FirmWeird
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User ID: 757
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1d ago
What the plebes want is not even a relevant factor in the equation, because the plebes refuse to exercise any discretionary funding over anything or hire any good lobbyists.
This by itself is a serious issue and one of the major contributing factors to the rise of politicians like Trump, who made it into the office on the basis of broken promises to rein in this corruption.
The Epstein Files fiasco is just a big clown show, much like WWE Smackdown
Au contraire - the Epstein files reveal a major scandal with incredibly far reaching consequences. If you don't think that these files contain information that's extremely relevant to modern politics I don't believe you're actually interested in politics in any real way beyond cheering for your favorite sports team.
FirmWeird
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2d ago
You can't have your cake and eat it, too.
Actually, you can. The most straightforward explanation isn't that the entire government is completely controlled and co-opted, but that there are multiple competing power blocs. The foreign blackmail operation has leverage and control over several important people, but their control isn't total - the public can influence those portions of the government exposed to the will of the people enough to shift the balance of power between competing groups in the government. This actually explains the behavior of the government better than both the stupid version of the conspiracy theory you're arguing against and the conventional, no conspiracy at all view.
FirmWeird
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2d ago
Terribly sorry for the delay - I've been busy over the holiday period with family.
this says 4400 tons of lead are contained in 92GW of solar panels. So that is roughly 4400 tons of lead for 30years92GW of energy.
Lead is actually substantially easier to safely re-use than spent nuclear fuel - to the best of my knowledge, solar panels don't actually do anything to the lead which renders it irreversibly unusable. If you have evidence that you can't actually reuse the components or materials placed into solar panels I'd love to see it.
If we also, say, limit the analysis to Germany where the PV capacity factor is 10% or bias our valuation of baseload energy production more highly, or we include battery waste it's not too hard to get numbers where Nuclear comes out on top.
Except nuclear waste is more dangerous for far longer and less re-usable, which makes the comparison pointless.
I feel like you're refusing to engage with the argument. Lead and spent nuclear fuel have pretty much identical environmental risk profiles after a few decades.
What argument? I'm unfamiliar with any scientific literature that makes the case spent solar panels are as environmentally damaging as nuclear waste. Nuclear waste continues to irradiate anything around it for an incredibly long time, while lead...well, I wouldn't want to drink it or use it in my pipes, but lead is actually a useful metal that can be repurposed safely.
Would it be safe to be in the vicinity of the chemical storage area of the Rotterdam port if civilization collapses tomorrow?
Collapse doesn't actually take place overnight - the US and Europe are collapsing right now, and the collapse of the Roman empire took hundreds of years to play out fully. But this question doesn't mean terribly much because you wouldn't be safe anywhere if civilisation collapsed overnight. If you want to talk specifically about the dangers of chemical storage, then it depends on exactly what's stored there and how. I personally wouldn't want to start growing crops on a chemical storage facility, but I think the bigger danger from a chemical storage area at a port would be that it gets into the ocean after sea levels rise... but that's going to be significantly delayed if civilisation collapses and we stop burning fossil fuels anyway.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
2d ago
Terribly sorry for the delay - I've been busy over the holiday period with family.
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/3/10/1796
http://theoildrum.com/node/3877
https://www.stormsmith.nl/Resources/ISA_LifeCycle.pdf
Working out EROI for nuclear is actually really annoying and tough - not all uranium ore is created equally, not all uranium is extracted equally, uranium enrichment costs are varied, etc. You can't actually just go "Oh nuclear has an EROEI of x", you have to say "This particular nuclear power plant has an EROEI of y that will decline over time due to the depletion of high quality uranium ore". Talking about the finances of nuclear is actually substantially easier and more useful when it comes to talking about the viability of nuclear as a power source for society.
FirmWeird
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7d ago
The rhetoric of pro-Israel politicians is a great example of this point. Randy Fine can talk about how beautiful it is to see dead babies and call for the extermination of Palestinian children all he wants and the DNC aren't even willing to mildly chastise him, let alone pass a condemnation of him like they did for Nick Fuentes.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
7d ago
A financial analysis does not avoid any of the pitfalls of actually measuring energy requirements, and it introduces many inaccuracies of it's own.
You're right, though it is more useful for things like "Is this worth using in the world we actually live in as opposed to the one filled with spherical cows" - hence my preference.
Transport costs next to nothing in terms of energy. If you want to make the argument that it's because of mining or refining, be my guest, by provide numbers in terms of actual energy.
