Category: Politics

“You’re Being Lied To About Nuclear Waste”

A few considerations…
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“Temporary” dry-cask storage does NOT pose any kind of risk. Not any more than a jug of bleach. Unless you are stupid enough to drink the bleach. And it would be so many orders of magnitude more difficult, and time consuming, and labour intensive, and costly, to “get at” any of the fuel in DCS than to just chug some bleach in front of the washing machine.

A simple solution to automatically cooling wet storage is called a Stirling Engine. As things stand, most backups are diesel, but if you just wanna be able to “walk-away” there are solutions.

The solution to sites where nuclear plants have been decommissioned or removed and the DCS has been left behind, is to rebuild the nuclear plants. Those sites are ideal for new nuclear. All the original connectivity is already in place.

The discussion of military waste is not relevant to civilian energy. Here’s an idea. Don’t build nuclear weapons.

It is insane to put 90% recyclable fuel in DGS. FFS! Recycle it!

OMG! She said, ass backwards, that reprocessing fuel could power the entire US for 100 years at a cost of $100 billion. I don’t know about you, but that seems like $1 billion a year to power the whole country for a century. Um, seems like a really really low-cost. The US could just take that out of the criminal-ICE budget. GFGDCoaS!

If we just took $100 billion from Eloi Mush right now, he would still be a many-multi billionaire and everyone’s energy could be FREE for ten decades? Sounds awesome!

“Burning coal produces toxic coal ash.” Yes. And orders of magnitude more of the radioactive waste in our environment than nuclear technology. Because radioactive Carbon 14 is just dumped into the environment out chimneys of coal plants. Coal burning presents an actual radioactive waste problem.

Worrying about how a collapsed civilization would deal with our waste is a bit like worrying about whether you might have left the iron on after your house has been blown away by a hurricane.

Fascists crave violence.

Here’s the thing. Of course we, the sane and the moderate, wish we all lived in a lawful decent kind world. A world where the malicious were dealt with justly through legal due process. Of course decent people would like saboteurs and misinformation peddlers and frauds and deceitful enemy propagandists to not get shot to death. Just like we would prefer that tens of thousands of ’mercuns, many children, were not gunned down every year.

But that is certainly not the United States under these Fox Republicans. These MAGA deplorables. These violent anti-social deviant ignoramuses and their howling followers. And if you are at all surprised that a disgusting loud-mouthed shameless far-Reich propagandist was gunned down by far-Reich gun nut, then more fool you. That was inevitable in the climate the kakistocracy has fostered. It happened, and it will happen again. And again with increasing frequency as the chaos unleashed by these “Conservatives” progressively erodes what is left of the American dream.

And if you think, as a moderate, that declaring that the shooting was wrong, which we all know, that you will be protected in any way from the political violence that fElontRump and the GQP have unleashed with their fascism, then you are deluded. This was literally far-Right on far-Right violence, infighting among the nut-cases, and THEY don’t care. They never care one bit about the facts or the truth. And they will continue to weaponize the killing to justify deliberately doing violence to you, if you will oppose them in any way.

Yes, we agree that political killings are bad. Except that the assholes with there teeth in the throat of the nation are actively, performatively, reveling in it. And calling for retribution, which is just more violence.

There is no CO2 capture.

From Sept 2, 2022

I was confused yesterday. I was listening to Science In Action interview “University of Toronto chemist Geoff Ozin and Eric Bachman, founder of the start-up CO2 Rail, explain their vision.”

I was confused because their vision is to add rail cars to existing trains everywhere that capture CO2 as they go. And the part that confused me was about energy. They kept saying that they would have huge batteries in the rail cars to run the CO2 extraction, and that these batteries would be continually charged from the WASTED energy of regenerative breaking. The confusing part was the “otherwise wasted,” bit. Electrified rail, like used all over China and Europe does not “waste” regenerative breaking energy. It feeds back into the system powering vehicles that are not breaking…

But then it dawned on me. There is a more primitive kind of rail engine. Almost all rail drive units are electric motors, but in savage countries like Canada those motors are supplied electricity by huge onboard diesel generators…

It suddenly dawned on me that their carbon extraction system depended on adding heavy loads to trains and increasing diesel fuel consumption. Burning extra fossil fuel to extract fossil fuel emissions.

People sometimes put yard waste in big paper yard waste bags. And fine, that may be the only way you have of getting rid of a bag-load of leaves. But the net resource cost of each bag, if price is indicative, is like 50¢ per bag. But the material you are conserving, by diverting the yard waste, is certainly worth less than 50¢. You are using 50¢ worth of resources to conserve 5 to 10¢ (¿?) worth of resources. This is a net waste of resources.

And this is what I was immediately reminded of by Geoff and Eric’s vision. A scheme which takes some CO2 out of the atmosphere, while probably putting more, or at least a large fraction of the amount of CO2, back.

