site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   23789 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

8
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The typical rule in Australian politics is that oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them. The most successful oppositions tend to employ a small target strategy - not putting out any big promises or agendas for the government to attack, and simply taking pot shots at the government for anything that goes wrong. The current Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, was an exemplar of this sort of strategy and he succeeded in dethroning a three-term Liberal government with it.

The current Opposition Leader, Peter Dutton, has decided to hell with that. Very unusually, he has proposed a big change in policy direction that is going to be one of the main issues that defines next year's election. He wants to go nuclear.

Australia does not have a nuclear industry (despite having more than a quarter of the world's uranium). In fact, nuclear power is explicitly illegal, at both the federal level and in multiple states. Victoria and Queensland (both ruled by Labor governments) have already ruled out any change in their laws or allowing nuclear plants to be built in their jurisdictions. Dutton is undeterred. He argues they will change their tune if he wins a mandate from the electorate for his policy.

The Albanese government meanwhile has made a big deal of the transition to renewable energy and acting on climate change. It has challenged Dutton to name the locations of his proposed nuclear plants (which he has now done) with the obvious intention of trying to stir up local resistance. It's running the argument that nuclear won't be built quickly enough to meet our climate commitments under the Paris Agreement, and that nuclear will be more expensive than renewables. Most of the media has joined in the chorus of insisting that nuclear just doesn't make sense and that relying on wind and solar is much more sensible.

Much remains to be seen about how this debate develops. But Dutton in my estimation is an very pragmatic politician with a good sense of the public mood. He's certainly a conservative, but not someone who's about to let ideology get in the way of political advantage. It seems that he's judged that this is a good fight to have, and I suspect he's right.

I don't know what the politics of nuclear were like back in the 70s but today most people simply don't have a strong opinion on it. What they do have a strong opinion about is energy prices, and those have been going up and up. And while there's an endless stream of commenters ready and willing to assert that the path to cheaper prices is more renewables, I think Dutton is correct that he can win this argument.

Firstly, the actual experience of Australians has been that prices have gotten more and more expensive as more and more wind and solar has been deployed. It's easy to write a headline saying "Power prices went negative today" during a sunny period, but most people are very aware that they are paying more overall.

Secondly, the uptake of rooftop solar has been very high. Something like a third of houses have solar panels already, and this has led to widespread understanding of the intermittency of renewable energy. People understand that it's great when it works... but when it doesn't and they have to buy power from the grid, it's extremely expensive.

And there's a third underrated and underreported aspect to this debate. Dutton's plan is for these nuclear power stations to be government built and owned, while the Albanese government is relying on private investment for its renewable energy buildout. This is kind of an inversion of the traditional stance of the two parties involved, with the Liberals having led the charge in privatising our existing energy system. But I've encountered a not-insubstantial number of people who think that privatisation was a big mistake and really wish we had a nationalised energy system again. I've even heard doctrinaire libertarians say it.

I think Dutton expertly read the public mood on the Voice referendum, correctly judging where people would end up as the issue became more salient. And my feeling is he's done the same here, and is guiding the debate in a direction that will be rewarding for him. It's rare for first term governments to lose, we'll see if this play is able to create an exception.

Labor's managing to burn down what looked like a fairly insurmountable lead after the last election, especially crazy considering Dutton's generally been lambasted for being Voldemort-adjacent aesthetically (and as a Liberal voter I honestly think that's very fair) and they haven't even had to swap him out.

Dutton's generally been lambasted for being Voldemort-adjacent aesthetically

There's a general recognition that a bald man could never become president of the US. Becoming a party leader in a parliamentary system seems less conditional on one's physical appearance, because one gets elected by fellow party members rather than by the general public. But since the general public votes on which party leader they like best in the general election, it's probably just a mistake to elect a bald man as party leader.

I dunno, Obama got pretty close with his hair. Still not bald, of course, but...

Think it's a little different for a POC

Dutton is undeterred. He argues they will change their tune if he wins a mandate from the electorate for his policy.

Reading this I momentarily felt the simulation breaking down. Are we talking about Australian politics or season 5 of Yellowstone?

While I'm inclined to agree with shamilton's take here that high renewable mix makes nuclear less likely to be economically feasible, not more, I do wonder if there's a play to stick a reactor in the pilbara to run an electric arc furnace. No one would care out there and it helps cut the primary fp knot of Australia being the only producer of iron ore worth talking about and China being the only buyer.

