/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

The two most frustrating things I often see coming out of anti-nuclear power partisans are the following:

<Conflation of pressurized water reactors with all other forms of nuclear power generation
This is the big one, let them get away with this huge leap in logic and most of their other arguments flow from there.

<Once the conflation is successful, projecting all the problems, including their danger and cost, onto other forms of nuclear power
The cost argument is especially interesting because I usually hear it come out of the mouths of progressive liberals. The implied assumption is that cost is what matters when it comes to saving human civilization from complete catastrophe. It also tends to be rooted in an internalized neoliberal worship of the market–nuclear power can't compete with other power sources without massive government subsidies; thus, it must be bad. Of course this is the same logic deployed to gut public services and privatize them for capitalist rent seeking. This is not something that a progressive would normally agree with if they've really thought it through, which is why you can tell that this argument is actually an industry talking point that they've carelessly adopted.

>>468838
>Conflation of pressurized water reactors with all other forms of nuclear power generation
>This is the big one, let them get away with this huge leap in logic and most of their other arguments flow from there.
Can this be helped with better marketing for the nuclear industry, by branding different reactor types like cars-brands ?
People generally don't make sweeping over-generalizing assumptions about cars, so if they had a bad experience with one car-model or brand they usually don't conclude that all other cars must also be bad.

>The cost argument is especially interesting because I usually hear it come out of the mouths of progressive liberals. The implied assumption is that cost is what matters when it comes to saving human civilization from complete catastrophe.
I know the cost argument is irrational logic, but nuclear power is definitely cheaper (if you count all cost factors) when it comes to saving human civilization, so that ought not be such a big hurdle.

>It also tends to be rooted in an internalized neoliberal worship of the market–nuclear power can't compete with other power sources without massive government subsidies; thus, it must be bad.
I know the neo-liberals are anti-nuclear because they can't fit nuclear-power-plants into their narrow range of acceptable business-models. But they are kinda stupid, because the cheap and plentiful power that nuclear generates benefits every other sector of the economy. Nuclear power would still generate market economic activities, for machine parts, for construction and so on.

>Of course this is the same logic deployed to gut public services and privatize them for capitalist rent seeking. This is not something that a progressive would normally agree with if they've really thought it through, which is why you can tell that this argument is actually an industry talking point that they've carelessly adopted.

I get the impression that what counts as progressive these days is overrun by careerists who do understand that they are parroting industry talking points and they do it to get shill money.

>>468839
>Can this be helped with better marketing for the nuclear industry, by branding different reactor types like cars-brands?
Funny enough, the nuclear industry has already been attempting this, with their "Small Modular Reactor" grift. It's done nothing to assuage the public's concerns over nuclear power safety because they're using it as a catch-all term for any kind of nuclear power that can be modularized, including the old inherently dangerous pressurized water designs. The devil is indeed in the details on this technology, and we won't have an honest and needed public debate until people are made aware of the different kinds of nuclear power to choose from.

>>468840
>The devil is indeed in the details on this technology, and we won't have an honest and needed public debate until people are made aware of the different kinds of nuclear power to choose from.
So how should this be done ? how do you "win the narrative battle" ?

I'm thinking that it might be possible to demonstrate the safety and usefulness of these reactors in some other application. For example it's possible to repurpose a giant container ship and put a 60 gigawatt Thorium reactor on it, without using up more than 30% of the ships hull space. The rest of the hull can house a energy intensive industrial process that embodies the energy into an intermediate industrial good. A 60 gigawatt thorium reactor produces enough waste heat to evaporate substantial quantities of CO2 out of ocean water and use a small fraction of the reactors electricity output to chemically bind the carbon into something useful, which would technically make the hole operation have negative carbon emissions.

If you are asking why, this idea originated from the fact that nobody complains about the reactors on nuclear submarines or aircraft carriers, hence my theory that all the anti-nuclear sentiment seems to go away once you get out of people's back yards. I'm not really suggesting to industrialize the ocean, but it's possibly the easiest route to get the new reactor types deployed and normalized as a different non scary technology.

>One nuclear catastrophe after another.
>Fukushima didn't turn into a nuclear waste land by sheer luck.
>No one will even touch nuclear because of the liability
>Renewables more than capable of replacing whatever role nuclear would fill.
>Nuclear shills are still going to try to try to get the public to buy into it again.
$200 from the nuclear lobby has been deposited in your account.

>>468842
>rattling off the usual talking points

Even the existing nuclear power-plants that have old reactor designs are extremely safe, nuclear incidents are extremely rare and the overall death count is super low.

