areyouevenreal
@areyouevenreal@lemm.ee
- Comment on Reactor goes brrr 2 weeks ago:
Can you link a source that isn’t pay walled?
- Comment on Reactor goes brrr 2 weeks ago:
Believe it or not you can turn a reactor off if necessary, or up and down. Crazy I know.
Biomass isn’t practical as it releases far too much emissions to be worth it, you almost might as well use gas. Actually thinking about how much land use it would take, it might actually be worse than gas overall. Biomass is only really sensible when talking about material we would waste anyway like food waste and other waste that can be burned, but that would barely make a dent in our energy needs.
Not everything is about economics, otherwise we probably wouldn’t be talking about renewables at all.
As for “free energy”, no energy is free. Solar panels and wind turbines still have a finite life span. Nuclear fuel is cheap enough to the point where it too might as well be free if we are willing to call wind turbines free. This is especially true for Thorium technology or actinide burners. Actinide burners literally reuse nuclear waste.
- Comment on Reactor goes brrr 2 weeks ago:
Not really, no.
Have you actually looked at the data? You might be surprised.
As opposed to the ever so clean extraction and storage of nuclear fuel? Come on.
Yes actually. Uranium mining isn’t nearly as bad as needing tons of lithium, cobalt, and who knows what that goes into solar panels. Thorium containing materials are literally a byproduct of other mining operations that gets thrown away.
From what I gather, wind is on par with nuclear. Other renewables have slightly more than either wind or nuclear, but compared to the other nonrenewable alternatives either option is far better.
Nope. Wind generates 11 tons of CO2 where Nuclear only makes 6. Solar isn’t even close. Biomass is the worst of the renewables and is closer to fossil fuels in its pollution levels than the other clean sources of energy.
ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
And all of this leaves out the most important aspect - nuclear is incredibly expensive compared to renewables, and is trending more expensive each year, while renewables are trending in the opposite direction. This means that for the same amount of resources, we will be able to displace more nonrenewables, leading to a net reduction in deaths/emissions pursuing this route as opposed to nuclear.
Is it? Most people aren’t factoring the cost of energy storage. No one is suggesting Nuclear as the only source of energy. It is very helpful though for grid firming and reducing the amount of expensive and environmentally destructive energy storage therefore reducing the overall cost of operating the grid while increasing reliability and reducing land usage and environmental damage.
It’s also cheaper than solar in many cases. While the upfront investment in reactors is large, the cost per energy produced and ongoing costs are quite low. Lower in many cases than fossil fuels like gas. Plus reactors last longer than solar panels and wind turbines.
Of course, I have nothing against fully privately funded nuclear. If private actors can make the economics work under safe conditions, then nuclear construction is an obvious net positive. When they displace public investment in renewables, however, then they are a net negative.
What happened to the idea that renewables didn’t need public funding anymore? If it’s really so cheap as you say that wouldn’t be necessary.
The reality is both renewables and nuclear needed huge state investments to get off the ground.
- Comment on Reactor goes brrr 2 weeks ago:
That’s a lie. Renewables produce more CO2 than Nuclear reactors per unit energy produces. They can also be significantly more dangerous (higher number of deaths per unit energy) in the case of hydro power or biomass. Solar and batteries require various rare materials and produce significant pollution when manufactured and must be replaced every 20 or 30 years.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 3 weeks ago:
Nuclear actually releases less CO2 than renewables, because renewables aren’t nearly as clean as you think they are. Those solar panels and wind turbines have to be made somehow. The things needed to make solar panels and batteries aren’t exactly great for the planet to mine and manufacture.
This concept of 100% clean energy is a myth, there are just more and less polluting sources. Nuclear being the least polluting, with fossil fuels being the worst, and renewables in the middle.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 4 weeks ago:
I know manufacturing panels and batteries have a significant environmental cost. Being a net negative though I am not sure about. Could you link some sources?
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 4 weeks ago:
How many of those incidents killed anyone? It’s the same with aviation, lots of incidents but few are actually fatal. We still fly everyday.
You can argue all you want but unless you have something that’s actually significantly safer then what are you going to do?
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 4 weeks ago:
Yes it can. Pretending it’s that dangerous in doses normally consumed by humans in say coffee would be silly though and that’s exactly what you are doing. Like you could make a dirty bomb from spent fuel rods, but that’s irresponsible. You could build outdated and unsafe reactors, but again that’s irresponsible. You could also burn people to death using the power of the sun and some mirrors. Do you get my point?
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 4 weeks ago:
That’s actually an interesting point. Maybe we shouldn’t put nuclear reactors in Germany.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 4 weeks ago:
You can’t call nuclear dangerous when it’s literally safer than many other energy sources. It’s like calling Caffeine dangerous when meth exists.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 4 weeks ago:
Wait are you saying that renewables have too much environmental cost to make?