Nuclear reactors rely on abundant fresh water for cooling. Australia's geography favors nuclear power plants built along the coastline of the Eastern states.

there are a few rivers near port hedland which has rail connections to the major pilbara ore mines

Does it actually have to be fresh water?

Nevermind. I was wrong. Seawater also works. There are even power plants that are air-cooled using giant radiators. But it's definitely disadvantageous to build a nuclear power plant in the middle of a desert with no abundant source of water.

There's one in the US south-west that cools by evaporating all the local sewage water, but that doesn't exactly scale well.

Higher reactor temps will eventually make the cold side less important. Delta-Ts on current reactors are at "1800s steam engine" level, terrible thermal efficiency. The Chinese are developing high temp air-cooled reactors for their northern desert regions for that reason, maybe the ozzies could piggyback off that.

All that said eastern Australia is in an amazing position for HVDC solar transmission from the deserts, which will undermine nuclear economics. Unless they can't be built because of some sacred spraypaint can worshipped by the local tribes.

Well probably, yes. And I'd assume that a hot desert(like 90% of Australia's territory) is not a great place for air cooling. But is there any reason you can't build reactors on the coast, where the vast majority of Australians actually live, or at least near enough to it to pipe seawater in?

Yeah even if the coast is relatively dense by Australian standards there's still huge chunks of the Eastern coastline that's essentially undeveloped. Latrobe-Gippsland has a large coal mining presence already and about 6.5 people per square KM (which is concentrated into a few urban areas)

Most of the media has joined in the chorus of insisting that nuclear just doesn't make sense and that relying on wind and solar is much more sensible.

Do they believe this? What’s going through their heads? Is it just vibes?

There are two(2) ways to run a power grid without particularly fortuitous geography a la Iceland, Switzerland, Norway. Nuclear and fossil fuels. That’s it. Renewables just aren’t reliable enough.

There is build 2x capacity and use fossil fuels when you are getting insufficient solar and wind power.

Which is why the vast majority of new US power infrastructure consists of natural gas turbines, because the only time the sun shines (and to a point, the only time the wind blows) is when you don't actually need the power and no other workable storage solutions exist.

Since the only output from the turbines is... CO2 and water [and methane is arguably the cleanest gas in terms of CO2 to burn, given its outsized amount of C-H bonds anyway], there's no visible plume coming out of the stack and very few other contaminants to visibly wreck the surrounding area (SO4), so most environmentalist complaints about them ring hollow to the general public. Much like cars themselves, come to think of it, especially when everything's already a hybrid anyway.

My memory that opposition to methane burning is more about leakage than anything about the plant or process itself. Of course, it is much better than coal, which is pretty bad. Methane, as you may know, is ~28 times more potent as a greenhouse gas then CO2, so small leaks can add up. However, I haven't looked at analyses on whether natural gas alone is or isn't sufficient for meeting Paris goals. My suspicion is no, but I could be wrong.

Hybrids still don't have full market penetration even among new cars. I'd be much more amenable to making hybrids required, rather than this electric-or-bust current policy. Unfortunately, they are still more expensive than traditional gas powered cars.

Still I quite like nuclear. Makes me wish the gen-4 reactor research funding wasn't so spotty and late.

I suspect that methane leaks are basically not real, and the meme probably driven by some research paper with either shoddy methods or a narrow application.

I happen to have two gas meters on my property. One connects to appliances in our house, the other to a heater for my pool. I use the heater maybe twice a year. During the months it is not used, there is zero movement on the meter.

Valves, joins, cracks, corrosion and wear in protective coatings. Keep in mind that the transportation methods used in your house very, very likely do not scale the same to industrial production and distribution. Pressure is fundamentally different, volume matters, square cube law stuff, different types of oversight and accountability regimes, etc all make for potentially a quite different product (I'd say your "but my house" comparison is akin to people comparing a household budget to the US government's budget -- there are some pretty key differences and assumptions that change, like the whole taxation and money supply aspects). Also, a gas leak is less likely in a carefully-tracked, very small segment of the overall distribution network involved, and furthermore leaks are frequently fixed when found, while the same paradigm might not exist on a large-scale gas line! Now, to be quite fair, it's probably a good assumption that brand new plants and pipelines to support them would be less prone to leakage, but more construction-related accidents are also possible to offset this, so it's not an ironclad assumption. Keep in mind when a new natural gas plant is opened up, there's the plant itself, but also pipelines and transport of gas to feed it, and furthermore a possible net increase in gathering and production lines, which might have their own leaks. So yeah. It might also depend a little bit on timeframe -- a new plant will have newer methods and pipes, but at some point the plant will grow old! The question then becomes, how careful are the regulations and monitoring?