As far as I can tell from the literature I have available to me, nuclear has an EROI ranging from 5-15 when you ignore the studies that give a wildly inflated amount by leaving out key steps of the process (if you judge it solely by how much energy is in a given amount of uranium fuel pellets it blows oil out of the water - but that's not really helpful).
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
8d ago
That's not what I'd call focusing on Energy Returned on Energy Invested, that's focusing on financials, claiming, but never proving, it's a good proxy, and calling it a day.
You're right, I don't actually go and prove that it is a good proxy. But the reason why I believe that is simple - that's the only real way we have to determine if a given power source can function viably in a modern western society, and the points where that connection breaks are fairly easy to identify and take precautions around. Actually measuring KWh is definitely worthwhile and there are analyses you can make with regards to it, but it gets exceedingly complicated in a way that finances avoid. How much energy went into constructing the vehicles which mined and transported that uranium? How reliably was that power generated? Was it limited to specific times (power that can only be generated in off-peak hours and can't be stored isn't as useful)? For the purposes of determining whether or not a given power source can feasibly supply power to a first world economy, finances are one of the best tools we have. But that said, to the best of my knowledge nuclear EROEI as measured in KWh still isn't very good. Mining, transporting and enriching uranium tends to consume enough energy that the return isn't terribly worthwhile.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
8d ago
Don't forget the cost of aid to Egypt, the cost of the failed military operation in Yemen, the bombing of Iran and the conflict in Syria!
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
8d ago
"I read things like how cigarettes cause cancer and remain grounded by my family's good health. None of the smokers in my family have gotten lung cancer. Even my grandfather, who smoked a pack a day, didn't die of any smoking related causes."
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
8d ago
I'd like to write a more substantive response to your post, but I have a question first.
Once you understand HBD, liberals become obviously wrong on most every social issue,
Are you sure about this? I am not entirely sure your understanding of HBD is the same as mine. While I don't mean to attack you, your post doesn't really seem to show any understanding of HBD beyond the idea that IQ exists and has measurable differences on outcomes. What, exactly, does HBD mean to you?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9d ago
You're not seeing what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that the essence of modern man is a commitment to moving forward, to striving for improvement, such that we can solve problems in the future we can't solve now.
I disagree - but this is a really complicated topic that would best deserve a thread to itself and goes very far afield from the original topic of conversation. If you really want to talk about what defines the essence of humanity, that would make for a great philosophical debate, but I will have to simply agree to disagree in the context of this discussion.
We agree on this. I'm not happy about it at all.
At least we can be happy about finding a point of agreement.
I'm not a paleoclimatology expert, but my understanding is that it will never, ever be green, because the limiting factor isn't temperature, it's that it's a high desert where mountains on both sides intercept any humid air.
I think that the world on the other side of climate change is going to be incredibly different - changes in climate and rising sea levels will produce an incredibly difficult to predict set of changes to the environment, especially when potential human interventions are taken into account. Of course, a thousand years is chump change when compared to the actual scale of the problem - some of the products of nuclear waste remain dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years, substantially longer than the entirety of recorded human civilisation and potentially for longer than the existence of anatomically modern humans. I am not certain that we can actually predict exactly how the Nevada desert ends up by the time these byproducts cease being dangerous.
The sense I get is that you are just motivated to believe every negative thing you can find about nuclear power at once, and don't really care whether or not they fit together, and so you're not able to make a strong and focused case against it.
The main focus of my arguments on this topic is simply Energy Returned on Energy Invested. Financial viability is a fairly good proxy for whether or not a given source of energy provides enough of a return to make its exploitation viable, and the other arguments are simply pre-emptive attacks on the common means of breaking the link between energetic viability and financial viability. Point number 2? The price of uranium being rendered comically low by colonial exploitation is a way of masking the true input costs. That is only relevant in the case of France, but their nuclear power system was the most prominent example of a financially viable nuclear power system (that has since gone into restructuring - c'est la vie). Point number 3? The costs of storage and maintenance being ignored or offloaded onto the rest of society obscures the true expenses of nuclear power generation and can create a temporary illusion of profitability. Avoiding paying those costs simply shifts the burden onto others, and in many cases magnifies them.
Point number 4 does have the least substantial link to my main point, but the relevance of renewables is that they make the opportunity cost of pursuing nuclear power even starker. If we already have power systems which give us a better deal than nuclear, nuclear becomes an even worse idea.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9d ago
The demand for 'ZOG' exceeds the supply. People want an explanations such as dual citizens with divided loyalties composing a significant portion of Congress. That's not true in a factual sense, but it feels right to them.
