Repost: https://feddit.org/post/13486648

Upton Sinclair, apparently.

Grist’s penchant for long-windedness makes me “headline-only folk”, so thanks. :)

Electric energy generation is just one (large!) part of the equation, and one of the more hopeful parts too. But the article makes only a passing mention of transportation, doesn’t mention (electrified) heating, doesn’t mention nutrition, doesn’t mention plastics, doesn’t mention environmental changes that are now running without further human intervention like thawing tundra and deteriorating eco systems.

Usually. Iirc, this guy didn’t get much of a punishment: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7SfHV4f0Y38 (this is Germany).

97% of the waste produced is classified as low- or intermediate-level waste (LLW or ILW)

Sure, much of it is concrete and not all that noteworthy. But those final 3% are still a substantive amount of waste. How exactly do those percentages do anything about the timescales that this waste is dangerous for?

In France, where fuel is reprocessed, just 0.2% of all radioactive waste by volume is classified as high-level waste (HLW).

France is a fun example. Incidentally, their reprocessing entails shipping spent fuel rods to Siberia and having Russia bury the unusable bits there. Basic sleight of hand.

Many industries produce hazardous and toxic waste. All toxic waste needs to be dealt with safely, not just radioactive waste.

That seems like whataboutism. Am I missing something there?

But because Plutonium is part of high level waste all HLW is treated as if it’s plutonium because of the overzealous safety standards.

Given how spent fuel rods contain different elements and different isotopes of elements, in what sense is that overzealous? So, indeed, every spent fuel rod contains some amount of Pu-242 with a half-life of 374k years. That that is only a small percentage of the whole doesn’t really matter, unless you plan to separate all elements/isotopes before storing them.

Geostorage was implimented because of military applications of plutonium that expired and had to be stored. Over a third of all nuclear waste in the US is military waste.

Switzerland and Sweden are two countries whose plans for geological storage sites are relatively far along. Neither of them ever possessed nuclear arms. But these countries are probably just not as clever as you are.😚

It’s not made up. What the fuck? Why do you think geological storage is a thing? Are you really this uninformed?

German informational platform (translaw via DeepL):

There is still no final repository in Germany for the highly radioactive waste from the use of nuclear energy - around 27,000 cubic meters. The waste will continue to radiate for hundreds of thousands of years and could endanger people and the environment. Internationally, experts advocate storage in rock layers deep below the earth’s surface.

The only agenda I have to push is making sure our grandchildren have a future that isn’t a collapse to pre-industrial living if not total extinction.

In that case, please stop flogging fission. It’s a dead horse, albeit one that continues shitting radiation for multiple 100k years.

Cool, you have an agenda to push.👍

I acknowledged that a wind park was dismantled, please read my comment. And it’s interesting to know that you just wipe away everything else as “nonsense”, without any argument.

Your comment is pure propaganda.

The German nuclear plants were 13 years overdue for their costly post-Fukushima checkups (as laws were tightened after Fukushima) and they were also past design life. Germany does not have a final storage solution for its legacy of nuclear waste, so the question of where to store the hazardous waste for multiple 100k years remains completely unsolved, and that in a fairly small but populous country that has no equivalent to the Nevada desert.

The energy that the final few plants generated was more than replaced by renewable build-out within the same year. In fact, at the height of German nuclear in the mid-90s, nuclear produced 30% of electricity, whereas renewables now produce 60% of German electricity. The reactors also evaporated used tons of river water, which is bad, given climate change. The reactors also tied Germany to a Russian-dominated supply chain, also bad, given geopolitical circumstances.

German coal usage is now the lowest since the 60s; while granted, Germany is behind a number of countries in that respect that have phased out coal entirely. And while yes, a wind park was demolished to enlarge a coal mine, and that is a terrible symbol, it is not much more than that.

If you even get a doubling of power usage that way, I’d be surprised.

If the nuclear industry is going to be quadrupled, and gas and oil are similarly enlarged, and renewables are at least not shrinking, what are people supposed to do with all that extra power in such a short time? I mean, I get that induced demand is a thing but… a quadrupling of long-standing industries? Is there any intention for this plan to be realistic?

It’s so weird how their ideology on the one hand appears to prescribe people like Musk creating a “legion” of their own offspring but also killing all the rest of us, including not just their political opponents but also their own voters and even people abroad.

At least you’re not a lunatic.

But … there’s one side in the conversation that is refuting basic facts. This unshared reality is making it impossible to depoliticize the debate. The country can either take a hiatus from democracy entirely, or finds a way to force right-wing politicians to deal with reality again.

And it’s not all about academic debates either, as someone needs to define desired outcomes, e.g., who to prioritize, today’s seniors, tomorrow’s refugees, today’s rich people, etc.

It requires political action, but this could happen without politicizing it.

Irresponsible actors have politicized the facts themselves. Trump didn’t run on “climate change exists and I am going to make it worse”. Instead, he ran on “climate change is a Marxist China hoax, now eat my beautiful clean coal!”

In the past, when it wasn’t quite as urgent that we act, there was a relatively broad societal consensus that it made sense to protect the environment. But now that some people actually feel extremely threatened in their wealth by climate action, we are experiencing an this frenzied attack on our collective intelligence from the right.

Blaming liberal/left-wing/green political actors for “politicizing” climate change is just victim-blaming. The ones who have given up on a shared, science-based reality are the fascists and the gonservatives.

If politicians recognize the need to do something, they might do it even if they do not center their campaign around it.

Sure but you’ll still have to explain to people what the hell you’re doing there.

Canada’s carbon dividend system appears to be a good idea fucked up through a mix of suboptimal implementation (including being hampered by state-level gonservatives), bad own PR, and successful negative campaigns from bad actors.

You do need political action on it, which makes climate change an inherently political topic. The issues are elsewhere:

• the majority [of] people would have been temporarily inconvenienced by climate action
• a small group of very powerful people would lose their existing business model

The latter group thus decided to tell the former group that reality is not what it is and that their minor inconveniences should be absolute dealbreakers.

My suspicion is that this is the kind of joke only guys can really laugh at. (Fwiw: I didn’t vote on this at all.)

!guilttrippingthroughhistory

A bit idealized in part. Germany has a similar system, and there are just a lot of people who ignore or misunderstand the rules, and a lot of packaging uses deceptive designs, e.g. plastics looking like paper. Facilities sometimes burn because some people discard vapes among their regular trash. And finally, most of the content of the yellow recycling bags is still burned anyhow because nobody can commercially recycle chips bag or tetrapaks. (Paper, glass, and organics recycling usually works pretty well though.)

I imagine Italy is maybe better in some areas but overall not too different.

The one thing that really works in Germany though is the bottle deposit system.