I’m not sure why you are spending so much time comparing nuclear to coal based plants. If you wanted to make a compelling argument there you’d need to compare it to renewable energy sources. I totally agree that we need to phase our coal based plants as fast as possible.

Because Germany decommissioned their Nuclear plants before they did so with coal plants (or gas plants, which they keep building)

The price for the fuel isn’t so much the issue but availability or rather dependency on outside powers.

Sure, but price is a function of availability and demand. The price is low because it’s pretty available and the demand is nothing like that of oil, LNG or coal. Plus Canada and Australia have some of the biggest reserves in the world (3rd, 4th) and they are western democracies we can rely on. Also, Uranium isn’t bought JIT, but it’s bought years in advanced so that it can be enriched and stockpiled, this means that it doesn’t feel the price fluctuations that much.

I’d much prefer the option with less reliance on other states for our power sources.

As for renewables, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but most solar cells right now come from China, if they were to stop selling tomorrow (for one reason or another) we’d be kind of screwed anyway. Maybe a good mix and diversification is the best answer here. And yes, I know that you don’t need China to keep operating your solar cells, but they are kind of needed right now to make the transition, new cells will be needed to replace old ones, and we also need batteries, which they are now leading production of. Unless we move manufacturing back (which we should do, but that’s a decades long process we can’t possibly rely upon) we are still reliant on an external state to undergo the ecological transition.

I have yet to see a convincing strategy to explain humans in a few thousand years what we buried in these tombs. It just doesn’t seem plausible. And even if we find a few suitable places are we sure we will find more when those have filled up?

Maybe it won’t really be necessary, some 4th gen nuclear reactors promise to be able to use spent fuel for their reaction (also Thorium, which is extremely more abundant than Uranium). These are now like fusion reactors, which are permanently 20 years away, but we are building them right now. Some of these plants will go online this decade afaik, and if they deliver, many more will surely follow next decade.

Using spent fuel should shorten the estimated containment time from tens of thousands of years to 300 years, which should be enough to just say, bury them and leave.

The delay and cost is definitely subject to policy and policy changes. But today no-one can guarantee that we wont do those and in effect have a delayed and very expensive project on our hands. I’ll remind you of Stuttgart 21 or the BER or any other bigger projects Germany has been dealing with as long as I can remember. I have no faith that a reactor would magically be built without any of the issues those projects have.

This is an issue we might be able to fix without hoping for magical technology. Also because it doesn’t touch only this argument, but pretty much everything happening in the country. We can’t just say “Germany can’t make any big project” and leave.

Fuel isn’t easy to source and will put us into a new dependency like gas did with russia. That’s not desirable.

Sure, but it’s very little fuel when compared to coal, gas or oil. Raw Uranium is just 14% of the total energy price for nuclear energy, which means that doubling the price of uranium would add about 10% to the cost of electricity produced in existing nuclear plants, and about half that much to the cost of electricity in future power plants. For Coal/Gas plants, the fuel cost is the main cost by far.

Btw, Russia is not the main producer of Uranium. First is Kazakhstan, then Namibia, Canada, Australia and Uzbekistan

Building a reactor takes a lot of time that we don’t have right now. We need to build that capacity and we need to build it fast.

For sure, and likely they won’t help or help marginally to reach 2035 goals, but they can definitely help to reach “net-0 by 2050”. Modern nuclear power plants are planned for construction in five years or less (42 months for Canada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) ACR-1000, 60 months from order to operation for an AP1000, 48 months from first concrete to operation for a European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) and 45 months for an ESBWR)[47] as opposed to over a decade for some previous plants.

Look at France and their shit show of new and old nuclear projects. The company building new reactors went insolvent because it’s insanely expensive and last year they had to regularly power down the reactors because the rivers used for cooling got too hot

The cost of building new power plants is mostly impacted by delays and overruns, which are often caused by policy changes. For instance, Canada has cost overruns for the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station, largely due to delays and policy changes, that are often cited by opponents of new reactors. Construction started in 1981 at an estimated cost of $7.4 Billion 1993-adjusted CAD, and finished in 1993 at a cost of $14.5 billion. 70% of the price increase was due to interest charges incurred due to delays imposed to postpone units 3 and 4, 46% inflation over a 4-year period and other changes in financial policy.

The costs of decommission are included by law in the price of the energy, and the Nuclear Power Plant owners are required to set aside that money in order to smoothly decommission the plant with no extra costs.

There is still no valid strategy for securely containing the waste produced for the needed amount of time

There are secure enough strategies to contain the, honestly small, amount of spent fuel we produce today. It’s just that it’s scary and no one wants a nuclear deposit in their backyard, but in reality it’s still orders of magnitude safer than dumping millions of tons of pollutants in the air with coal power plants.