Only the most unsophisticated of ...zog-demanders? would actually claim that the reason for Congress' divided loyalties is due solely to a large proportion of dual citizens. The actual claim on the part of people who believe in ZOG is that Congress is thoroughly corrupt and gridlocked, which grants AIPAC incredible undue influence over American politics. One of the primary examples these people point to is Ted Cruz, who openly stated that he went into office for the sole purpose of serving Israel - despite not being an Israeli citizen himself. These people are very obviously correct, which is why you have to twist their argument into something like "it is solely the Israeli dual citizens that are the problem" before you can actually defeat it.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
12d ago
I'd like to point out that this is the exact same argument feminists use when they say that any advice like "Don't get drunk in a skimpy outfit and hang around lots of desperate horny men" is actually blaming the victim and morally wrong. That said, my personal position (not that I can speak for the people you're referring to) isn't so much "more health insurance ceos need to be gunned down in the streets" as it is "these health insurance ceos need to be reigned in so they aren't causing so much damage to society". If a fentanyl dealer gets killed because he sold a bad batch of drugs that killed a bunch of his clients, I'm not going to pretend that I'm terribly upset when someone gets revenge on him. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes - and when your industry performs as awfully as the US healthcare insurance industry does, profiting on the back of destroying lives and denying people medically necessary procedures, you're going to be buying a lot of tickets for the Luigi lottery. Sure, most of the victims will just die or suffer in silence, but all it takes is for the right person to get screwed over and something like this will happen again. The right thing to do would be for the government to crack down on these people and implement a much better healthcare system, but seeing as how that isn't happening anytime soon we're just going to get more and more cases like Brian Thompson as the years go on.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
12d ago
"This is a canary in the coal mine. People are getting fed up. There's going to be more of this. CEOs better take note." And... I mean, it's not like I'm unsympathetic to critiques about health insurance companies. I get the frustration, absolutely. But the moral frame of it, and the flat certainty of who had culpability and agency, caught me off guard, I have to admit. There was a distinct undercurrent that the communities these people were in had already reached consensus that, legal or not, this kind of assassination was, functionally, licit. Or perhaps something like, there no longer appear to be political ways to address this problem, so extra-political solutions are on the table.
If I say "Hey, it looks pretty stormy out there - there's a very high chance of rain, so you should take an umbrella" I'm not actually saying "Rain is morally good and I support the rain falling on you and getting your clothes wet". People are simply pointing out that when you live in luxury and riches earned via rent-seeking in an industry which can just arbitrarily ruin people's lives due to an accident or illness they weren't at fault for, you're going to create more and more Luigis (or whoever the real killer was, if it turns out he is innocent). They're not endorsing extrapolitical assassinations as a means to effect change, they're identifying that a large underclass of people who have no ability to effect change politically while occasionally losing the lottery and getting their lives completely ruined by people like Brian Thompson (have you looked at what he actually did? That man was no angel!) is going to regularly produce more and more violence.
FirmWeird
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12d ago
Where are the policy initiatives for deep geological storage of solar panels and solar panel production waste that guarantees no environmental damage for the next X thousand years?
The environmental damage from the creation of solar panels comes from the mining of the components used to create them as well as their manufacture. They are mostly made out of glass and aluminum which doesn't actually cause any serious environmental damage, though there are some trace amounts of nasty chemicals. If every single solar panel in use today was abandoned after humanity got wiped out in a second, the environmental damage would be minimal. The two problems just aren't really that comparable.
Why is nuclear power singled out as the one human activity where we have to spend billions to make sure that no living being in any possible future timeline thousands of years in the future is harmed by some byproduct?
Because nuclear waste remains dangerous for that long. But moreover, it isn't - if we were actually being rational, global warming and the flooding of the atmosphere with the byproducts of fossil fuels would demand even more attention. But we're not going to care until it is too late, because the consequences of global warming will come after the people currently making decisions are long dead - you, me and our descendants will have to deal with those problems but the people in power right now won't.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
12d ago
I get that. But, as a modern man, I would have no similarity to descendants a thousand years in the future who haven't figured out some easy way to deal with nuclear waste
How exactly would you have no similarity to people who haven't figured out some easy way to deal with nuclear waste when YOU haven't figured out some easy way to deal with nuclear waste?
To share values with us as modern men is to move forward and overcome problems, not to stagnate and regress.
The USA is currently stagnating and regressing right now. Manufacturing capacity and the real economy has been completely hollowed out and sold to China, and political gridlock means you can't even successfully set up advanced chip fabrication technology - ever read about the troubles TSMC has had getting set up in America? American infrastructure is falling apart, the political system is unable to meaningfully address any real problems (Israel not having enough money doesn't count as a real problem) and levels of societal cohesion are in the toilet compared to 70 years ago. Is there any serious analysis which doesn't identify the US as in decline?