And there it is. Another fantasy environmental ‘solution’ which on closer examination turns out to likely do more harm than good.

Germany, Energiewende, Sept 2, 2024

This is because Germany’s “Left”-affecting Greenies have absolutely fucked the country with their disastrous Energiewende wind&solar anti-nuclear fantasy. It is hard to say how much investment Germany has flushed away, but even wind and solar advocates like Clean Energy Wire put the cost to 2025 at €520 BILLION in the electricity sector alone. The final cost is likely to be in thousands of billions. And for all that, to date, Germany’s green house gas emission reductions can mostly be accounted for by the consequent shrinking, some might say, “collapse,” of their industrial sector.

And for all that, “Energy in Germany is obtained for the vast majority from fossil sources, accounting for 77.6% of total energy consumption in 2023” Investment to date in energiewende could have built anywhere between 25 and 50 new nuclear plants in Germany and mostly decarbonized the electricity sector already. And they would be well on their way to decarbonizing the rest of their energy sector.

This is a political suicide mounted by fact-averse anti-nuclear activists, who apparently don’t care what progress they don’t make on decarbonizing, so long as it isn’t with safe, clean, cost-effective nuclear electricity generation.

And now the whole country, and Europe, gets to pay the price. And that price is a rise in opportunistic Reich-wing parties, happy to champion “sensible” policies that make the current governing ideology look absurd. And that resurgence in far-right politics is something any thinking person ought to have hoped that Germany, of all places, had had enough of.

Ordinary Germans, facing a manufactured domestic energy crisis and an unprecedentedly shrinking national economy, and eye-watering costs, were gonna lash out.

This is a fine example of why moderate and self-identifying Left politicians must not follow policy positions that are delusional. This kind of self-indulgence opens moderates up to quite reasonable ridicule. It creates a niche into which opportunistic scumbags can simply step.

The premiere of Ontario, DoFo, compared to his dead brother, looked like the smart, sober one. At the time RoFo was running for Toronto mayor, some poor woman, I think in North York, had been getting continually harassed by the city for parking in her own driveway, or something like that. The City was enforcing some nuance of some bylaw in a way that simply amounted to bullying. It had been going on for a while, with multiple abuses and complaints to the city. The then mayor and the woman’s councillor, and council more generally chose not to intervene and put a stop to it. So when the slobulent cretin RoFo took office, one of the first things he did, which made total sense, was be the heroic white knight and stop the City from persecuting this poor woman. Which helped legitimize him as a leader, when his term in office was in fact an unprecedented shit-show.

Part of a sustainable future depends on keeping regressive far-Right policies out of governance. And part of that depends on moderates following evidence-based policies and doing the right thing when it is right and stopping doing the wrong thing, as a matter of orthodoxy, when it is objectively wrong.

Two fer the ONE

The problem with religious “belief” is twofold.

First, if you teach, usually young children, to BELIEVE one untrue nonsense, then you have equipped them to be credulous of anything.

Second, we are use to “religious” people living within the constraints of modern secular societies that were necessary to end centuries of religious violence. Intolerance is a feature of all mythological belief systems because, if you sincerely believe that there is “evil” and your doctrine stands against that evil, if you are certain that heresy is a threat, if you think that people who do not conform or agree or fall in line are the “other,” then essentially being at war with all those others is inevitable.

We should not be surprised, as we watch fundamentalist Christians in the US, having been given consent to throw off all external constraint, a la “Heart of Darkness,” have reproduced a hideously medieval atmosphere of religious persecution. That tendency to violence is a feature, not a bug. We just got used to several decades of most deeply beliefy religious folk being restrained by secularism.

The wind&solar dead parrot

It was sometime before 2010 that my dreams of windmills and solar panels were dashed. I saw a headline proclaiming something like “for the first time wind and solar have become cheaper than coal for generating electricity.” I was surprised, more than 15 years ago, by that awesome news, but I wanted to know more about this wonderful turn-around, so I started reading the article.

Turned out, the devil in the details was that the headline should have began, “With a 95% subsidy…” What the article with the misleading headline was in fact reporting was that, with a 95% subsidy, the remaining 5% of the cost of wind&solar was comparable to the cost of the same KWh of capacity for a coal-fired generating station.

Or, put another way, wind&solar capacity was, in fact, TWENTY times as costly as coal capacity. However, thinking about this today, I have realized that it is much worse than that. If you take capacity factor into account, you could increase that figure anything from 1–6 again. Although CF varies dramatically by location and by year.

And just yesterday, almost two decades later, I was hearing the same sorts of ludicrous claims, that melt under the slightest scrutiny. Including the one where wind&solar, which in fact contribute a trivial 6% of the world’s energy, are growing exponentially. You just cannot see the exponential growth. But if we just continue to not start building real sources of grid-scale low-carbon energy for another 30 years, then the ‘bird’ will “have nuzzled up to those bars, bent ’em apart with its beak, and VOOM! Feeweeweewee!” Fwee energy.