Biased source, fair warning, but here you can see a large report on the issue. They apparently did some legwork and tried to verify EPA estimates and found the EPA numbers to be a significant under-estimate. Some of existing pipelines are quite old, and clearly not monitored that extensively, so to some extent perfect data on some of these aspects do not exist. They give one example that for some types of pipeline only 7% of the length is actually monitored at all! Also, you claim not to have a leak at your house, but one of the methodologies used was data gathered directly from Google Street View vehicles. In 12 metro areas at least, they had sensitive gas meters on them, so they used this data alongside some other sources to find that some leaks seemed to definitely be occurring, in aggregate.

Overall I find a dismissal of methane leaks as not real does not seem to match this data at all, even the EPA numbers. Note that even the EPA numbers are equivalent to (on a 20-year time scale, where methane is 100x more potent than CO2, vs the aforementioned 28 on a 100-year scale) over 6 million cars on the road for a year, and the org above thinks the real number is actually equivalent to 23.5 million cars on the low end and 50 million cars on the high end.

Seems like a bit of a streetlight effect to me. These infrastructure leaks are likely tiny compared to methane generated by ordinary organic processes. Their high-end estimate of about 2.5 million tons is as compared to an estimated 570 million or so tons annual emissions, of which 40-50% is from single-celled organisms and most of the rest from agriculture and oil production. Since infrastructure leaks already come directly off the bottom line of the service providers, it seems likely to me that resources would be better utilized elsewhere than trying to reduce this number to zero. The simplest solution, if you want people to stop demanding natural gas service to the home, is to permit enough electrical generation to make electricity cost-competitive, but electricity rates are rising faster than inflation, providing pressure in the other direction.

The simplest solution, if you want people to stop demanding natural gas service to the home, is to permit enough electrical generation to make electricity cost-competitive, but electricity rates are rising faster than inflation, providing pressure in the other direction.

From the point of view of the government, it's simpler to let them keep demanding but just say "no".

They apparently did some legwork and tried to verify EPA estimates and found the EPA numbers to be a significant under-estimate.

If these numbers are correct, then natural gas actually has a significantly greater impact on greenhouse gas release than lignite coal (which does not leak into the atmosphere and has about twice the CO2 factor when burned as methane, whereas leaking methane is about 28 times the greenhouse gas impact as burning it). Would you, then, support going back to coal (with all modern scrubbers and other pollution control technology) as much as possible until such time as this leak problem has been solved? Would anyone producing these numbers?

If not, I submit they do not actually believe these numbers. They are merely a weapon to be used against fossil fuels.

You are actually correct! Great intuition following this to its logical conclusion. NYT description of recent study you might find interesting which also has some good links about natural gas leaks. Were climate activists misled? Yes, partially! Note that clean coal technologies have improved over the last few decades, and traditional coal was a classic and convenient boogeyman because of the visceral and visual aspect. At the same time the data involving methane leaks was insufficient and caused climate activists to make some bad assumptions. We shouldn't be too positive when it comes to coal, however, because greenhouse gasses are a big issue, but so is pollution, and coal is traditionally much worse about pollution. The two concerns don't always dovetail. Cost and the most efficient use of resources including money also looms over everything, too. This is the case in other related areas, as well! In my home state of Oregon, they've been destroying a couple of hydropower dams for other environmental and/or so-called environmental justice reasons (native tribes, fishing, etc) even though I personally (and some portion of dedicated climate activists as well) strongly oppose these choices since hydro is so incredible as a power source! So those are all potent reasons I'd be hesitant to accuse broad Green efforts of bad faith -- there are some genuine tradeoffs, and tech is constantly changing! Plus, a lot of people are (rightly) skeptical of fossil fuel company claims and arguments, because those same companies also have a (very, very strong) history of bad faith arguments as well as outright lying, both in the greenhouse gas realm as well as the pollution realm. I think these energy companies are improving, but slowly. The incentives are just very skewed.