Please, tell me what dreadfully important ecosystems draw on the western Nevada desert for water?
Do you know what the climate of the western Nevada desert is going to look like in a thousand years? At current levels of global warming, there's a decent chance that the desert could actually be green in a thousand years. My paleoclimatology knowledge of America isn't the best because I don't actually live there, but I don't think there's anything implausible about places like that turning into more human-useful environments in the future.
Do you actually believe that the storage of depleted nuclear waste deep underground, leaching through the groundwater to aquifers over the centuries, and then to the ocean, diluted in billions of gallons of water, is going to turn into radioactive rain?
This conversation was, in my mind at least, in the context of a polluted river - if it has already reached the surface and created an irradiated river, absolutely. If you're proposing that we replace fossil fuels with nuclear, the amount of waste created would be far higher than the relatively tiny amounts we have now, especially over hundreds of years.
But if your argument for why France's program is cheaper is because the least economically important input is slightly cheaper than getting it from Australia, I think you need better arguments.
France was paying roughly 2 dollars a kilo - and they still had to go through financial restructuring due to economic problems. If you want to disprove my argument, simply point to the successful nuclear program that is currently generating power at a profit healthy enough that it does not need any government subsidies. That's all you need to completely destroy my position!
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
14d ago
My descendants in 1000 years will presumably have as little to do with my values, culture, genes, and life as I do to my many ancestors from the year 1025.
I am actually incredibly similar to my ancestors from a thousand years ago - they lived in a different country and spoke a different language, but there are a lot of things we have in common.
one of them might go out into the Nevada desert and drink from a stream that has nuclear waste runoff in it.
Except that nuclear waste runoff won't be limited to that stream. What bodies of water will that stream feed into? What ecosystems will draw upon that river for water? A single stream being rendered unusable would be a perfectly acceptable price to pay for cheap, relatively clean nuclear power - but that's not the price actually being paid, nor is it what we're getting for that price. A single stream feeds into the broader ecosystem and harms there will spread in ways that cause immense damage to the fabric of life in the future. That radioactive water will reach aquifers and groundwater supplies, it will reach the ocean, it will reach the atmosphere as it passes through the water cycle and becomes rain. Nature will adapt, for sure, but humans don't evolve nearly as quickly as wolves or bacteria - and the evolution of radiation resistance via natural selection would involve incredible amounts of human suffering and pain.
You are implying that the person you're responding to doesn't care about the world he bequeaths to his descendants.
I don't think that qualifies as snark - not caring about the fate of the Earth is a fairly common position among a lot of rationalist circles, especially ones who believe we will colonise space or discover AGI in short order.
I am happy to have you here for the debate on cost, because that's the debate that actually matters
Sure, here's the debate: Barring a dramatic increase in EROEI, nuclear power is uncompetitive with solar and other renewables. While it is the appropriate solution for some limited circumstances (nuclear submarines, having a colonial empire that lets you get effectively free uranium, etc), it is no way an actual answer to the energy crisis rapidly approaching the world.
Far from being an irrelevant distraction from the argument, nuclear waste and the proper safekeeping/disposal of it is one of the bigger contributors to the EROEI problems of nuclear power. When the final accounting is done, the costs of that storage could leave nuclear power with a negative EROEI - we would have been better off simply not doing it at all save for the generation of certain medically and scientifically useful isotopes.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
14d ago
If my descendants in a thousand years' time haven't figured out some futuristic technological solution to disposing of nuclear waste, then fuck 'em.
I'd feel ashamed if I ever said that about my descendants. I think this might be a case of differing moral frameworks - I really can't relate to this perspective.
hence your need to resort to snark
What snark?
it's much more reasonable to care about giving clean, reliable power (bracketing the cost question)
"Bracketing the cost question" lmao. If you don't care about the cost of the power produced then there's no point even talking about the viability of different energy sources at all. Assuming I misunderstood what you meant here... If nuclear power actually did provide clean, cheap power that was too cheap to meter then there would actually be a real discussion to have here but it doesn't! It has failed to do so for decades, and I see no signs that this will change in the near future. What we actually get is power that is more expensive than fossil fuels or renewables and creates a huge waste problem on top of that. My government's chief scientific body recently produced a report on the relative cost of different energy sources, and nuclear ended up being roughly twice as expensive as solar/wind (https://www.csiro.au/en/news/All/News/2025/July/2024-25-GenCost-Final-Report).
