A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
The problem isn't that they exploded one time. The problem is that that one explosion is still happening and likely will be for quite a while.
On the other hand, modern rock exploding plant designs are so much better that it's very unlikely to repeat itself, so there's that.
You're right to reject the logic behind that because it's nonsense. Its not making sense to them because they still presume some kind of good faith when it come to these sorts of things.
The reason we haven't built more nuclear power stations is because oil, gas and coal companies will make less money, if we build more nuclear power stations.
They have the means, the motive and they have a well recorded history of being that cartoonishly villainous. Nothing else makes sense.
Three Mile Island and Chernobyl really did change things. Prior to those incidents there were plans to build over 50 more nuclear plants in place which got canceled as a result. Currently oil and gas industries will do all they can to keep nuclear from making a come back, but for a long time they didn't have to do shit thanks to those catastrophes.
Paraphrased but this is right.
And the people were taught to talk about the horrible nuclear accidents that killed a few but completely glance over the unimaginable millions perished in the name of oil, mustn't even mention the mass extinction events we launched with oil.
We even spread exaggerated bullshit about radiation mutation (wtf? thats superhero comic books fiction!!) and cancer rates (only one really), ignoring how much overwhelmingly more of the both we get from fossil fuel products.
We are like prehistoric people going extinct bcs of the tales how generations ago someone burned down their house so fire bad. Well, actually not like that - we are taking with us a lot of species & entire ecosystems too.
“Ted Kennedy killed more people than Three Mile Island” - Bumper sticker.
That’s said, I facepalm at Fukushima. And desperately want more modern systems
Not even a joke, that's a very concise way to put the argument.
Na it's dumb. The issue with the magic rocks isn't the direct consequences like with the fire. The issues with these rocks are long terms with the consequences on humans and the environment thousands of years later.
Yeah, the environmental issues that are orders of magnitude less problematic than literally pumping the toxic chemicals into the atmosphere like with fossil fuels, vs comparatively miniscule amount of solid waste to store inert.
What consequences?
There are no consequences for animals in Chernobyl, they are thriving in all aspects, even mammals living underground (mutations are fiction).
People that didn't leave the exclusion zone died of old age there.
Life on Earth had to deal with all sorts of radiation.
What caused mass extinction was ecosystem change, eg via global climate change.
these rocks are long terms with the consequences on humans and the environment thousands of years later.
You bury them in concrete, done. Nuclear waste isn't an issue and hasn't ever been
Except the retard didn't just burn his house down, he burned thousands of people's houses down in such a way that nobody could ever live there again, and came very close to burning down the whole continent in the same way.
(I'm still in favour of spicy rock steam)
Isn't nuclear energy like super safe and have killed incredibly few people compared to all the other energy sources?
Or are you talking about destilling the magic rocks very much and putting them in a bomb?
Exactly.
The whole clusterfuck of mishandled Chernobyl cleanup & everything there before and after only claimed a few lives (via direct radiation tissue damage or just accidents).
Compare that with the daily average of thousands of killed in various (ultimately) oil wars.
But we don't even get news about that.
But western propaganda sure showed us malformed babies & claimed it was from radiation - it turns out it was all bullshit, it was always a toxic chemical behind it (unregulated industries selling toxic shit by the tonnes - fertilisers, paints, even biological warfare).
We just take radiation super seriously and completely disregard toxic chemical pollution of eg industrial spillages. People just get to live in polluted areas and die sooner because of that. Instead of living for longer & with less health hazards but with a little radiation.
And lastly - burning coal released way more radiation into air than nuclear accidents.
Or to put it another way, we almost ruined a large swath of land and learned from that mistake, but chose not to use it so when we do have to switch to nukes because destroyed our planet we will have forgotten all those lessons and do it again.
One time? Wikipedia says over 100 serious incidents and lists about 30 of them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents&wprov=rarw1
It's fine if you like nuclear, just don't try and claim it was one time. It poses serious risk and should be treated as such.
Look up deaths per kWHr of different energy sources and come back to me
Most of those didn't involve the magic rocks, and most didn't hurt anyone.
More people die creating the building materials for a powerplant (or a windmills, or a solar panel) than ever during operation. The numbers really don't matter.
I honestly don't care what we do, as long as we stop burning coal, oil and gas. The way I see it, every nuclear plant and windmill means we all die a little later.
Just put it somewhere noone lives like the Dakotas or places people who don't matter live, like west Virginia. All the coal miners getting cancer anyway, why not double tap?
Low blow on West Virginia. Cool state and nice people. Hoping to move there someday.
Burning down your house doesn't poison people thousands of years later, so it's not a perfect analogy.
Plus we have magic mirrors and magic fans that do the same thing as the magic rocks just way cheaper.
We had magic mirrors and magic fans for centuries tho.
Yet we decided to release way more poison and even way more radiation by mining and burning fossil fuels. We just poison larger areas than any nuclear disasters. And with fossil fuels people actually get cancer, and with toxic byproducts, mutations and birth defects.
People in polluted areas die sooner. Except around nuclear disasters sights - the air gets cleaner once all the people are thrown out.
We’ve upgraded from burning our houses down to burning our atmosphere down which will absolutely poison humans for centuries to come. And since we now burn larger fires with black rocks, those release far more magic rock dust that poisons people than the magic rock water heaters do. Not to mention that fire has both killed more of us cave dwellers than magic rocks ever have (including the flying weaponry runes made from them) and have caused more ecological disasters, so fire is much worse.
Then we talk magic mirrors, they have evil rocks in them that get in our rivers and we don’t contain well. That aside, we show tradition to our ancestors by making much of them with slavery.
And the magic fans? The design is very human. They’d be a gift from the gods if only the spirit of the wind were always with us.
Summary: Magic rock still good, black rocks and black water make bad fire and hairless monkey make sick more.
This is exactly, factually right, and eloquently put using the same meme terminology people here understand.
I love the wording in here
For huge countries as like the US: Maybe. You have enough space to also store the trash somewhere for thousands of years.
For small countries, like most of Europe, where the population density is way higher: hard pass.
Those same countries that found space for all the rest of their industrial waste?
Nuclear waste has a tiny footprint. Fence off a couple square km for security, dig a small but deep hole, and there ya go.
Obviously oversimplifying, but the point is that nuclear waste is a tiny issue. The entire world's waste could be stored in a single warehouse if we wanted to (we don't).
iirc nuclear waste isn't really that big of an issue anymore, they just drill a really deep hole that's like a foot across and nobody will ever see it again
Storage isn't that much of a problem, even in smol Europe countries.
Also it's contained in specific areas, some nerds are bound to wanna reuse what we now think of as trash/spent fuel. If it's still radioactive after it just means it radiates energy, we just didn't commercially learned how to harness it. There are ongoing studies into that too.
And radiation isn't as problematic as we are taught by media - humans lived in Chernobyl exclusion zone until death by old age, mammals there are thriving. The dangers of radiation are immediate tissue damage or thyroid cancer (again via tissue damage) if iodine isn't taken by exposed people.
Well, you see, the "Anti Magic Rock" Lobby has immense amount of power because of the money of the still lucrative "burning stuff and pollute everything" business.
It's the "Burning other magic rocks" party.
Step 1: Get magic rocks.
Step 2: Now design the rest of the nuclear reactor.
I always wonder where we would actually be at as a civilization if it weren't for fuckass lobbyists and money hoarding greedy assholes. This is a perfect example. If we'd learned from our mistakes and actually improved on nuclear energy there's no telling where we'd be at this point.
But the profits!