Elon and Trump make the worst possible argument for nuclear power I have ever heard:
“Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed but now they are full cities again,” the multibillionaire owner of Tesla, SpaceX and X said.
“That’s great, that’s great,” Mr Trump responded.
“It is not as scary as people think, basically,” Mr Musk added.
They joked about nuclear power facing a “branding problem”.
“We will have to rebrand it,” the former president told Mr Musk. “We will name it after you or something.”
Nuclear power does have a problem where perceptions of danger greatly outweigh the actual danger.
Trying to make nuclear power sound safe by saying that a nuclear bombing isn’t that bad is not helping. I fucking hate these two dipshits.
Right? I’m not an anti-nuclear person in general (although I think it’s becoming mores superfluous as other methods become more efficient), but “thousands of people died and then they built a new city, so don’t worry” is so fucking stupid.
(although I think it’s becoming mores superfluous as other methods become more efficient),
Yeah, nuclear power plants are expensive and slow to construct. 20 years ago, hell, 10 years ago, I would’ve said “Yes, building new plants or making major expansions is still a good idea.” Now? Renewables are advancing so fast that it’s probably economically unwise to make major investments in nuclear power.
Nuclear energy has insane energy density in terms of MJ/kg (something like 3.9 x 10^6 ) versus chemical fuels (4.5 x 10^1), but it’s grossly inefficient because most of the output is waste heat and “hot” isotopes-- the last things we need. I don’t have hard numbers on hand but I wouldn’t say nuclear is more than a few tens of percent efficiency. Then there’s the capital costs to build, maintain and operate plants PLUS costs to source, refine, transport, and store the fuel, and then transport and discard (contain) waste product. Not worth it at scale.
Versus Solar, Wind and Tidal which are far less energy dense per unit mass of working fluid¹, but enjoy up to 80% efficiency, and are relatively easy to scale.
Nuclear still makes sense, I think, in interior areas like the American Midwest where wind and solar are fickle, and transportation (transmission) costs for tidal would be unsustainable.
¹ Not a fair comparison because solar efficiency is quantized on intensity x area / time, while wind and tidal would quantized on flux density, or (mass / area) x velocity (over time?).
I think it would make the most sense at high latitudes. Where they don’t get enough sun for solar and maintenance on iced-up turbine blades would be a pain in the ass.
Nuclear still makes sense, I think, in interior areas like the American Midwest where wind and solar are fickle, and transportation (transmission) costs for tidal would be unsustainable.
There’s another downside to depending on nuclear power that wasn’t so much an issue in the past, but is now, and will be even more in the future: the required cooling capacity to operate a nuclear reactor.
The reason nuclear power plants are built next to large bodies of water is that the waste heat needs to be dispersed somewhere. The heat is transferred to the body of water (lake, river, sea or ocean). Except now with climate change the bodies of water are already warmer so they cannot take away as much heat. In other places drought is reducing the amount of water, meaning less waste heat can be carried away. If you can’t get rid of waste heat from your reactor, you have to turn it off until you have sufficient heat dispersal available.
This isn’t theoretical. Its been happening sporadically for almost a decade. Here’s an article from 2018 detailing Finland having to turn off reactors because of ocean temperatures too high to operate.:
“Finland’s Loviisa power plant, located about 65 miles outside Helsinki, first slightly reduced its output on Wednesday. “The situation does not endanger people, [the] environment or the power plant,” its operator, the energy company Fortum, wrote in a statement. The seawater has not cooled since then, and the plant continued to reduce its output on both Thursday and Friday, confirmed the plant’s chief of operations, Timo Eurasto. “The weather forecast [means] it can continue at least a week. But hopefully not that long,” he said.”
I don’t know why more people aren’t talking about this when they recommend nuclear power for a climate changing world. Its only going to get hotter from now on, which means we’ll be able to effectively only use less nuclear power plant capacity.
exactly. it isn’t that they’re unsafe, its that there’s more effective options that aren’t oil.
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I’m beginning to think this Musk guy isn’t as smart as he lets on…
You’d already know that if you hear him talk about something you have knowledge about. He is spewing bullshit so confidently, only a layman would think it sounds logical.
But to hammer it home.
Elon has a degree in Economics. He tried to go for Physics as well but he wasn’t smart enough.
Only 2 year after he left school did he get a degree, when the school received a big donation. He just bought his degree.
Didn’t stop him from claiming he got the degree during those 2 years either. He even got sued for that.
Fuck, it’s always worse than you already knew. What a phoney.
not as scary as people think
This painting/drawing is from artist Kichisuke Yoshimura, who said of it, “Their clothes ripped to shreds, their skin hanging down. On the riverbank I saw figures that seemed to be from another world. Ghost-like, their hair falling over their faces, their clothes ripped to shreds, their skin hanging. A cluster of these injured persons was moving wordlessly toward the outskirts.”
Not scary: some people were vaporized leaving only a shadow, others badly burned as the painting shows, people were maimed and amputated by the blast, and a big part of the city was blown and burned down. Plus the poor souls who would die horribly from acute radiation poisoning over the following days.
And let’s not forget those nuclear weapons were some of the very first ever made. Modern atomic weapons can range from Hiroshima-size to turning a mountain into a radioactive lake range. Thankfully no hydrogen bomb has even been used in anger because that would be a completely different level of horror (and likely the trigger to the end of human civilization).
Many nuclear powers have policies to fire nukes on warning. That means they would shoot back even before the enemy nuke hits them. Shoot when the nukes are confirmed to be incoming.