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
14d ago
Europe can either go down the war path and ban Chinese cars from the European market and risk losing Chinese parts
Are you familiar with the Nexperia affair that is currently taking place?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
14d ago
Yes, depleted fuel remains dangerous for a long time, but the implication that we therefore need to also develop containment solutions that last for millennia is completely and utterly bonkers.
I mean sure I'll be dead by the time that problem shows up, but I do actually care about the world that we will bequeath to our descendants.
However, spent fuel is dangerous to the touch for a few decades at best, after that, the health and containment concerns are identical to those of any other chemical waste (basically, making sure it does not come into contact with the food supply and drinking water). Except, there is a universal method to detect radioactive contamination.
Yes, that is the entire problem! And sure, we can detect it - but that doesn't stop the river that could have supplied entire communities with life turning into a source of cancer instead.
Some toxic waste, particularly heavy metals, remains dangerous indefinitely. However, you never see any heated political debate about ways to permanently isolate entire waterways.
I am an environmentalist who does actually care about this issue. You're right, that is a big problem - but I'm not particularly moved by claims of hypocrisy when I have actively protested against this kind of thing in the past.
FirmWeird
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14d ago
Venezuela's oil is notably low quality and requires extensive processing before it is usable - and they actually are drilling for oil anyway for export to China. The last time I ran the numbers, Venezuela's oil reserves, if totally extracted, would be able to power the current global economy for less than a decade assuming zero economic growth. While there's likely to be significant demand destruction due to the US economy imploding to the degree that the administration won't even publish the numbers anymore, Venezuela's oil just isn't worth the squeeze - and even if it was, it won't last for long.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
15d ago
Then nothing is cost-effective except for fossil fuels and hydroelectricity, ultimately.
Correct! Hell, forget about cost - there is no viable replacement for fossil fuels.
But we already knew that; that's why banning their use is such a powerful socioeconomic weapon.
Nature is already going to do that for us - not only are the fossil fuels going to eventually run out, rational human beings prioritised the easiest-to-access and most efficient stores of fossil fuels. The energy return on energy invested of conventional fossil fuels is going down, and the EROEI of shale and fracking is even worse.
This line always frustrates me because this is an isolated demand for rigor.
No, not at all. I believe mining should be heavily regulated, especially when it comes to disposal of hazardous and toxic wastes. Allowing people to pollute and destroy the biosphere imposes immense costs on the rest of society - it is a form of abusing the commons, and is ultimately substantially more expensive than properly disposing of the waste. It's just that the cost is paid by the rest of society as opposed to the mining companies.
Which is why you basically can't do this until you have a military that will deal with that.
How long are you going to be waiting? We've already hit peak conventional oil, and tight oil is significantly less competitive on an EROEI basis (which is the only basis that actually matters). Nuclear power, barring some great new discovery or innovation(which, to their credit, the Chinese may have actually achieved), will remain on the shelves in most cases because it is just not capable of functioning as a viable replacement for fossil fuels due to the poor EROEI.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
15d ago
It's worth pointing out that the European countries did actually provide material support for the democrats, as well as implementing censorship regimes that targeted American companies and American political opinions. I'm not saying this to claim that the US has clean hands and the EU is attacking them unprovoked, but you're not really going to convince the republicans not to do something on the basis of a threat which they have actually already followed through on.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
15d ago
It might not be the culprit, but have you disabled "Motion smoothing"? If you're noticing a quality difference on the basis of framerate that setting is an extremely common problem that's often turned on by default to impress old people.
Incorrect - the "running out" of resources means that we will have completely shifted the Earth's climate and seen immense changes to global temperatures and environments. The environmental damage is only just goin to get started when that happens, and the human infrastructure damage will be immense. Every single port city is going to be underwater and new ports will have to be constructed. Shifts in climate means that the areas which receive rain and the areas which are habitable for humans are going to be very different to what they were in the past - which is going to be a big problem, given that our farms and other infrastructure are located in places where they are most efficient right now, as opposed to the world we're going to be living in once all that carbon is back in the atmosphere. Not to mention the terrible weather events we'll get during the transition - and which are already starting to show up.
I'll believe that nuclear fission is a viable answer to our energy needs when you show me a nuclear plant capable of generating energy at a profit without government subsidies of one kind or another. Good luck! Nuclear fusion has been twenty years in the future for the past eighty years, so you'll have to forgive me for not being too excited for it.
No, they didn't have access to fossil fuels. Technically they were richer in the sense that they could have chosen to use those fossil fuels responsibly, but we already know that in reality they didn't.
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