Overall, the Green movement is a bit slow sometimes, but I wouldn't be surprised if as you say, clean coal becomes the new recommended so-called "bridge" recommendation. And in fact, there is some movement to do exactly what you suggest doing, which is step up data collection and analysis of leaks, and re-consider what to do as we seek to complement renewables, and presumably attempt to eventually do pure renewables.

“Their conclusion is to once again point out that natural gas may not be any better at all for the climate than is coal, particularly when viewed through the lens of warming over the next 20 years or so, which of course is a critical time” for meeting climate goals, [Robert Howarth, an earth systems scientist at Cornell University] said in an email. “I do hope the policy world and the political leaders of the world pay attention to this, as I fear too many remain too fixated at simply reducing coal use, even if it results in more gas consumption,” Dr. Howarth said. “What the world requires is to move away from all fossil fuels ASAP, to a 100 percent renewable energy future.”

I found this analysis and discussion to be highly interesting. Politics creeps into everything. That's not necessarily a bad thing, politics is just the natural human way of trying to sort through our different priorities, and subject to manipulation by those with power in all its forms. I think the conclusion is to accept the complexity of our world and the issues, rather than rail against everything as a tribalist and one-dimensional manipulation effort. It's not Crazy Greens vs Big Oil, existential battle, with everyone stuck in between. So to answer your question, yes, I'm actually totally amenable to going back to "clean coal" for a little while, and I suspect most Greens might start to feel similarly over the next 5 years as well. It's really a huge optimization problem, where you're trying to find some stable balance of greenhouse/warming timeline (tipping point climate arguments, current favor of a 20-year timeframe over longer ones), money efficiency (using existing infrastructure, cost of energy to consumers, effectiveness of federal incentives), pollution and health concerns (short term risks, longer ones like cancer, environment stuff, wildlife sometimes), technology advancements (can we predict what the final power generation mix looks like, can we mitigate the bad stuff, etc) and political feasibility (how cooperative are corporations, how persuadable are voters, how educated are lawmakers and the public).

More comments

Germany is the only country which believes in climate change.

I don't have any particular knowledge of methane infrastructure, but I am an engineer with some relevant general knowledge.

You are incorrect.

Leakage is an unavoidable part of any fluid system, and the larger the system, the more leakage you can expect. Shit leaks, especially on an industrial scale. Your domestic gas lines are very small and minimally manipulated, gas systems in industrial systems are very large, involve lots of things that can break, and are manipulated regularly.

The leaks are mostly from production facilities, not local distribution.

The EPA estimates leaks at ~1%. There's studies out there estimating them at 9%. The amusing thing is that at about 3.5%, you might as well be burning lignite coal -- at 3.5% you're leaking as much CO2-equivalent as you are burning, and lignite coal has roughly twice the CO2 factor as natural gas. So if we're really leaking 9%, we'd be better off (from a CO2 perspective) burning coal by a large margin. Of course you're probably right and the leak thing is likely just a bogeyman.

Plus, coal-burning provides the benefit of an insolation-reducing and thus planet-cooling sulfur layer! Not that I'd recommend it, personally, over direct sulfur injection.

Still I quite like nuclear. Makes me wish the gen-4 reactor research funding wasn't so spotty and late.

I think the problem with "but muh costs" is that most people miss the intangibles about having and encouraging nuclear know-how and research. There's enough commercial incentive to come up with better batteries; but not for more interesting and novel fission designs, and chemical energy storage is ultimately a dead-end anyway since you just can't cheat electrochemistry. (Also, lack of sun due to massive volcano eruption, or to a much lesser extent wildfires, means solar isn't actually bulletproof either.)

I also think that's what the US (and formerly, the Soviets) get right in terms of military-industrial investment. The French nuclear build-out was kicked off under martial law for a reason, because it wouldn't have happened without de Gaulle noticing the tactical situation that was, and is, that the US does not generally act in Europe's strategic interests (which would come to a head with oil in 1973, and natural gas in 2022).

Biden's newest energy regulations are going to make new natural gas plants infeasible, however.

Yes, because we can't have Red areas getting rich from shale gas production (much as we can't have Red areas prosper when nuclear generating stations are located in them).

Which is... probably part of why the current build-out is so overwhelming.

Uh, where do you think those wind subsidies wind up?

Uh, where do you think those wind subsidies wind up?

New Jersey. Though our governor seems to have managed to screw that up.

