/222/ Nukes 4 Kids ft. Emmet Penney, pt. 1
Added 2021-11-02 07:01:01 +0000 UTCOn the global energy crisis.
Nuclear energy advocate Emmet Penney (@nukebarbarian) joins us to discuss the growing energy crunch in Europe, the US and beyond. Nuclear power is opposed by an unholy alliance of environmentalists and neoliberals - yet it seems the best solution for providing plentiful, reliable, and clean energy. As a demand, it seems an open goal for the left - so why are so many resistant?
Part 2 is available here.
Links & Readings:
- Nuclear Barbarian - pro-nuclear podcast & newsletter
- ex.haust - Emmet's other, co-hosted pod
- Undeveloping America, Emmet Penney, The American Conservative
- Political Life in the Lottery of Babylon, Emmet Penney, The American Conservative
- How we happened to sell off our electricity, James Meek, LRB
- A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations, Robert Bryce, Public Affairs (book)
Comments
Based and Promethianpilled, Bunga Boys! Fire up that fission
SLE1990
2021-12-08 03:14:39 +0000 UTCListen, I love you guys but this is demented. Your proposal is to build THOUSANDS of new nuclear plants, in every nation on earth, every one of them (unless you know something I don't) on the coast or by a body of water. You propose building them, I guess, across a period maybe 20-120 years from now, a century during which the already-committed temperature rise is, I don't know, let's say 1.8-2.0 degrees and by the end of which sea-level rise will be, you know, appreciable. Also, of course, many of these plants will be built in regions that, by the end of that period, will quite likely be uninhabitable because too hot (although I guess you'll have plenty of power for the A/C). Meanwhile, you'll want to be disposing of the huge quantities of radioactive waste (two orders of magnitude more than presently produced?) in DOZENS (hundreds?) of geological stores that don't presently exist and - this is the best bit really - the replacement cycle means you'll need to be building AND decommissioning HUNDREDS OF PLANTS PER YEAR by the end of the period (burying the old ones? Shooting them into space?). And I know you'll say I'm being catastrophist, because geniuses like Emmet will somehow have managed to short-circuit the epic construction cycles inherent in current nuclear and everything will be all right by mid-century but there's a good chance that quite a lot of this will have to be done in settings that will have been pretty chaotic for a while, quite possibly in militarised or failed states, with populations immiserated by warming and by the shitty response of the capitalist state. I'm not anti-nuclear. The safety argument is obviously bogus (deaths from coal must run into the millions) - although multiply the number of plants by 100 and put them in vulnerable, underresourced places and, you know, we might see a few more meltdowns. Let's keep and upgrade the current fleet, urgently switch the German and Japanese plants back on (switching them off was obviously a dumb idea), even build some more - but honestly, depending on nuclear to stabilise emissions and secure continued growth in the long run is not about HOPE, it's about DESPERATION.
Steve Bowbrick
2021-11-18 16:23:54 +0000 UTC
