Speaking for myself?
I”d go back and try to show…
…well, not “the idiots who shut down nuclear power”, so much as the mushy minds that believed them, how much trouble and misery they would eventually cause around the world.
Of course, destroying cornucopia in general is a goal of the totalitarian left. Poor people don’t solve problems – but they do demand strongmen to solve the problems for them.
Best use of a time machine would be to go back and watch great concerts in person.
I’m not even sure that targeted assassinations would be a good second best use. That’s liable to bring down some protectors of the timeline from even further in the future to stop you.
If only a time machine could prevent the most damaging phrase of all time coined by Psychologist William Ryan in 1971.
Ryan uttered that phrase to refute Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 work The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (usually simply referred to as the Moynihan Report).
Essentially, Moynihan said, “if you do this (the war on poverty), this is what will happen”.
We did and he was right.
Rather than focus on self-improvement, the civil rights movement focused on rage, radicalism and recrimination.
…and here we are.
ps, on my way to a family gathering on Sunday, I took a right on Lake Street after exiting I-35. What a mess. Trash, tents, druggies, the scent of urine and skunk.
…but hey, the bums, er homeless, are not to blame.
They are the victims.
So, OK, a time machine. What would you say to those people that would cause them to change their minds? Those same people, with very exceptions, still believe that nuclear power is bad nowadays.
One thing that was not said at the time and should have been on every pundits tongue:
“Three Mile Island was a success, not a failure!”
Chernoble was a failure!
The opening of Georgia Power’s Vogtle unit 3 comes seven years late and billions of dollars over budget
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/31/vogtle-unit-3-nuclear-reactor-long-delayed-starts-delivering-power.html
You can’t just build one reactor and expect it to be cheaper than alternatives. For economies of scale to kick-in, there needs to be a continuous program of building, maintaining and decommissioning reactors over 30-40 years involving 100s of reactors. That’s what will ensure a ready supply of trained workforce, cost efficient spares, reduction in building cost, incremental improvements in reactor technology. This is exactly what happens in any manufacturing setup and must be a no-brainer. Majority of the upfront investment and cost is required to build the first of anything with all following units have just the variable cost and a portion of the initial fixed cost with higher the number of units lower the price.
From the weedy shores of murky, mosquito infested LakE HaCK, rAT shares his expertise in nuclear reactors and business while downing his first hair of the dog of the day.
That’s very nice rAT.
What’s the lunch special down at the PiZzA ShAK today?
From the weedy shores of murky, mosquito infested LakE HaCK, rAT shares his expertise in nuclear reactors and business while downing his first hair of the d0g of the day.
That’s very nice rAT.
What’s the lunch special down at the PiZzA ShAK today?
Last night I watched Oppenheimer.
It’s striking that around that time the West developed a carbon free, scalable electricity supply solution which today could be running electric arc furnaces continually to produce abundant amounts of silicon, glass, steel, aluminium and so on to support resilient local supply chains.
This source og energy requires 10 times less raw material per GW installed.
Should we not be going back to the future right now?
Greg wrote:
Rather than focus on self-improvement, the civil rights movement focused on rage, radicalism and recrimination.
Greg, when you say “the civil rights movement,” you are not talking about black civil rights leaders. You are talking about college educated whites, primarily people with degrees in the humanities and the soft sciences. Blacks were too poor and held too few positions of power to create the mess we are in now, our world is the creation of the white intelligentsia.
You know who the white intelligentsia blames for the woes of the world?
Reagan. An capitalism.
A lot of this is politics. Are you surprised?
Long term storage of nuclear waste from our current generation of reactors is an issue. But that issue can go away if you actually burn that waste in a different type of a reactor to create even more energy. The problem with that? That nuclear reactor will also produce Pu as a byproduct, and that leads to far easier nuclear weapons (as well as a chemically nasty waste). The anti-progress nuts already hate nuclear; they’d hate cleaner, more sustainable nuclear power even more.
But if you think proliferation is an issue now, just wait. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Iran trying to get a nuke while the US pulls out of the middle east, and China threatening Taiwan, I suspect that there’s going to be a lot more proliferation in our future. Ukraine has the expertise, knowledge, materials, and motivation already, Taiwan is likely to be not far behind, and Saudi Arabia has limitless money and utter hatred of Iran.
