And how practical do you think it is to replace every take home essay with something that rigorous?

Have you ever proctored an exam before?

If you can’t articulate why schools use long essays, perhaps you shouldn’t suggest scrapping them. One should know how a machine works before one starts tinkering with it. And a course is a machine like any other. Don’t start pulling out pieces before you know what they do.

Different but wrong. I am always interested to know what people’s guesses are for the total number of deaths caused by Chernobyl, because it’s remarkably low in my opinion.

There were roughly 350,000 innocent human beings who had to abandon their homes due to Chernobyl. The death total was only so low because hundreds of thousands of people had to literally flee for their lives.

You support nuclear for psychological reasons, not for technological reasons. It gives you a sense of superiority over your fellow human beings. The real reason nuclear is a dead technology is that it’s simply not cost competitive with renewables and batteries, but you’re here pretending that it’s a bunch of scared superstitious ignorant environmentalists that are dragging it down. THOSE common fools just don’t know the science. THOSE morons just aren’t rational actors like you are. THEY are just to lazy to read about nuclear plant designs.

You’re engaged in a comforting form of self-delusion. The actual barriers to nuclear have nothing to do with people just being irrationally afraid of fission. But you ignore this because it gives you a sense of intellectual superiority.

You support nuclear for psychological rather than technological reasons. Fission is just your sports team.

Fun fact, you still need base load reactors

Fun fact, the very concept of base load has been obsolete for a decade. There are times on modern grids where the net power demand goes to zero due to all the solar deployed on rooftops and such. Base load of many grids is zero at this point.

So since we’re people and not angels, maybe we should stick with solar, wind, and batteries. There’s just less of a chance of us colossally breaking something with these.

Which is why you design it so human error cannot cause a nuclear incident.

BWAHAHAHA

Human error is always present. You can’t engineer around it. You can have the best, most safest design possible on paper, but it won’t do any good at all if it isn’t built and maintained the way you designed it.

Fine. I’ll support building a nuclear plant if you can promise to build it without hiring any managers, executives, or accountants.

Just learning about Javon’s paradox?

No they couldn’t have. Both fission and renewables require either fossil fuels or energy storage to build a grid off of them. They really do not complement each other well. They compete with each other; they do not complement each other.

Unless you’re bloody Singapore, who the fuck cares about space efficiency of power generation?

France went all in on nuclear. Their nuclear company still went bankrupt.

I’ve never understood the anti-nuclear movement. Let’s give up one of the cleanest and most efficient ways to generate energy because reasons?

I don’t support fission because I don’t like paying comically high amounts of electricity. I support power options because they’re the most practical, not because I get some weird retro-futuristic “our friend the atom” sexual kick out of it.

That doesn’t make any sense.

Fission and renewables are fundamentally incompatible technologies. Nuclear plants are comically expensive. The only hope you can possibly have of making them profitable is to build giant power plants that run at full capacity 24/7. It’s physically possible to throttle a nuclear reactor, but it is not economically possible to do so. (Small modular reactors have been tried and failed dozens of times.)

Renewables however have to partner with throttleable power sources. You need a power source that can run its output up and down to cover the swings in renewables. This is possible with fossil fuels, it’s not possible with fission.

The best example of this? The Bath County Pumped Storage Station.. It’s one if not the largest pumped storage facilities in the US. And yet, it was built…40 years ago?

We normally think of energy storage being built for solar and wind. But this energy storage was actually built to complement fission plants. The area has a lot of nuclear plants around it. The idea was that with this facility, they could keep the reactors running full power 24/7, and use the storage station to store the excess power at night.

This dramatically illustrates why fission and solar/wind pair so poorly. If you wanted to build a grid out of 100% solar/wind or 100% fission, either would require extensive energy storage solutions. Nuclear needs to be variable but it’s stuck in a fixed state. Solar/wind would like to be fixed but are stuck in variable. Either requires energy storage to build a grid off them.

This is why Germany keeping its fission plants wouldn’t have resulted in much decrease in fossil fuel use. Keeping the fission plants would have simply meant less renewables instead. They are not complementary technologies; they are competitive technologies.

We don’t have the resources for a ground invasion. And nukes are extremely unlikely.

What is more likely, and what the senator appears to be referring to, is bombing campaign aimed at destroying the vital civilian infrastructure of the country. Think power plants, bridges, ports, water treatment facilities, etc.

Seriously. How many random small town plumbers know anything about industrial-scale computer liquid cooling installation? How many local electricians know anything about data center electrical systems? It makes no sense to use local labor. The skills required are just too specialized.

If you are what you eat, does eating a billionaire in turn make you evil?

(Apologies for the weird photo source. Only one I could find that includes the tribute text.)

I mean, if there’s a safe word involved…