Fukushima was first and foremost a massive earthquake and a Tsunami flood. The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant operated by TEPCO was online for longer then its specified life cycle, meaning that it should have already have been replaced by a newer power-plant. Tepco also did not keep the backup generators maintained. So a badly maintained ancient nuclear plant was hit by a massive flood and an earthquake simultaneously, and it still didn't produce a "nuclear waste land". I would say this is a testament to how resilient these things actually are.

All the big nuclear incidents were caused by water getting heated until it turned into explosive Oxyhydrogen gas, which blew a hole into the containment. The new reactor designs no longer use water so that shit will not happen anymore.

>try to get the public to buy into it again.
I just want cheap electricity

>$200
is that projection ?, do you get 200 dollarinos to trash-talk nuclear ?

>>468842
>Renewables more than capable of replacing whatever role nuclear would fill.
Wrong.
https://www.withouthotair.com/

>>468844
Nuclear makes for about 2% of the energy mix right now. Renewables can more than make that up.
And renewables can replace coal and much of oil especially if the generation is localized.

Redditors really want nuclear power to make a comeback.

It's not even profitable, lads. There's a reason nobody's been building reactors.

>>468848
You see nuclear power in competition with renewables. That's the ruling ideology position, that wants to preserve the status quo of legacy fossil plus a green energy fig leaf.

The real deal however is replacing fossil fuel with nuclear power and using it in conjunction with renewable energy.

Renewable energy on it's own cannot supply enough energy it will either be couple with nuclear or fossil fule. Nuclear is the much better option because it is cheaper, safer, more scalable, with secure lasting conflict free supply and it has no CO2 emissions.

Some people are trying to square the circle of pure renewables for a position that essentially is green austerity, which will likely degenerate into eco-fascism, that tries to solve the power shortage by killing off people.

>>468854
>Redditors
self projecting redditor confirmed

>>468854
>It's not even profitable, lads.
Not that socialists would care about muh profits, but that's a problem with the neo-liberals sucking badly at economics. Nuclear power has the highest energy return on energy investment of any power source.

>>468857
>secure lasting conflict free supply
That's not necessarily true. There's definitely geographic variation in the global distribution of uranium and thorium. It also depends on the type of nuclear power. If using traditional pressurized-water reactor designs, the fuel is the sparse U235 isotope which constitutes only 0.7% of all natural uranium, and doesn't even use all of the material in spent fuel rods. If everyone were to switch to that kind of nuclear power worldwide there likely would only be enough mineable material for a few decades before it's all gone, with states fighting over its scarcity. A thorium-based reactor on the other hand uses material roughly 500-600x more abundant than U235 and makes full use of its fuel.

>>468871
>There's definitely geographic variation in the global distribution of uranium and thorium.
You can economically extract Uranium from sea-water, and Thorium can be economically extracted from dirt. The geographic variation will not cause conflicts.

>If using traditional pressurized-water reactor designs
You could do that, but why bother when there are so many newer and better reactor types available already.

>If everyone were to switch to that kind of nuclear power worldwide
Technically we only need nuclear energy as a stop-gap to buy us enough time to finish developing fusion power.
Lets say that takes another 200 years (that's a very conservative estimate), there's already enough thorium that originated as waste product from rare earth mineral mining to last us for about a thousand years. The amount of Uranium you can extract from sea-water would last for hundreds of thousands to millions of years.

<Uranium Seawater Extraction Makes Nuclear Power Completely Renewable

<America, Japan and China are racing to be the first nation to make nuclear energy completely renewable. The hurdle is making it economic to extract uranium from seawater, because the amount of uranium in seawater is truly inexhaustible.

<And it seems America is in the lead. New technological breakthroughs from DOE’s Pacific Northwest (PNNL) and Oak Ridge (ORNL) national laboratories have made removing uranium from seawater within economic reach and the only question is - when will the source of uranium for our nuclear power plants change from mined ore to seawater extraction?

<Nuclear fuel made with uranium extracted from seawater makes nuclear power completely renewable. It’s not just that the 4 billion tons of uranium in seawater now would fuel a thousand 1,000-MW nuclear power plants for a 100,000 years. It’s that uranium extracted from seawater is replenished continuously, so nuclear becomes as endless as solar, hydro and wind.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-seawater-extraction-makes-nuclear-power-completely-renewable/

Don't get hung up on semantics, renewable never means infinite energy source, solar and wind also runs out when the star in our solar system dies

>>468878
I think we should be very careful before considering seawater extraction, that could have serious unforeseen environmental consequences. Uranium has been in seawater throughout the history of life, it's actually a useful tool for learning about history in geology/paleontology via isotope analysis due to the selective way in which it settles on the seafloor. It may play an important ecological role that we do not yet understand. Not to mention the impact of filtering mass quantities of ocean water itself.

