A community for discussing events around the World
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
I don't think this is the solution everywhere. In my country there is no safe space to put the waste.
And then don't forget France had real trouble keeping them going during summer heat waves because the rivers were so warm, they didn't cool down their nuclear power plants enough.
Amazing to me that on a platform that is the epitome of the power of decentralization we don't see the same advantages with energy production and storage.
I am not in favor of development of nuclear power for 2 reasons:
Uncertain future costs. Building a nuclear reactor is very expensive and takes a long time. The cost curve for renewable production (solar, wind) as well as storage (batteries) has fallen so dramatically in the last decade it's impossible to make a financial commitment to building a nuclear plant. That's why there are very few applications in the US (https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/large-lwr/col/new-reactor-map.html) - nobody wants to financially back an investment that is likely a money loser.
Grid security and stability. Having centralized power sources has exposed the US grid to inadequate security and protection from attack (https://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/problem-us-power-grid-its-too-vulnerable-attacks#:~:text=Regrettably%2C%20the%20electric%20grid%20is,matter%20of%20short%2Dlived%20inconvenience.). The solution is decentralization, which occurs naturally when solar/wind and batteries are used for storage. For those arguing battery technology and deployment is inadequate and impossible for grid stabilization, there is an easy solution to this problem - VTG. We are deploying hundreds of thousands (soon to be millions) of EVs. Vehicle-to-Grid technology can solve the storage problem with renewables very easily and in parallel to the goal of transitioning to renewables.
Are you in favor of shutting down existing nuclear plants in favor of coal? This is for example the action that Germany has taken, supported by the "Green" party
Nuclear power is neither safe nor ecologically sustainable. The waste is immensely toxic for hundreds of thousands of years. The model is centralized so wealthy oligarchs own the power source and sell it to everyone else. Better to move toward distributed power generation that isn't massively toxic. Greenpeace must stay anti-nuke.
Cue the nuclear shills that will handwave away any legitimate concern with wishful thinking and frame the discussion as solely pro/anti fossil, conveniently pretending that renewables don’t exist.
ETA:
Let's look at some great examples of handwaving and other nonsense to further the nuclear agenda.
Here @danielbln@lemmy.world brings up a legitimate concern about companies not adhering to regulation and regulators being corrupt/bought *cough… Three Mile Island cough*, and how to deal with that:
So uh, turns out the energy companies are not exactly the most moral and rule abiding entities, and they love to pay off politicians and cut corners. How does one prevent that, as in the case of fission it has rather dire consequences?
So of course the answer to that by @Carighan@lemmy.world is a slippery slope argument and equating a hypothetical disaster with thousands if not millions of victims and areas being uninhabitable for years to come, with the death of a family member due to faulty wiring in your home:
Since you can apply that logic to everything, how can you ever build anything? Because all consequences are dire on a myopic scale, that is, if your partner dies because a single electrician cheaped out with the wiring in your building and got someone to sign off, "It's not as bad as a nuclear disaster" isn't exactly going to console them much.
At some point, you need to accept that making something illegal and trying to prosecute people has to be enough. For most situations. It's not perfect. Sure. But nothing ever is. And no solution to energy is ever going to be perfect, either.
Then there's the matter of misleading statistics and graphs.
Never mind the fact that the amount of victims of nuclear disasters is underreported, under-attributed and research is hampered if not outright blocked to further a nuclear agenda, also never mind that the risks are consistently underreported, lets leave those contentious points behind and look at what's at hand.
Here @JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works shows a graph from Our World in Data that is often thrown around and claims to show "Death rates by unit of electricity production":
Seems shocking enough and I'm sure in rough lines, the proportions respective to one another make sense to some degree or another.
The problem however is that the source data is thrown together in such a way that it completely undermines the message the graph is trying to portray.
According to Our World in Data this is the source of the data used in the graph:
Death rates from energy production is measured as the number of deaths by energy source per terawatt-hour (TWh) of electricity production.
Data on death rates from fossil fuels is sourced from Markandya, A., & Wilkinson, P. (2007).
Data on death rates from solar and wind is sourced from Sovacool et al. (2016) based on a database of accidents from these sources.
We estimate deaths rates for nuclear energy based on the latest death toll figures from Chernobyl and Fukushima as described in our article here: https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-chernobyl-and-fukushima
We estimate death rates from hydropower based on an updated list of historical hydropower accidents, dating back to 1965, sourced primarily from the underlying database included in Sovacool et al. (2016). For more information, see our article: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Fossil fuel numbers are based on this paper which starts out by described a pro-nuclear stance, but more importantly, does a lot of educated guesstimating on the air-pollution related death numbers that is straight up copied into the graph.
Sovacool is used for solar and wind, but doesn't have those estimates and is mainly limited to direct victims.
Nuclear based deaths is based on Our World in Data's own nuclear propaganda piece that mainly focuses on direct deaths and severely underplays non-direct deaths.
And hydropower bases deaths is based on accidents.
So they mix and match all kinds of different forms of data to make this graph, which is a no-no. Either you stick to only accidents, only direct deaths or do all possible deaths that is possibly caused by an energy source, like they do for fossil fuels.
Not doing so makes the graph seem like some kind of joke.
Damn, if one reads that entire long list of ranting in one session it makes an even better case for nuclear than anything else ever could. It's like you started with your "Nuclear sucks!!!!111!!!eleven!!", and then had to make a lot of effort to find ways to fit things into your narrative.
But let's pick at it one by one, shall we?
That you think what I said is a slippery slope, an actual type of informal argumentative fallacy, is fascinating. Because if nothing else it exposes that you had a predisposed notion how to dismiss what I wrote before you actually read it. If you had said it's appeal to emotion, then fair enough. In a lot of ways it is exactly that, specifically the point I'm making is that if you're the one emotionally affected, then you don't care why you are, your suffering is the same either way. I skipped the part where we try to compare quantitatively how many people are affected by deaths from either source of power because - getting to that in a sec - that's the common part. But you're correct of course in that since I didn't present how I reduce from the large scale accident to an individual event of loss, it's an argumentative fallacy.
Only... a slippery slope? Really? What I was levelling against the person I replied to? They did that argument, that corruption in the building or maintaining process warrants not using something. Which is bullshit, you need to take a far more specific approach. Specific companies need to be targetted for this, not an entire industry or even more broad an entire type of energy production.
But now to the funny part, your data source. So I take it you have a single centralized data source that has tracked various kinds of deaths from completely different industries in a single central location over time? So there's no need to corrrelate disjunct data, nevermind what a completely normal process that might be?
Plus, the source that is from is, from looking around the site, they're not directly affiliated with an energy produced that has a specific stake in nuclear. The writer is an assistant to a professor that in turn is pushing for improvements to green energy at both their university and through a nonprofit. Importly, the writer takes the upper boundary of the thyroid-in-children cases even though that is exceedingly unrealistic but they do it to take a more conservative approach. Which makes sense if you're trying to check whether nuclear is really all that bad: When necessary, you take the numbers worst for nuclear so you can establish a solid lower boundary on its efficacy.
That it still comes up so well should tell you something. It's also interesting that you never talk about the actual problems with nuclear energy, which are mentioned by people actually trying to do a more measured approach or proper criticism (namely how we cannot build more plants now to shut down coal/gas with them but there's a secondary problem: while their accident effects are extremely localized by comparison to fossil fuels their duration is very long and we can run into societal problems in regards to warnings and long-term handling).
I will say, reading what you wrote, you're not an ineffective shill for nuclear energy. You make criticism of it seem laughable and childish.