Based on their model, the researchers estimated that 1.37 million cases of lung cancer around the world will be linked with coal-fired power plants in 2025.

How many people do you think will die in 2025 due to Nuclear Energy? How many per MW/h? And I remind you that Germany closed all Nuclear Plants before closing all Coal Powered Plants.

Can storage technology reach 100% coverage by 2050? Because that’s the target for net-0 afaik.

If not, we should invest in something else to help us reach that goal, and Nuclear seems the most promising medium-term solution.

It’s a tricky thing, but renewables and nuclear fission plants are not two mutually exclusive things that can’t coexist. The issue with renewables is that, right now, they are not consistent enough to be relied upon 24/7, and we don’t have, right now, a good enough storage technology to solve the issue.

Without this, the only other option is to have renewables cover 30-50% of the production capacity, and another technology to provide a base capacity when renewables cannot be used. This can be hydro, if you have it, nuclear, gas or coal. Choose your poison.

Completely agree with you. The death cults are considered heretical sects of the Imperial Faith and are actively hunt down by the Inquisition. Despite their apparent faith in the God-Emperor Himself, it’s clear that their faith has been twisted by Khorne and Slaneesh and many of their numbers are now just pawns of the Ruinous Powers, that are clearly using them to bring forth the End Times.

Hillary lost because she was so unlikable that people would rather vote for Trump than her.

Biden doesn’t arouse that same sentiment, he’s just there. The Democrats are banking on Trump defeating himself. In a way, they’ve learned the lesson from the 2016 election, don’t put forth someone too polarizing when dealing with a person like Trump. Put forth a safe choice with broad appeal and let the adversary defeat themselves.

This is what politics is, btw, a careful balance to appeal to most of the electorate and win the race.

I’m expecting shit like what we saw in Bucha and what we didn’t see in Mariupol

It felt like we, as a society, had so much optimism for the world that was to come. So, if anything, I think that’s what I’m mostly nostalgic for. I was so excited to grow up in that world. Damn.

As with anything regarding the past, there’s a lot of rose-tinted glasses going on. Be careful what you wish for

That seems overkill

Iirc type 2 is acquired diabetes, type 1 is the one you get from birth, so yes.

Doesn’t matter, the point is that, if it starts with “is” then you automatically know it’s a boolean.

The most funny thing about this is when Google AI will pick this as the true answer to the creation of Dune

In more official settings they would also use the year “ab Urbe condita”, meaning “since the City’s founding” (city being Rome).

59BC should be around 694 aUc if my numbers are right.

I mean, I wouldn’t mind a car with “only” 200km range, but that can charge up to full in just 5 minutes. I use my car just for work 99% of the time anyway, the times I need to go somewhere further away I can easily stop midway to charge, get a coffee in the meantime and then be on my way.

Iirc is to attract birds so it can infect the bird and use it to reproduce. After the bird has eaten the parasite out of the snail’s eyeballs, the snail can often regenerate and keep living as usual. This is what I recall from a YouTube video at least ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah, it pretty much blew out that whole section of coastline, that big hole is called a “caldera”. It’s still active btw, you can go and check it out if you want. Look for Solfatara di Pozzuoli.

You can also look at the Greek island of Santorini, where the whole western and central part of the island was blown off during the bronze age iirc. Historians speculate the eruption, earthquake and tsunamis caused by the event could have partially influenced the collapse of the Minoan civilization, the rise of the Mycenaeans, turmoil in Egypt and possibly even the fall of the Chinese empire due to a global winter. Crazy stuff

Except Vesuvius, which looks like a volcano, but in 79CE erupted violently sending lave, magma and molten rocks several kilometers away, exactly like the stuffy nose you described. It completely destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum, burying them for thousands of years.

Still nothing when compared to the destruction that the “Campi Flegrei” volcano brought 37’000 years ago, completely burying a huge section of the Campanian coastline.

I mean, we could even try to extract how this works and use it to create a biological processor. Or a myriad of other stuff. This is actually a really interesting discovery

In Italian Digimon it’s called Digievolution

Yup, the T. rex is just extinct, chickens are the closest thing genetically speaking (or one of the closest, I’m not sure).

Same reason why humans don’t actually descend from monkeys, both monkeys and humans descend instead from a common ancestor that no longer exists. This is why, IMO, Digimon could be a better representation of evolution than Pokémon, since one Digimon can evolve into many different forms, so that kitten could become a fridge, but also a dragon or a knight with cannons, depending on the evolutionary line.

Then again, I doubt any of these were intended as a realistic portrayal of anything at all, least of all the theory of evolution.