I assure you, the owners of corn fields measurably boost their bottom lines by rents from subsidized wind farms.

No, the third (3rd) way is degrowth. Affordable and reliable energy is not a human right, it is a construct of white supremacism and colonialism which doesn't take into consideration climate justice and accountability to the stakeholders.

That's not an option.

It's something that a handful of radicals talk about on the internet, mostly alongside extreme ignorance of the effects of any of the policies they symbolically recommend, but it has no purchase with the actual electorate.

As Ashlael notes, Australians care about energy prices. Energy prices win (or lose) elections, and if the Australian public feels the pinch of energy costs, or worse, starts feeling a measurable decrease in standard of living, they will turf out any government that seems responsible for it.

Climate change activists have been complaining about this for a long time, actually - the moment it hits the hip pocket, the public always pick side "lower prices, worry about climate change later". We're willing to vote for lower emissions and growth, but we absolutely will not vote for lower emissions at the cost of growth.

Degrowth is dead in the starting gates. It's not happening.

Ironically, I think the combination of left-wing policies actually makes it less likely, not more - the white-supremacism-and-colonialism argument only has appeal to liberal middle-class white people who feel a sense of collective guilt. However, as Australia becomes more ethnically and culturally diverse, that means that guilty white people will only come to make up less and less of the overall population, and have less power as a voting bloc. Chinese or Indian migrants largely do not respond to arguments about white supremacism or colonialism or historical injustices, for hopefully obvious reasons.

This is of course retarded and will lead to populists who end emissions regulations getting elected.

Like seriously, concern about climate change will not survive the first wave of blackouts.

This is of course retarded and will lead to populists who end emissions regulations getting elected.

Not if they ensure all such populists are excluded from the ballot.

This has, in fact, already happened.

When the blackouts start, they'll blame wreckers who refuse to conserve.

Longer term yes. But true believers can cause enormous damage now while we await the populists.

Especially not if the true believers harden the country's institutions against democracy. As some people are doing in preparation for the return of Trump.

They're right in that mixing nuclear and renewables is pointless. The median electricity price produced by renewables can be too low for nuclear to be cost-compeitive even while the average price is extremely high. That's why simple gas turbines make so much money off of renewable intermittency.

Every afternoon where solar overproduces to the point energy costs are "negative" is time a nuclear plant is losing money, and nuclear doesn't have the variable/surge capacity to make up for it on the cloudy winter days when people will buy energy at any price. (I have some graphs of that from last winter if you're interested)

The key to making nuclear successful is capacity markets or long term contract pricing, neither of which we can have because they would destroy the artificial wind market.

Amazing that this is coming on the heels of the US Senate voting 98-2 on a huge nuclear bill.

Of course no media coverage, despite this being both significant and bipartisan.

It being bipartisan is probably exactly why it got little coverage. The media did write about it, but the stuff that reaches front pages and gets spread all over social media is the stuff that people actually share. Ragebait gets way more clicks than good news.

The legislation directs the NRC to examine its licensing process for new nuclear technology and study ways to speed it up. It also sets aside federal funding to cover licensing and permitting costs for the first advanced nuclear power operator to successfully deploy its technology

Strengthen its workforce by allowing the NRC chair to appoint up to 120 exceptionally well-qualified people into the excepted service at any given time, plus up to 20 more into term-limited positions in any fiscal year.

Looks like a handout to investors who got caught by all those startups with ideas out of a physics class weed circle. The Super Conductive Americium Metamorphosing reactor is 100% proven to work on paper, get in at the ground floor of our high tech pyramid-shaped funding scheme!

That and jobs for the boys nonbinary individuals who come to work in stolen women's underwear. Throwing money at the democrat-captured grant-consuming academic do-nothing wing of the nuclear industry.
And they got Republicans on board just by saying it was pro nucular.

Call me when they're making it possible to build more copies of actually working plants instead of one-off prototypes.

Way too much culture warring. You've been told before to check your seething.

When nothing gets built and 120 useless parasites get paid $400,000 sinecures to have meetings about the next thing that won't get built... I won't even bother saying I told you so because it's pointless to show you evidence.

You are making the same mistake culture warrers always do - when I tell you to actually discuss things instead of waging culture war, it is not because I actually have an opinion one way or the other about your viewpoint. Your evidence is irrelevant because I am not disputing your evidence, nor do I care how objectively correct you are when you're being intentionally inflammatory in making your point. You could say something I agree with 100% and I'd still mod you if you were a prick about it. I have done this many times, in fact, but people like you only notice when you (or people you agree with) are modded and assume it's because I have sympathy for "non-binary individuals" blah blah blah.

