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Pandora's Promise and the Problem of "Solutionism"
Lasrick writes "Kennette Benedict of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reviews Pandora's Promise, a new documentary that focuses on environmental activists like Stewart Brand who have gone from vehemently anti-nuclear to vehemently pro-nuclear views. Good points brought up by Benedict that weren't really addressed in the film."
From the article: "The flaw in the film's approach is its zealous advocacy of one solution — one silver bullet — to meet the tremendous challenges of providing for some nine billion people by 2050, while also protecting societies from the ravages of climate disruption. The kind of thinking that led some of these environmentalists to single-mindedly protest nuclear power plants during the 1970s and 1980s leads them to just-as-single-mindedly advocate a push toward nuclear power 40 years later."
Empirically, across a pretty wide range of situations, energy efficiency improvements tend to actually increase rather than decrease net energy usage, an observation known as the Jevons paradox.
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Hello, nuclear fusion in stars actually has a very LOW power density. It's just that stars are very large. This is why getting fusion to produce power on Earth is so damn difficult, we are not trying to RECREATE the conditions inside a star, we need to SURPASS those conditions.
Mostly random stuff.
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And that means one motherfucking hefty CO2 tax
So you want a War on Coal, do you, throwing thousands of miners out of a job? Heartless bastard. Raising the cost of a gallon of gas? Unthinkable!
and a big piggy bank full of money next to every nuclear plant to pay for dismantling when the time comes
A Lie That Will Not Die, the taxpayers have to pay for decommissioning nuclear power stations. False.
That "piggy bank" you speak of already exists, and has done so since the 1980s in most Western nations that have nukes. Operators of nuclear power stations in the US have to pay into a fund to cover future decommissioning of individual plants. It's more than the coal-fired station operators, wind turbine and solar generators do to clean up after themselves and after forty or fifty gigawatt-years of generating power for a given reactor it adds up to quite a large amount, including interest. The San Onofre nuclear power station, even though it's being shut down only 30 years after being built, has about 3 billion bucks in its "piggy bank" for decommissioning, and using a long-term custodianship system (aka SafStor) it won't spend much of that for another fifty or sixty years meaning more interest accruing into the fund.
Let me help, what he said: "Nuclear fusion in stars actually has a very LOW power density." And that's extremely true. The sun gives off about the same energy per cubic meter as a compost pile, it's just that the sun is big, really big. The person you are replying to was pointing out that getting useful energy out of fusion requires energies that are actually much higher than those present in the sun. You are confusing power with energy. Yes, the sun has a crap ton of energy... but it releases that energy very, very slowly (i.e. over the course of several billion years).