Nuclear waste is a hugely exaggerated problem. In fact it is great that we can concentrate the waste into such small volumes which can be easily vitrified and buried rather than trying to capture vast amounts of dilute CO2 which then has to be compressed into a liquid state which (hopefully) stays underground. Not to mention the radioactive fly ash that comes out of a coal chimney stack. I understand why people fear nuclear waste, but the reality is that it can be safely dealt with. There are naturally occuring sources of radiation deposit in the ground which even have microbes feeding of them.
They can put a nuke reactor in a tube, sink it to 3000 ft. below the surface of the ocean and cruise it around without a single problem. They do this at will. They have been doing it for more than 60 years.
But they cannot build a nuke power plant in 10 years, and billions over budget.
What’s the secret?
The military is immune from grifting politicians, federal and state regulators, and leftists nitwits
Now, to tie a bow around it, if I had a nuke submarine, and a time machine, I’d paint shark teeth on it, and sink every ship that approached the coast of Africa that was flying a Dutch, British, Spanish or Portuguese flag, starting around 1560 AD.
BTW…speaking of sinking tubes, rAT, what did your ex wife say the first time she caught you firing your port and starboard tubes into your ER nurse/daughter?
Betting it wasn’t “avast there!”.
One issue is that cost is very hard to pin down. There are so many distortions for example:
1) Cost of subsidies which differ depending on the type of generation we’re talking about
2) The flakiness of leveled cost calculations which often fail to account for a lot of the externalities associated with intermittent renewable generation (e.g back-up plant and their associated fuel costs, grid re-enforcement to deal with the large spikes you need to accommodate to fully utilize just the average generation delivered and so on…)
3) The ‘economy of scale’ subsidy which might favour one technology simply due to its rate of deployment at a particular point in time rather than its true lifecycle/environmental credentials
Pointing out the raw material overhead of different types of generation however does flag a major advantage of nuclear power. With such a high capacity factor, all of the materials in the genset, turbines, reactor core, building materials and so on are being utilized constantly with a very high power density. A wind turbine by contrast must have enough material to withstand the fatigue stresses associated with a storm, however the utilization of this material is very low since it is barely stressed to this limit at much lower average power levels.
Another metric which is worth considering is the energy return from energy invested ratio for each type of generation — if you check out this link you see that nuclear again comes out way on top:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/02/11/eroi-a-tool-to-predict-the-best-energy-mix/
Solar – 4
Wind – 16
Nuclear – 75
rAT squeaked: “One issue is that cost is very hard to pin down…”
As hard to pin down as your ER nurse/daughter was that first special time, rAT?
I bet she cried, didn’t she, rAT? Did that make it better for you?
I suppose your inability to produce a son is a double edge sword, rAT.
On the one hand, you could have bonded as cell mates, and fellow registered sex offenders up there in HaCK.
But on the other, there could be a young Turk out there hunting you with the murderous intent of righteous retribution.
Life is funny, no?
“You know who the white intelligentsia blames for the woes of the world?
Reagan. An capitalism.”
So true. I saw book review the other day where, apparently, the book tries to make the case that racism = capitalism and one can only be anti-racism if one is anti-capitalist.
Of course, the book author who holds this opinion probably believes we are all to stupid to see the blatant racism in that statement. The sad thing is, at least half the population probably is that stupid.
mjb003 wrote:
I saw book review the other day where, apparently, the book tries to make the case that racism = capitalism and one can only be anti-racism if one is anti-capitalist.
This idea is highly accepted in intellectual circles and among powerful Democrat politicians. They will say that they support capitalism, but the capitalism they support is a capitalism where “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.”
There is a kind of triumvirate of disreason among these people — global warming, racism, and capitalism. The campaign to end one is inextricably tied to ending the other two as well, you can’t end racism unless you also end capitalism and global warming, etc.
Nuclear waste is a hugely exaggerated problem. In fact it is great that we can concentrate the waste into such small volumes which can be easily vitrified and buried rather than trying to capture vast amounts of dilute CO2 which then has to be compressed into a liquid state which (hopefully) stays underground. Not to mention the radioactive fly ash that comes out of a coal chimney stack. I understand why people fear nuclear waste, but the reality is that it can be safely dealt with.
You do not need to try and convince the commenters on this blog of this paragraph. You need to convince 2 groups of those on your side.
1) The emotionally driven activists who are ignorantly afraid of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.
2) Those in power who are aware that cheap, readily available energy will only increase the standard of living (contrary to anti-global-warming) , the movement of goods and services (contrary to anti-capitalism), and thereby, liberty (contrary to anti-racism) itself.
To tie in with MMPs most recent comment.
They do not want that.