Uh, yeah, so Gen 4 nuclear reactors have some factually very great promise, such as increased safety, ability to reuse waste as fuel, and lower maintenance costs, but have struggled for consistent funding. It's not some pie in the sky, ultra left wing liberal conspiracy. I'm not sure what on earth nonbinary people have to do with anything.

I actually think Kirk has a point here. The Gen IV reactors are great and fine, and what they lack is not really funding but reactors. There has been numerous funding events for decades, which has been almost entirely consumed by people not building things.

ETA: This is not a problem limited to nuclear power development. There is a serious, IMO possibly terminal problem of construction sclerosis in this country such that we can't build reactors, railroads, transmission lines, or nearly any other major engineering project that isn't a freeway, except at increasingly impossible high costs and timelines.

Too many veto points. NEPA was the original sin (thanks Dick), community review, greenhouse gas review, endangered species act review, ADA review, millions of industry-specific regulations, and lawsuits associated with each one. It's a Gordian knot, the Democrats like it (and can bypass it whenever they want something) and the Republicans are temperamentally against cutting.

Thanks, that's exactly what I mean. In twenty years the same people will be getting grants to talk about the generation 5 reactors they're not going to build.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Brinton

Like I said, the theory-crafting academic wing of nuclear that gets all the policy seats because they're with the DC in-crowd. Not the guys who actually run existing nuclear plants and know how to make more of them.

We keep getting these grants to fund "studying pre-prototype next generation technologies" with no intent of building them, because all-consuming parasites like they/them steal all the money.

You’re just salty at anyone that succeeds.

Another crab with crab mentality.

This comment adds nothing. Personal jabs and sneering like this are inappropriate.

And sneering at The Super Conductive Americium Metamorphosing reactor and jabbing at "democrat-captured grant-consuming academic do-nothing" or obsessing over someone's choice of appearance?

There's a whole host of people that have accomplished nothing with contempt for anyone trying to do anything.

... he's clearly joking

What in the actual world is this comment?

  • -10

More effort than this, please.

If you have a substantive complaint, share it. If you don’t, downvote and/or move on.

Pretty realistic summary I think. They're giving Bill Gates 2 billion dollars for his pixie dust reactor project, and now they're going to pay for all his permitting too. At the same time as they pay the anti-nuclear activists to oppose the license, of course!

It's just another slush fund to make busywork for professional procedural manipulators, not a serious attempt to bring back the nuclear industry.

I'm a US citizen and I have no idea what you're talking about. I'd love it if someone would give a writeup.

Yah, see, no media coverage. Thanks to /u/ToaKraka for the link -- although you could have just searched "2024 Senate Nuclear" to get a few token media stories.

I've said for years that Congress itself needs a public relations campaign. Most people think congress only passes like 4-5 bills in an entire year. Of course they have had some difficulty recently, but they still pass usually a lot (2023 was a suuuuuper bum year with "only" 27, but 2022 for example they passed over 200)

Reuters picture caption:

Xcel Energy's Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant, the site of a leak in November which was not made public for four months, as well as a newly reported recurring leak, is seen in Monticello, Minnesota, U.S. March 27, 2023

Perhaps not very subtle about what they want you to think.

I think the trigger for this was the AUKUS nuclear submarines purchase. Dutton in discussions about waste disposal said that they would store it at the stations themselves until they were decommissioned and then dispose of them through the same means as the waste from the sub reactors. The 'checkmate' here is that Labor already approved signed off on the nuclear sub reactors and resultant waste disposal so they can't play the 'we won't deal with nuclear waste' argument. This leaves cost of reactors and NIMBY 'it could meltdown' arguments.

Military nuclear power being the trojan horse for civilian nuclear power is a rare case indeed.

Australia isn't beating the allegations of doing everything upside down.

How popular is nuclear power in Australia?

In the US, it's only a little over neutral, with a big gender gap. Nuclear has a reputation of being dangerous, which lowers its popularity.

Traditionally Australia has been nuclear free (except for a small research/medical isotope reactor in New South Wales). Back in the 70's/80's it was strongly anti-nuclear.

