To produce the 25 tonnes or so of uranium fuel needed to keep your average reactor going for a year entails the extraction of half a million tonnes of waste rock and over 100,000 tonnes of mill tailings. These are toxic for hundreds of thousands of years. The conversion plant will generate another 144 tonnes of solid waste and 1343 cubic metres of liquid waste.
So you‘re offering your backyard?
Half a million tons? Compared to mining up 3.4 million short tons of coal and then also tailings (which are also classified as toxic) it’s pretty good. As an added bonus, the nuclear power plant releases far less radioactivity in the air than the coal plant.
At the scales we’re talking about 144 tons of solid waste and 1,343 m^3 of liquid is microscopic. Like I said, the problems in dealing with it are entirely political. That’s less than half a swimming pool worth of liquid for an entire year of generation for hundreds of thousands of homes. Not an issue.
They tend to be a big NIMBY for a lot of people.
That everyone that does not agree with you 100% a “pompous dick head”?
All ideologies have this problem. They all have tragic flaws and any attempt of orthodixical adherance creates some major issues. I’n my atheistic opinnion, we need to stop being lazy and start dealing with issues one at a time instead of buying positions in bulk. Ideologies, the Costco of ideals.
You’re making the bet that we can stop climate change without changing our lifestyle. The very best we can hope to achieve that way is kicking the can down the road. And this mindset brought us to where we are now. I have a hunch that this is not the best strategy.
But let’s got with that, and see what happens.
Let’s assume that we solve the problem of extracting uranium from seawater, and that this is would be a process that compares a negligible amount of waste, not compared to coal, but also compared to renewables. We’d have all the fuel for nuclear power plants we need for a long time, even without breeders.
Now you start building nuclear reactors all over the world, so that everyone can start wasting energy like the US does (~12.000kWh/year per capita, i.e. ~1.5kWh per hour). Maybe using nuclear power would reduce the overhead of extracting and processing carbon based fuel, but that would be offset pretty quickly by the fact that that our lifestyle involves that energy consumption increases.
Let’s further assume that the average reactor has an output to 5 MW, so it would provide energy for around 3 million people.
In that case we’d need to build ~2.5 Million nuclear reactors all over the world. Currently we have ~450.
A massive undertaking, that would take years - after we solved the problem of fuel, because before that the US will start wars to control as much of the cheap uranium as possible as soon as they divert from fossil fuel towards nuclear power.
And we’d have to build more plants soon after, because our lifestyle is one of increasing consumption.
If the state in the US is anything similar to the state in Europe, you have all sorts of problems in those reactors, some of which are properly reported, others are not, and all are “no cause for concern or a rest to safety”, of course. I’m talking about France and Germany here mostly, which should have a pretty high standard. However, in fact, that standard is not sufficient in my book.
Now you start building these reactors in Iran, Irak, Afghanistan, Cuba, sub-saharan Africa AND try to maintain that standard. Good luck with that. Is that still “one of those risks we need to take”?
You asked what public luxury means, private sufficiency: we share commodities that take a lot of energy to produce, and reduce what is privately owned to the essentials.
Yes, for that we’d need to redistribute most of the wealth. As you put it, that is merely a political problem. And does not look so daunting when you compare it to building 2.000.000 nuclear power plants and then running them in a safe way.
Well played, Sir.
Crises like global warming and deadly flu epidemics don’t really care about skin or gender privilege, and economic privilege only slows them up a bit. Being able to practise Libertarian ideology without negative consequence depends a lot more on those societal advantages than the AynCaps would care to admit.
They can’t admit it because they would be acknowledging that taxes are not theft.
Especially the taxes that give money to the “undeserving” (i.e. PoC and women who want control over their own bodies).
Typical of these wannabe Galtian tycoons, who make grand pronouncements about macroeconomics while routinely demonstrating their utter ignorance of microeconomics.
Now this is something I wanted to talk about wrt the whole climate change plans. To me, the problem isn’t that there’s rampant consumption on a global scale but that there’s a rampant production on the same scale. There’s literal regions of the world unofficially designated for dumping electronic waste which in many cases the devices dumped are perfectly fine: iPhones, laptops, server boxes, etc. And all for what? Because someone couldn’t make their expected return. The same is true for agriculture, textiles, and plastics. Now, I’m not saying consumerism needs to stay. One less frustrating rat race isn’t something I think most, if anyone, will miss. But I’m saying is that often this is a push based demand rather than pull based (as in from active customers). No one demanded the dongle hell that smart phones are now. Few demanded bigger screens (there’s actually more demand for smaller ones now). And certainly no one is clamoring for a new shiny to replace their already functioning gadgets. It was mostly conceived by capitalists who make the final call on what’s produced and not consumers.
True.
If you haven’t seen it, I can recommend Adam Curtis “The Century of the Self”, which explores how advances in psychology were actively used to drive consumerism and commodification.
Just another argument why the concentration of capital in the hands of a few people are one reason why we can’t have nice things.
Kevin Carson in Homebrew Industrial Revolution summarizes this from the industrial concern part of it through the work of Mumford and Illich to name two I remember from the introductory chapters, so that’s another source everyone should look at as well.
Not quite. Not everyone dies from the flu, economic status is a good predictor of how much you are going to be affected:
The same goes for climate change, of course they will be worse off that they are now, but provided they will sustain their economic privilege, they will have it significantly better than the rest of us.
Allow me to add a link: The Homebrew Industrial Revolution, is available as free version as well as a book on amazon.
Ironic choice of user name.
Isn’t it though
I have a friend who points out: “we already tried libertarianism: it was called the industrial revolution, and it didn’t work out.”
Originally the threat was about the individuals experience working, though, now it’s more broad in scope and much more of a general existential threat to humanity, so I’d say that aspect may have changed.