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 4 weeks ago:
You do know what a city is, right? The regulations on nuclear are also around population density if I remember.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 4 weeks ago:
Which cities? I haven’t heard of any cities being made unlivable, only towns and villages.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 4 weeks ago:
Since when? There are dams all over the place.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 4 weeks ago:
While I think most of this is true, I do doubt your claim that Chernobyl didn’t cause birth defects. Even if it didn’t cause defects in humans because they were evacuated, it still caused birth defects in animals that stayed behind. I mean the thing killed a forest. It’s easier to cause mutations than outright kill something.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 4 weeks ago:
There was never any real risk of ruining an entire continent. Stop watching TV shows like Chernobyl for accurate information. Perhaps some people thought that at the time, but we now know that kind of thing is impossible. It could have been a worse accident for sure if there was another steam explosion and it would have effected a wider area, but not even close to a continent lol.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 4 weeks ago:
This is the way. Nuclear is actually one of the safer energy sources, and one of the more reliable. It’s also more expensive than most renewables. As always it comes down to local conditions and situations that favor one power source over another - like countries with lots of geothermal that can be exploited or solar probably won’t go nuclear.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 4 weeks ago:
Yet it still has much lower deaths per energy generated than fossil fuels, and even less than some renewables. A single hydro accident can kill more people than even the worst nuclear disasters. It’s not fair to pretend that all the other sources are perfectly safe.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 4 weeks ago:
A hydro damn breaking has killed more people than Chernobyl before, and probably will again. Renewables are not perfect either unfortunately. Though some are slightly safer than nuclear.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 4 weeks ago:
People don’t put reactors next to cities for a reason. Meaning this scenario wouldn’t happen. Nuclear is also one of the safest energy sources overall in terms of deaths caused. It’s safer than some renewables even, and that’s not factoring in advances in the technology that have happened over the decades making it safer. This kind of misinformation is dangerous. It’s also not a good reason not to do nuclear. The reason why renewables are used more (and probably have a somewhat larger role to play in general) is because they a cheaper and quicker to manufacture. Nuclear energy’s primary problem isn’t safety but rather cost. It’s biggest strength is reliability.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 4 weeks ago:
Renewables folks are also always looking for things that don’t exist. Like magical energy storage and transmission solutions that don’t cost the earth or have huge losses. Or wave power which still hasn’t materialized after decades of research.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 4 weeks ago:
Breeder reactors already exist??? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Notable_rea…
Moving electricity around is a hard problem. Even just moving energy from one end of Britain to the other looses us 10 or 20%, and we are a small nation. If you need to start moving energy in from somewhere actually sunny like Spain you are going to have a big problem.
Crypto isn’t looking for a problem, fiat has plenty of problems, it’s just not an optimal solution. Probably the real answer is not using money at all.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 4 weeks ago:
The guy replied with reasonable arguments. You just don’t want to entertain that nuclear might have a place in some countries. Apparently wanting nuclear to make up less than half of energy generation is called being a shill.
Nuclear power is also not a fossil fuel. That’s ridiculous. It comes from elements naturally found on earth that are the product of nuclear fusion reactions in supernova. Not the result of plant matter decaying underground.
Do you not think there are pro-renewable lobbies too? There are lobbies for all power sources including fossil fuels, nuclear, and renewables. Can you link anything that doesn’t come from a pro-renewable lobby.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 4 weeks ago:
You don’t actually need to mine more uranium though. You can run certain nuclear designs on Thorium, Plutonium from weapon stocks, or even waste from other reactors. Current generation nuclear designs are laughably inefficient at using the nuclear fuels we have available, and I fully understand why people don’t support them.
Realistically though I don’t ever expect nuclear fission to be as cheap as renewables in most areas. In some places nuclear or another power source is always going to be needed though just because renewables are not practical in certain conditions.
In the long term the answer is almost certainly going to be nuclear fusion or another future power source like neutrino voltaic. Solar and wind power are ultimately just offshoots of fusion, and so is fission if you think about where uranium, thorium and so on come from. In fact all power we know of seems to come from either gravity or some kind of nuclear reaction (inc. geothermal and fossil fuels).
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 4 weeks ago:
You do realize that all that is also expensive, and limited? We haven’t invented room temperature superconductors yet, and battery technology is far from perfect. There is only so much lithium and cobalt in the entire world. Yes we can now use things like sodium, but that’s a technology that’s still young and needs more research before it’s full potential is realized. There is also a reason we have overground cables and not underground. Digging up all that earth is hella expensive.
- Comment on where the magic happens owo 5 weeks ago:
Could honestly try a virtual machine or an emulator at that point. Would be worth a shot.
- Comment on Nahh 2 months ago:
Can someone explain what is going on here?
- Comment on Pray for me lads, Imma about to rawdog this without back ups 2 months ago:
I don’t think you have interpreted that correctly. People tend to reinstall when changing versions, for example from Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04. That isn’t the same as doing updates.
- Comment on Pray for me lads, Imma about to rawdog this without back ups 2 months ago:
Honestly if you are that worried about updates breaking stuff, you might be better off using an immutable distro. These work using images and/or snapshots so it’s easy to rollback if something goes wrong. It’s also just less likely to go wrong as you aren’t upgrading individual packages as much, but rather the base system as a whole. Both Fedora and Open Suse have atomic/immutable variants with derivatives like Universal Blue providing ready to go setups for specific use cases like gaming and workstation use.
Alternatively the likes of Debian rarely break because of updates as everything is thoroughly tested before deployment. Gentoo and void are the same deal but in rolling release format so they are at least somewhat up to date while still being quite well tested.
- Comment on Anon recommends a cast iron pan 2 months ago:
What made you think that?