There are many left wing/green constituents that want to see renewables win in the nuclear/solar/wind showdown, but that isn't everyone. As AshLael says, most people care mainly about power prices and renewables can't deliver all the time (not nearly enough suitable locations for hydro-batteries to cover).

Edit: Poll from 2011 says 46% were strongly against.

Additional 2024 polling in this article from left leaning public news organisation with 35% for and 33% against.

https://poll.lowyinstitute.org/report/2024/climate-change-and-energy/#nuclear-power

https://news.gallup.com/poll/474650/americans-support-nuclear-energy-highest-decade.aspx

Australians are mildly in favour of nuclear power, we're actually more pro-nuclear than the US by a small margin. There's a fairly large gender gap, a lot of women say they're unsure about nuclear energy (compared to men) and thus their support is lower while opposition is just as high or higher.

https://essentialvision.com.au/support-for-nuclear-energy-in-australia

Despite my heartfelt desire for nuclear energy, I am almost certain that Australia is not competent enough to make it work. There will be extremely bitter sabotage and wrecking campaigns from the Greens who utterly hate nuclear energy. If Labour win even a minority government, they'll have to work with the Greens to govern: nuclear will be toast. German Greens like Habeck sabotaged German nuclear energy by misrepresenting scientific reports to justify closure even in an energy shortage. Their order of operations is pretty clear - Green parties were founded on opposition to nuclear weapons and nuclear power and they are true to their beliefs.

There are countries that know how to build and countries that don't. South Korea, Japan and China are industrious and pretty efficient, they can get things done on-schedule and under budget, nuclear plants included. Australia is pretty terrible at manufacturing. We gave up on the car industry over a decade ago, labour is very expensive and unions are quite powerful. We are also pretty bad at construction, there are endless regulations and environmental reviews. The kind of country that outright bans nuclear energy is not going to have a permissive regulatory environment for anything! Indigenous people will probably also try to extract some cash from the government, they've been hostile to nuclear since the nuclear tests here.

Building your first nuclear plant is hard, there are always going to be delays and cost overruns. Likewise with Small Modular Reactors. Great, promising technology. But nobody's put them into production for civilian uses, there are only the military submarine reactors. The physics is simple, the engineering and safetyist regulation is the hard part. That's what happened to nuclear in the USA, costs rose 5-10x because of intense regulation.

I foresee years spent working to open a path through a thicket of regulation and legal obstacles, years more worrying about storing nuclear waste for millions of years (the US spent billions on this silly problem and still failed, see Yucca mountain). There will be some inevitable delay as industry wants cash paid upfront rather than trust that their capital-intensive, slow-payoff project won't be cancelled. The Greens and Labour will shout that it's too expensive and too dangerous, despite the expense stemming from overreactions to safety. Some crisis will come up and the government will get distracted. They might fall into the trap of constantly switching tenders like we did with submarines: Japan->France->US/UK. Our national defence is heavy on announcements, light on results. Nuclear could be the same. The Coalition might fall into the trap of replacing Dutton the moment his polls fall, like with the last couple of their prime ministers. There are so many roads to boondoggle and only a few to success.

Maybe the global tide is turning. China is constructing plenty of reactors, South Korea switched back in favour of nuclear. The US recently legislated to loosen the straitjacket: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-senate-passes-bill-support-advanced-nuclear-energy-deployment-2024-06-19/

But if Dutton makes nuclear work in Australia, if reactors actually enter service, he deserves a Lee Kuan Yew Medal for outstanding political achievement.

I still have a massive grudge against Harry Reid and his Yucca Mountain opposition, very frustrating. But yeah, your first reactor is very, very hard. There are only a select few companies in the world capable of building them and the pushback cannot be underestimated. I don't know how strong Australia's federal vs state power is, so that might come into play.

Federal and state governments are reasonably-similar in power, although frankly tugs-o-war don't happen all that often.

It should be noted, however, that the territories of Australia have very weak governments that can be overridden by the federal government at whim, and unlike in the USA those territories are actually pretty substantial in physical size and in at least the ACT's case wired into the main (Eastern) power grid. So if all the states go NIMBY, the federal government could just force the first one through in the backcountry of the Australian Capital Territory over the ACT's own objections.

Finland has managed to build nuclear even with the Greens in government (though they've frequently left the government over it) and the result of the tension has recently flipped Greens to a (mildly, ambiguously) pro-nuclear stance.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats