this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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It's written by an Indian nuclear physicist and disarmament activist. This book's line is that it takes too long (valid) and is too dangerous (less valid). Naomi Klein gave it a good review so it's probably not turbolib shit.
I know he was born in India. His professional career is in British Columbia.
His "it takes too long!" argument is absolute nonsense. It hinges on the bulk of the "construction" time being government reluctance about nuclear power. So nuclear power takes too long to build because we take too long to build it? That argument doesn't pass muster.
The average time to build a plant is around decade solely on construction and another decade in compliance. Nuclear power is safe as a result of regulation and compliance, not in spite of it.
Weird how China can do it in five years, then.
It's almost like a country with more engineers and a larger workforce can build things faster. Most renewables can be set up in five weeks or so. We need development in both but five years is a while with a ticking clock.
I'm sorry. I think I've been overly hostile. We definitely can agree on the point that we need to walk and chew gum at the same time, so to speak.
We need to be busting out every tool at our disposal to slow down this global climate crisis. I'm just of the opinion that fear of nuclear power is vastly overblown, and this book is feeding into that fear. In a perfect world we'd be running entirely off true renewable energy. But we aren't. We live in Hell. We need to pull out all the stops so we don't make ourselves extinct.
Yeah it seems like you are arguing with the no nuclear under any circumstances libs and I'm arguing with the nuclear or bust ones. We need the silver buckshot and we need it now.
Yeah, the (online) left is weirdly "fuck yeah science!" on nuclear and the counterpart is still riding on the legacy of the 1980s anti-nuclear movement, opposing it under any circumstances.
I'm personally of the opinion nuclear should be phased out eventually, but coal, oil, gas and other minor fossil fueled energy has a way higher priority to go first.
It also matters little, because energy under capitalism is dependent on the infighting between factions of capital. Like the much-mocked German shutdown of nuclear power. Half opportunism to prevent the electoral rise of the green party and half gift to the mining corporation RWE. Had it not happened, it would be the firms dealing with nuclear power supply, etc. to profit. Nothing gets done without the bourgeois benefitting.
It would seem the problem is capital, not what policy to follow.
I've been in the nuclear trenches a few times (on the pro-nuclear side, though there are very obviously drawbacks and limitations and by no means do I advocate for paving the world with nuclear power plants or whatever the strawman is nowadays) and I've come to realize that anti-nuclear sentiments aren't fundamentally influenced by these well-thought-out arguments that anti-nuclear intellectuals and professionals have. It's much more to do with their profitability and rate of return and investment cost than like, scientific arguments about the amount of uranium/thorium reserves, or potential for disasters, and so on.
As in, the nuclear debate online isn't actually as relevant in the real world as it seems, and a lot of the displayed concern about Fukushima or Chernobyl happening again in government bodies isn't actually the thing that is motivating them, it's just good-old-fashioned capitalism and they're dressing it up. If we're talking environmental impacts, massive oil spills, while certainly widely known about and important points in the fossil fuel debate, haven't really done much to dent fossil fuel production quite like how nuclear disasters affected nuclear energy's reputation. And it takes a shitload of rare resources like cobalt and copper and lithium to create the renewables that would be required to get us to a fully renewable economy even if we assume energy consumption doesn't keep rising over time. The cumulative effect of hundreds and thousands of mines and quarries on the environment (let alone workers) is gigantic, but they're spread out enough (and often located in countries that the average person couldn't place on a map, let alone care deeply about) that they don't feature as heavily in the debate.
So basically I caution anybody who gets too lost in the sauce over the common issues that online debates are about because, while these things are extremely important, these aren't actually the big reasons why capitalists aren't investing heavily in them, so you're kinda wasting your time (even under the assumption that internet debates are somehow productive). Do you think a capitalist gives a shit whether their nuclear power plant has some leakage that raises cancer rates in the surrounding area, so long as it makes a profit? We have to distinguish the discussion over these things versus the material reality.
GOOD post
20 years doesn’t really seem that big of a deal compared to the consequences of climate chsnge. But in the US, it will actually take 60 years and then abandoned half way because 25 contractors were revealed to be fictitious companies and the 5 real ones demand a $150 billion screwdriver
20 years is a big deal because climate change is exponential and we don't have that much time, many places in 2044 won't be habitable anymore. Nuclear is a good option but it can't be the only option.
What energy source ist fast enough to build? Wind? PV?
France constructed 56 reactors in 15 years (1974-1989) with about 60GW capacity.
Germanys nuclear program was faster in constructing capacity than any phase in the Energiewende.
You do know that you can build nuclear power plants almost anywhere?
Four of the french ones are not at water sources. The biggest in the US is located in a desert. Katar has nuclear reactors.
Why would site selection be difficult?
I got an error there. They are built by water sources but 11 of 15 power rely on evaporative cooling via cooling towers. There is the possibility of dry cooling, which doesn't use external water.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you simply don't know what you're talking about.
Let's take a peek at Naomi Klein's recent writing, but first I want to preface it by pointing out her last book was about how "the pandemic made everyone crazy" and some people mixed up her Twitter account with an antivaxxer. Pretty thin gruel, and the Shock Doctrine wasn't really much better at using a lame analogy to conduct a historical investigation. It's kind of impressive how people trip over hacks like Klein and Zizek and make them part of their weird pantheon of writers considering their writing contains so many blatant insults to the reader's intelligence. I guess it's all about the buzz surrounding some writers, Klein speaking at occupy, Zizek appearing in documentaries, which obscures the hints in their writing that precede their most trashy displays in rando magazines like Compact and whatever this one where Klein is using a genocide to sell the aforementioned shit book is called. Okay, now on to the good stuff.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231019132834if_/https://www.anothermag.com/design-living/15184/naomi-klein-doppelganger-2023-interview-israel-palestine
Let's remind ourselves what got her in hot water that she's brushing off here:
"So sorry you were offended, it's hard to know how to be "politically correct" with all the rabid leftists these days, buy my book. :-)"
It really seems to be a no-brainer that any writer who compulsively shits on the USSR without making a real analysis just by making shitty historical comparisons (Ann Pettifor comparing proposals to use western tax dollars to fund a "green belt" of for profit enterprises in the Sahel to the Soviet Union may be a rare exception, but honestly she seems to hinge everything on investors putting down the cocaine and considering climate change seriously so maybe the rest of her stuff is lame too, also the guy who wrote Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of A Ukrainian Nationalist trashes the USSR here and there but he never backs it up with anything good and the stuff on the OUN etc is great) can be dismissed completely
Thank you for coming to my TED talk in conclusion check the ingredients on your slop next time
Why does it take too long? Because there are too many people who believe it's too dangerous
why are you assuming that nuclear has to completely replace all other forms of energy, whether renewable or not, to be worth building?
Death to America
Did your calculation account for the fact that energy and economic growth having an almost 1:1 relation, meaning a compound growth of ~3% economic growth every year will add up quadrupling the energy requirements in 50 years.
Capitalism is generally also horrible at building things, even if the decision is finally made.