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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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If you want good-faith engagements, it would probably help not to poison the well by categorically dismissing all previous (but ambiguous) engagements as bad-faith and aligned with a general political tribe.

Particularly when you base it on a conclusion as a settled point (relative financial cost) without even making a position on the elements that make it a disputed premise. (I.E., what the relative costs are by what metric, what you believe the relative costs would be if you remove imposed regulatory burdens from one side and regulatory subsidies/requirements on the alternatives, what the relative costs of the political advocacy/opposition dynamics were reversed, etc.).

The crux of pro-nuclear arguments is that the technology provably exists and does not require assumptions of future technological breakthroughs, many of the more often cited relative costs are either imposed (regulatory over-engineering requirements no other power sector has to fail) or selective (concerns over nuclear-related costs in excess to equivalent welfare risks from others), that nuclear is effective baseload power (which is needed for sustained industrial economics at scale) rather than intermittent (which functionally requires additional baseload generation regardless for load-balancing, see Germany), and that many of the premises of 'low emission' energy sources just smuggle away the relative costs (such as not considering the extraction / processing / recycling / end-of-lifecycle costs) or have never been feasible requirements for the goals they were meant to support (i.e. the required amounts of rare earth minerals to supported estimates being magnitudes beyond actual rare earth mineral production) in ways that are both highly grift-able and grifted (see carbon credit markets relations to organized crime).

I do not mean to disqualify the argument. It does seem productive to me, however, to observe the correlated occurrence of seemingly contradicting positions within a group - a lesser regard for climate change, but defending nuclear power - and be extra cautious about potential interests in disguise inside the discussion.

The aspects you brought up are absolutely pertinent to investigate in order to establish a good judgement about the role nuclear should have in the energy transition, but ones that I seldom hear in the public debate. That's why I am out for good sources.