Blake [he/him]

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  • 71 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • When it comes to generating electricity, nuclear is hugely more expensive than renewables. Every 1000Wh of nuclear power could be 2000-3000 Wh solar or wind.

    If you’ve been told “it’s not possible to have all power from renewable sources”, you have been a victim of disinformation from the fossil fuel industry. The majority of studies show that a global transition to 100% renewable energy across all sectors – power, heat, transport and industry – is feasible and economically viable.

    This is all with current, modern day technology, not with some far-off dream or potential future tech such as nuclear fusion, thorium reactors or breeder reactors.

    Compared to nuclear, renewables are:

    • Cheaper
    • As clean or cleaner, in terms of emissions
    • Faster to provision
    • Less environmentally damaging
    • Not reliant on continuous consumption of fuel
    • Decentralised
    • Much, much safer
    • Much easier to maintain
    • More reliable
    • Much more capable of being scaled down on demand to meet changes in energy demands

    Nuclear power has promise as a future technology. But at present, while I’m all in favour of keeping the ones we have until the end of their useful life, building new nuclear power stations is a massive waste of money, resources, effort and political capital.

    Nuclear energy should be funded only to conduct new research into potential future improvements and to construct experimental power stations. Any money that would be spent on building nuclear power plants should be spent on renewables instead.

    Frequently asked questions:

    • But it’s not always sunny or windy, how can we deal with that?

    While a given spot in your country is going to have periods where it’s not sunny or rainy, with a mixture of energy distribution (modern interconnectors can transmit 800kV or more over 800km or more with less than 3% loss) non-electrical storage such as pumped storage, and diversified renewable sources, this problem is completely mitigated - we can generate wind, solar or hydro power over 2,000km away from where it is consumed for cheaper than we could generate nuclear electricity 20km away.

    • Don’t renewables take up too much space?

    The United States has enough land paved over for parking spaces to have 8 spaces per car - 5% of the land. If just 10% of that space was used to generate solar electricity - a mere 0.5% - that would generate enough solar power to provide electricity to the entire country. By comparison, around 50% of the land is agricultural. The amount of land used by renewable sources is not a real problem, it’s an argument used by the very wealthy pro-nuclear lobby to justify the huge amounts of funding that they currently receive.

    • Isn’t Nuclear power cleaner than renewables?

    No, they’re pretty comparable in terms of emissions, and renewables are cleaner in terms of other environmental impacts. You can look up total lifetime emissions for nuclear vs. renewables - this is the aggregated and equalised emissions caused per kWh for each energy source. It takes into account the energy used to extract raw materials, build the power plant, operate the plant, maintenance, the fuels needed to sustain it, the transport needed to service it, and so on. These numbers generally show that renewables tend to be as clean or cleaner in terms of total lifetime emissions, and in addition, since nuclear relies on fuel extraction (mining) and has lots of issues regarding waste, renewables is overall cleaner than nuclear.

    • We need a baseline load, though, and that can only be nuclear or fossil fuels.

    Not according to industry experts - the majority of studies show that a 100% renewable source of energy across all industries for all needs - electricity, heating, transport, and industry - is completely possible with current technology and is economically viable. If you disagree, don’t argue with me, take it up with the IEC. Here’s a Wikipedia article that you can use as a baseline for more information: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy







  • Hey, I just wanted to say thank you for looking into this further and being brave to admit when you’re wrong. That’s a really admirable quality which is way too uncommon these days!

    For the safety aspect, I don’t think deaths is the most helpful comparison - considering for nuclear that many, many thousands of people will have to deal with health problems caused by radiation exposure over decades. Lots of people argue that the Chernobyl death toll should include people who die from the effects of that radiation, which would push the numbers from ~300 dead to tens of thousands.


  • Blake [he/him]@feddit.uktoMemes@lemmy.mlPower Sources
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    1 year ago

    Even according to your source (which is really biased, by the way), renewables are just as safe as nuclear.

    Why should be waste money on expensive, dirty nuclear power when we can get double the return on investment with much cleaner renewables?

    There is no sensible reason to mine limited uranium unless you want us to continue to be dependent on exploitative, extractive industries?



  • Blake [he/him]@feddit.uktoMemes@lemmy.mlPower Sources
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    1 year ago

    When it comes to generating electricity, nuclear is hugely more expensive than renewables. Every 1000Wh of nuclear power could be 2000-3000 Wh solar or wind.

    If you’ve been told “it’s not possible to have all power from renewable sources”, you have been a victim of disinformation from the fossil fuel industry. The majority of studies show that a global transition to 100% renewable energy across all sectors – power, heat, transport and industry – is feasible and economically viable.

    This is all with current, modern day technology, not with some far-off dream or potential future tech such as nuclear fusion, thorium reactors or breeder reactors.

    Compared to nuclear, renewables are:

    • Cheaper
    • Lower emissions
    • Faster to provision
    • Less environmentally damaging
    • Not reliant on continuous consumption of fuel
    • Decentralised
    • Much, much safer
    • Much easier to maintain
    • More reliable
    • Much more capable of being scaled down on demand to meet changes in energy demands

    Nuclear power has promise as a future technology. But at present, while I’m all in favour of keeping the ones we have until the end of their useful life, building new nuclear power stations is a massive waste of money, resources, effort and political capital.

    Nuclear energy should be funded only to conduct new research into potential future improvements and to construct experimental power stations. Any money that would be spent on building nuclear power plants should be spent on renewables instead.

    Frequently asked questions:

    • But it’s not always sunny or windy, how can we deal with that?

    While a given spot in your country is going to have periods where it’s not sunny or rainy, with a mixture of energy distribution (modern interconnectors can transmit 800kV or more over 800km or more with less than 3% loss) non-electrical storage such as pumped storage, and diversified renewable sources, this problem is completely mitigated - we can generate wind, solar or hydro power over 2,000km away from where it is consumed for cheaper than we could generate nuclear electricity 20km away.

    • Don’t renewables take up too much space?

    The United States has enough land paved over for parking spaces to have 8 spaces per car - 5% of the land. If just 10% of that space was used to generate solar electricity - a mere 0.5% - that would generate enough solar power to provide electricity to the entire country. By comparison, around 50% of the land is agricultural. The amount of land used by renewable sources is not a real problem, it’s an argument used by the very wealthy pro-nuclear lobby to justify the huge amounts of funding that they currently receive.

    • Isn’t Nuclear power cleaner than renewables?

    No, it’s dirtier. You can look up total lifetime emissions for nuclear vs. renewables - this is the aggregated and equalised environmental harm caused per kWh for each energy source. It takes into account the energy used to extract raw materials, build the power plant, operate the plant, maintenance, the fuels needed to sustain it, the transport needed to service it, and so on. These numbers always show nuclear as more environmentally harmful than renewables.

    • We need a baseline load, though, and that can only be nuclear or fossil fuels.

    Not according to industry experts - the majority of studies show that a 100% renewable source of energy across all industries for all needs - electricity, heating, transport, and industry - is completely possible with current technology and is economically viable. If you disagree, don’t argue with me, take it up with the IEC. Here’s a Wikipedia article that you can use as a baseline for more information: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy









  • Come on man, I’ve seen you around a lot and I know you post a lot of good stuff, but to be fair, you’re not blameless here. I get that you’re not interested in a game and it’s frustrating to see lots of posts about it dominating your feed, but clearly the OP is interested and excited about it, and basically telling them to shut up about their interest just because it’s not what you want to hear about is a mean thing to do. It would be different if they posted spam links to their own blog every single day or something like that but they post all sorts of relevant news links to various communities so I think they just share stories they’re interested in, and that’s valuable to the community too! We all should be working together to build a nice friendly community to talk about what we enjoy and sometimes that means we have to tolerate others quirks and discussing things we don’t particularly care for.


  • Oh boy, Travis Worthington comes off as such a selfish asshole in this interview. Paraphrased, and being a bit unfair to him, he just kind of says, “oh, we know fine well that we are benefiting from stealing art from others, and I’d really like if you believed that I cared about that, but the reality is that I don’t really give a shit, and if you’re an illustrator, just give up on your dreams of getting a job someday, because I certainly won’t be paying you”

    Definitely gonna be avoiding indie games studios from now on.