'm just pointing out that the technical discussion is pettifogging the actual issues of the social, political, and economic (structural, not resources) barriers (and their disheartening impacts) I was discussing with ChristianS.
I think the whole discussion on nuclear is almost entirely irrelevant to the barriers preventing substantial progress on climate change from the US and to the thread generally.
In your eyes, what do we do to convince US voters climate change is worth addressing to the extent that we need to? What mechanism do you see to convince people their lives should radically change today so as to prevent their lives from changing even more in 50 years? As you know, I advocate for authoritarianism to get that done, but I think you tend to be a libertarian left kinda guy, so I am curious what you see as a rough outline for changing people's minds.
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Separate topic, so forgive the double post:
Now that Indigenous people's day has come and gone, I can say with 100% confidence republican objections to vaccines are just "do the opposite of what the libs want". The reaction from the right to Indigenous People's Day is astounding. They are protecting Columbus like he raised them as orphans and then solved world hunger. No one can really pin down what they think makes him special. No one seems to have any real reason to celebrate him. But boy do they LOVE him now that lefties have another suggestion. The reactionary nature of the US right is impossible to deal with. We are truly at a point where reverse psychology is the only option.
Right now I feel like the only way for us to get drug prices down would be for Biden to issue an executive order doubling drug prices.
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On October 14 2021 01:54 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On October 14 2021 01:42 GreenHorizons wrote:
fwiw I'm not "hand waving go do revolution" I'm just pointing out that the technical discussion is pettifogging the actual issues of the social, political, and economic (structural, not resources) barriers (and their disheartening impacts) I was discussing with ChristianS.
I think the whole discussion on nuclear is almost entirely irrelevant to the barriers preventing substantial progress on climate change from the US and to the thread generally. In your eyes, what do we do to convince US voters climate change is worth addressing to the extent that we need to? What mechanism do you see to convince people their lives should radically change today so as to prevent their lives from changing even more in 50 years? As you know, I advocate for authoritarianism to get that done, but I think you tend to be a libertarian left kinda guy, so I am curious what you see as a rough outline for changing people's minds.
I think we're better served with a question like:
"How do we get the people that recognize climate change (or the plethora of other pressing issues) needs to be addressed to organize and mobilize in effective ways" which is what ChristianS and I were talking about with mutual aid, building dual power, and extra-governmental organizations using things like general strikes to force radical change.
I've mentioned Freire a lot because I think Pedagogy of the Oppressed in particular provides some great insight into the fundamental aspects of going into communities and building the mutually beneficial understandings and frameworks that push us toward those goals in meaningful ways.
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EPT