Republicans love to regularly talk down the World-ending horror that would be using atomic weapons in war. During Bush Jr.'s “war on terror” they were already talking about using bunker-buster nukes and tried to diminish the well-deserved stigma of nuclear weapons.
Renaming them atomic weapons “Musk bombs” sounds hilariously misguided.
John Hersey’s book, Hiroshima, which is a book of personal accounts he recorded just one year after the event from six people who were there, is one of the most haunting things you will ever read.
some children where at home after the bomb fell and they said a horrific burnt figure on fours came crawling in and died. It was so burnt black and horrifically melted they thought it was a dog. It was their mother.
absolutely sickening these “men” I wish i could just absolutely take it to these pieces of shit and beat them senseless.
He should be strapped to a spacex rocket and sent to the sun. It isn’t as scary as you think.
Tell trump it’s ok to go at night, when the sun is cool.
He’ll be blind from staring so he won’t feel much
The SpaceX rocket unfortunately isn’t powerful enough to launch anything into the sun, but yes.
Doesn’t need to reach the sun.
Even exploding on launch is enough.
That said, such an explosion would that be more or less scary than the sun?
Not as scary as people think.
I’m sure we could modify it to make it possible. Even if we miss… 🤷🏼♂️
I have an idea Elon - how about we bomb your house with you in it? I’m sure after a while some other people will build another house there and move in, so it’s all good, right?
Yea, it wouldn’t be as bad as he thinks.
It would be really fun to punch him in the face for like 30 minutes.
The internet has come full circle!
There used to be a game in the 90’s where you punch Bill Gates in the face.
I remember an early 2000 game called Who wants to Beat Up a Millionaire
Which was a quiz and if you got the right answer, you get to beat up your millionaire opponents until they aren’t millionaires any more. Even getting some weapons.
Ah, good times.
Just needs updated to billionaire.
They’re really working on making World War III attractive. That’s not a joke. They long for war.
It’s the absolute decadence of having a generation of youngsters offered up to the blood God for your personal indulging of geopolitical prowess
We already had two World Wars and civilization still exists. It’s not as scary as people think, basically. /s
The World Trade Center was destroyed by terrorists, but they built a new one. Not as scary as you think.
Elon is like that greasy kid in high school who would correct the History teacher with facts he learned by posting on /pol/. “Actually, the slaves loved being slaves because they got free housing and healthcare.”
Can someone please line his shit ass up against the wall already?
There is a reason people call them Weird. Anyone who calls the death of hundreds of thousands of people “not as scary as people think” needs their heads examined. And with those two, I would not mind if that would be perfomed in the autopsy department.
Simply flee the country on a private jet or crawl into your billion-dollar bunker and the blast cannot impact you, what’s the problem? It’s only going to kill hundreds of thousands of poors, NBD.
Wait, that’s the old tech… it’s only going to kill millions of poors, NBD.
Can people stop trying Musk like he is some sort of “cool bro” idol?
I’d like to take a moment to share this video about what happens to the human body at different zones of the blast. It’s pretty horrific, but simulated.
How fast would the disintegration in zone 5 (fireball) happen? Would the nervous system even register it?
Wouldn’t feel a thing. At minimum the blast would travel at the speed of sound ~343m/s. Nerve conduction velocity is on the range of 120m/s. Your nerves would be vapor before the signal reached its destination.
This is both comforting and incredibly morbid. Idk how to feel.
No need to feel
You wouldn’t feel it, that is the point
The absurd amount of radiation (thermal included) would get there even faster!
I figured. I was just sure the minimum would be speed of sound. Other than speed of light, I’ve no idea what the maximum would be.
I want to say the shock wave moves faster than the speed of sound, but yeah it’s hard to beat the speed of light.
The chain reaction happens super fast, so all that energy is dumped in a practical instant.
Okay then. I call shotgun for zone 5
Sounds good. I’ll choose zone 0. Or whatever is outside the blast radius. Good luck.
Big difference between the original atomic bombs he’s talking about and current (or even decades-old) thermonuclear weapons. This is just ignorant rambling from someone that wants to be “smart”.
Meanwhile, Annie Jacobsen has a recent book on exactly this subject that has been making the rounds these past months. Those two have to be living in a small bubble to not know about this book.
Never heard of it
Title of book?
Thank you!
Somebody should let these geniuses know that nuclear weapons are now a thousand times stronger, and there are thousands of times as many spread all over the world.
Plus they’re doing the old people thing where they pretend the past was all great. Plus there’s probably some kind of bigoted/xenophobic undertone, because after all it didn’t happen to the people that matter to them. (Which is very few people honestly)
Ok, so now that’s Japan, EU, UK and Brazil that hate elon’s guts. He’s gonna start to run out of democracies to fuck with, will he move on to dictators or is that friendly fire?
As a nation of one, one of my foreign policy agendas is the eradication of everything Elon Musk stands for. All my cells voted in favor of this, we are not a house divided.
yeah, yeah, there are people of all kinds in these places, but know that if he attacks your institutions, he is not on your side. Governments have taken notice and are starting to act on it.
He will not mess with dictators. Because in those countries he can get anything he wants just by bribing a few people. Not so in democracies.
Let’s associate a nuclear power plant with Elon’s record of dumping mercury in waterways and not giving a shit about safety.
If Elon musk goes into nuclear energy I guarantee you, the plant he would make will have a meltdown that would make Fukushima and Chernobyl look tame by comparison.