>>468878
Fusion power is an unnecessary technology, the stopgap is actually until we return to the moon and develop lunar solar power using all the technology we already have now that we know works.

>>468879
>unforeseen environmental consequences
Nah, not really. It would take a 1000 years of maxed out extraction efforts to use up a measly 1% of the Uranium salts that currently are in solution in the sea. The ocean will of course dissolve more Uranium salts from the ocean-floor during that time, so the concentration wouldn't actually drop. And we're probably not going to use this tech for more than a couple of centuries. So the potential impact this could have is infinitesimal.

>filtering mass quantities of ocean water itself.
Yeah i don't know exactly what you are imagining here but, nobody is intending to actually pump the entire ocean through a filter, lol. Do you have any idea how stupendously gargantuan the ocean is ?

If you care about the technical details. You exploit osmotic properties of salts dissolved in water. So If you remove salt from one region of water the salt-ions in the other regions will migrate towards the water with the lower salt concentration until it evens out. That means you have a small salt-water reservoir that is connected to the ocean through a pipe, that creates a pathway for salt-ion migration. You filter the same reservoir-water over and over. Remove the desired uranium salts, wait a bit until more uranium-salt-ions replenished, rinse and repeat. The pipe that is connected to the ocean will also have a membrane that basically blocks off everything but salt-ions, which means not even small single cell organisms will ever come into contact with the uranium extraction machine.

>>468880
I guess technology could develop that way, but technically that's till using fusion power (because the sun is a massive fusion reactor). The main attraction of using space based power like this is because you don't add any power-plant-waste-heat to the planet, and you get a higher maximum energy budget.

People will however still develop fusion reactors, if only because they'd be really useful for space ships that go far away from the sun.

Lunar solar power might have beneficial political implications because it would force everybody to play nice with each other. Almost Every country only faces the moon once per day and would rely on neighboring countries relaying energy.

This thread is reddit tier

>>468837
>Climate change is creating a need for energy generation that emits very small quantities of carbon dioxide gas.
source?

>>468886
and it's your fault

>>468889
>Omg why won't you pretend to know what your talking about and argue about things you can't impact!!!!!!
Comrade DK… Is that you?

>>468888
In case you are an honest climate skeptic:

Paul Cockshott made a video that explains climate change on the basis of straight forward physics without any of the complicated climate models. So if you found the popular account of climate change unconvincing, and you are still open to considering a reasoned argument. I suggest you watch this:

https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=kIonH3GNKuM


In case you want to argue a different approach to the climate problem:

In principle we can emit as much CO2 as we want as long as we take out the same amount of CO2 out of the atmosphere as we put in. This means that we treat chemical fuels as an energy storage medium, instead of a primary energy source. We would have to pay an energy-cost to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and convert in to fuel, and we'd get back that energy when we burn that fuel, minus the conversion losses.

The thing is that the conversion-losses for hydrocarbon fuels are about 30% and when we do the same thing with only the hydrogen without the carbon, the conversion losses are only 20%. But wait there is more, you can use the hydrolysis machine that originally made the hydrogen in reverse (to make usable energy) and also get about 80% efficiency, while a combustion engine that burns hydrocarbon (to make usable energy) only gets 40% efficiency. And you need a hole nother machine to make the hydrocarbon fuel. A hydrogen car could make it's own fuel if you give it electricity and water. Once you scale up the hydrogen industry until it has the same economies of scale as the hydrocarbon industries you'll get more than double the usable energy.

Of course hydrogen fuel tanks either need a pressure vessel (most economical for small tanks) or a cryogenic temperature vessel (most economical for big tanks). Those are more expensive but they are more secure, they are much harder to light on fire than either petrol tanks or battery packs, and hydrogen can carry more energy/weight then both.

But if you are a unyielding petrol-head, you can get a type of solar collector that takes water vapor and CO2 out of the air and turns it straight into petrol by using intense focused sunlight on a special catalyzing substrate. I think you might still be able to buy one, these cost about 2.5 million a pop and produces on average about 17l or 4.5gal of high octane petrol. These might get cheaper if somebody makes a breakthrough in catalyzing technology, so that they don't require lots of rare elements like titanium.

And since this is the nuclear thread, there is a special sub-set of nuclear reactors that make hydrogen by thermalizing water. These can scale up to a size of hundreds of gigawatts and could build an energy infrastructure that dwarfs anything that came before, like on the scale where you might consider heating the roads in winter to melt the snow.

>>468891
Hydrogen economy is a dumb idea in multiple ways. For one, it turns cars into bombs; just try to keep the public on board after a few exploding car accidents. For another, hydrogen is an exceptionally difficult material to contain without leaks. Leaked atmospheric hydrogen gas is a) an indirect greenhouse gas that extends the half-life of other greenhouse gases and b) a vector for atmospheric escape of Earth's hydrogen. Produce and release enough hydrogen at a civilization-level scale for a long enough time and we may do something dangerous (and potentially irreversible) to Earth's climate.