But the reality is, “Mate, this bird wouldn’t “voom” if you put four million volts through it!”

And I swear by the Great goddess Asherah I would love to be wrong. I would love for the mathematically challenged delusions of wind&solar advocates to be a path to a sustainable future. But it happens every bleedin time that when they make a glorious hopeful claim, it turns out that they nailed it to the perch.

You’ve met people, right?

My mum was a long-time Sunday school teacher. She was one of my Sunday school teachers. She taught stuff to vulnerable kids, as if that stuff was history, that had been proved to be fiction 80 years before she was even born.

But she told those lies just as she had been lied to about it in her turn. And she was never even slightly resentful, any time reality conflicted with that received myth, that she had been lied to. She never was angry with the lying liars.

Nope. Far from it. What she was angry about was if anyone told her she had been lied to. She’d get mad at the revelation that she had been taught… lies.

And in there we can find the reason the world has taken this insane turn to the Reich. People are not bothered much about the lies they have internalized, or the liars that lied to them. What makes them angry, what makes them violent and genocidal, is being told they were lied to.

And that is the human nature that we need better secular education to counter. Because once a person has grown to adulthood believing a load of nonsense, they are forever going to be painfully resistant to correcting their misconceptions.

$1 billion

I think the scale, it makes it hard for people to grasp $1 billion. For instance if anyone has that much wealth, in effect there ceases to be any way for anything, a n y t h i n g, reasonable to have an effective cost.

If you have $1 billion to “invest,” even if you made the worst possible use of that capital, if you put it into a 1% savings account, then your lowest possible annual return on investment, uncompounded, would be 1% of $1 billion, or $10,000,000… per year, in perpetuity.

Without ever touching the principal, your “income” would be multi-millions.

But that is not what happens. If you have that much capital, you invest it in a diverse portfolio to maximize return on investment. Such a portfolio might well be expected to return something like 10%. Which would be $100,000,000 to pish away, every year.

For such wealth, nothing that anyone could ever need or reasonably want has any cost. In a very real practical sense, for the extremely rich, everything, e v e r y t h i n g, is free.

And there is no “earning” in that scenario. Once you have that kind of capital, you never have to do a stitch of work to “earn” your hundred thousand tonnes of flesh. It is all… free.

Now consider that some people have schemed their way to fortunes of hundreds of billions of dollars. This is so wrong.

PRATT Chernobyl

Someone ‘what about Chernobyl’-ed me. “Chernobyl is still uninhabitable.”

That is an interesting misconception. So let me address it on two grounds.

First, while initially it was thought that the accident would render the exclusion zone uninhabitable, what actually happened is that in the absence of human settlement the area has recovered a diverse ecosystem, with even large rare mammals finding sanctuary in the accidental nature preserve. The presence of human settlement was actually worse for the environment, than the disaster. Which is a real slap in the face.

In fact the undamaged reactors remained in operation for many years and today the exclusion zone is a tourist attraction. But I advise you not to go near the elephant’s foot.

Secondly, while horrific, the increased mortality from the disaster is something between 4000 and 15,000 over a period of about 70 years. That number will be rapidly decreasing because the Russian invasion of Ukraine is causing so many more deaths. If a Russian drone kills you today, you cannot get thyroid cancer in 20 years.

But to put the 4–15 thousand in context, particulate matter from German coal-fired mostly-electricity generation kills about 75,000 people in Europe EVERY year. And closing the last two nuclear plants in Germany was expected to increase that number by about 1000, per year. Closing Germany’s nuclear power plants has conservatively killed so many more people than Chernobyl ever will.

But here is a thought… Don’t build an unsafe archaic RMBK reactor. Problem solved.

But… again, for what it is worth if you are able to understand actual statistics, here is a graph.
It is NOT building nuclear power that is killing people.

Due Process

The law, courts, justice system only works in a lawful society where those systems have not already failed and broken down. The reason you want to protect those institutions, keeping them effective, is that when they fail, as we can see daily, corruption and criminality on the part of the powerful, run unchecked.

A consequence of this however is that having failed, as often lauded “checks&balances” have comprehensively done in the US, there can be no expectation that the corrupt criminals in power will ever be held accountable by the existing institutions that they have subverted.

That is how in a period of restoration a country will resort to The Nurenberg Trials. In South Africa that is what The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was for.

Someday, unless US democracy is in fact dead, it will not be the existing law or courts of justice that decide on the punishment of this evil kakistocracy. It will be some special tribunal. And, of necessity, the protections these criminals have availed themselves of, by subverting the courts and the justice system will not be able to apply to the outlaws.