Far better to electrify rail than continue to rely on the farcically inefficient form of transportation known as the automobile by twisting ourselves into knots with ideas like hydrogen fuel cells.

>>468906
>it turns cars into bombs
it is incredibly hard to blow up a hydrogen tank, just burning the car down will not make it explode. You really have to do it on purpose, like with specially designed detonators. Even for malevolent actors, there are easier ways to blow shit up. Dis be nothing but fearmongering nonsense.

>Leaked atmospheric hydrogen gas
isn't going to happen at a scale significant enough to matter. The scenarios you talk about won't have an appreciable effect. On a civilization level, technologies like this are only ever used for 100 to 200 years before we find something better. If we figure out highly structured molecular mass production for stuff like borophene or graphene , we'll be able to build electricity storage devices that have a higher energy density than chemical fuel, you'll be able to power a car with a device the size of a shoe-box. We won't run out of hydrogen because there are 4 large gas-giants in our solar system that have more hydrogen than we could possibly need.

I agree with you that the car won't remain the dominant mode of transportation, and for those cars we keep around will likely use batteries. But hydrogen is necessary for all the big machines that need a lot of power, like excavators for example. Long range cars will likely use hydrogen as range extenders to keep batteries charged.

>Far better to electrify rail
I agree with that but decades of neoliberalism has eroded away so much of the rail-network that rebuilding it will require a lot off construction work that will involve lots of heavy machinery. Once the petrol and diesel commuter traffic goes away in 10 to 20 years, chemical fuel production will go into a death spiral. Once production gets scaled down the cost will go up and that will make it too expensive for many of the remaining application and cause further production scale-down raising the cost once again and on and on. Don't count on having big diesel engines powering construction-work for cheap in the medium term. We also need hydrogen for the chemical reduction of iron in steal production unless you want to restart coal fired blast furnaces, and you need steel to make rails.

Climate boogaloo isn't real, but energy policy is never dictated by the people or their wants. It is the exact opposite - energy monopolies were the birth of post-slavery capitalism, and were contingent on ensuring that the masses were as far removed from the benefits of electricity and technology as possible. Every decision of the state after 1870 was designed to eliminate the masses' comprehension of science and technology, so that people were ruled by the machine, completely alienated from it. It started with the type of education allowed for them in public or private schools, which emphasized slavish devotion to pedagogy and philosophies of rule, or emphasized avarice and a love of backstabbing and called it "business sense". It goes without saying that eugenics was at the center of this entire project.

If you did want to reduce the dreaded carbon emissions - which was always a bullshit excuse to invade peoples' lives and not anything real - you would begin by not making planned obsolescence the norm, and institute some fucking quality control over the entire chain of industry. It would be trivial to reduce energy requirements for many things, but this is not done because it was always an excuse to attack living standards. The rulers did not want to hear anything about technology being more efficient or better, and when it became too difficult to suppress new technology or changes in peoples' habits, the climate boogaloo was invented to justify a further invasion and begin fully stripping away people from technology. Not just the reduction of fuel use, but the elimination of private transport, the war against the countryside, and the shittifcation of everything were deliberate and the entire point. Ultimately it has nothing to do with any substantive use of energy, but seeding the idea that too many people is the problem, and using the control of energy technology as the vehicle to impose this from on high. That is one lever the oligarchs hold over the people, since energy is a natural monopoly. He who controls the oil controls the planet, and that is something they don't give up. Same with uranium or fusion power plants, or the infrastructure to even maintain electricity which is necessarily expensive. The only way this could be stopped is if people exert what leverage they possess and there is a force commandeering this infrastructure that will fight eugenics. That's why you can't bank on this idea of a peoples' revolution from nothing - there would need to be a moral disgust at the ruling idea and disgust at the way people are ruled by technology and horrifically bad teaching.

>>468911
>Climate change is real hurry durrr

Kill yourself Eugene.
You will never be an intellectual.

people that believe climate hooga booga: "i fricking love science!" "achtually men have periods"
people that don't believe climate hooga booga: "i love jesus and lenin" *build mach 15 long range cruise missiles*

>>468911
>planned obsolescence
>attack living standards
Those points are true, there is a fuckton of green hypocrisy and green-austerity-wealth-inequality-extremism in the ruling ideology.

Consider that climate change can be true and at the same time the ruling class also tries to bend every narrative towards their agenda.

It's actually pretty easy to cast the ruling class as climate sinners, their live styles are extremely wasteful, and they are casting stones in a glass house.

>>468918
This