• 0 Posts
  • 58 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 30th, 2023

help-circle


  • Wars are won (and lost) as a result of supply chain logistics.

    One of the most important elements of the war machine is a well-fed and well-equipped soldier. As such, most armies have dedicated logistics divisions to ensure supplies, weapons, and machinery get to where they are needed on time.

    Consequently, supply chain interdiction or disruption is a powerful weapon of war. To interfere with your enemy’s logistical operations is to reduce the overall effectiveness of their combatants and thus their strategy.

    Modern-day Russia was not prepared for this war to last as long as it has, their commanding officers have little regard for their soldiers, and they’ve historically had poor logistics to begin with.

    This makes it easy to disrupt their supply chains, if they were even set up in the first place. Add this to tribalist infighting and a general lack of cohesion and you end up with people going hungry.













  • Okay, so, I appreciate the discussion, but I have to address your comment as it is plainly disingenuous.

    • Finland is, indeed, the only country with an currently operational deep-level storage facility. But several other such facilities are in active development across the globe. These are long-term storage facilities and their design and installation naturally takes time. Nuclear is still young, but the solutions are being worked on—the only thing hindering it is people like you who attempt to sabotage the industry and then claim it isn’t up to scratch.

    • You claim “the facility will be finished in a hundred years and only contain the waste of a single Nuclear (sic) power plant”. This is a carefully-worded lie. The facility will begin storing nuclear waste this year and continue to store waste from all five of Finland’s nuclear reactors for the entire length of their life cycles, which is indeed about 100 years.

    • The cost is a difficult one and can only be assessed in the context of all ongoing costs to produce nuclear power. However, the International Energy Agency’s ongoing assessment of the Levellised Costs Of Electricity—which takes into account all cost inputs for power generation of any type, from mineral extraction to ongoing maintenance, to waste storage—shows that nuclear is the low-carbon technology with the lowest costs overall.

    • The reason that Germany doesn’t have concrete plans for long-term nuclear waste storage is due to years of undermining attacks on the technology from fossil fuel lobbies and oddly similar ‘Green Party’ voices. To say that a technology cannot work or isn’t viable because the opponents of said technology have successfully sabotaged it is incredibly disingenuous and deeply malicious.

    • You cannot claim that the issues of any sector of energy generation are “solved politically”, nor can you claim that their “funding is secured with certainty”. Again, to claim a technology isn’t viable because you don’t want it to be and you’re helping to undermine its development isn’t a good argument. Nuclear power technology continues to advance at a rapid rate and will continue to do so providing it receives the necessary support and funding. The same goes for any emergent technology.

    Your entire comment is full of the things you claim that the proponents of nuclear energy put forward. You are skewing the facts in an attempt to favour a sensationalist argument that convinces those less educated in the technology that it is scary and dangerous—which extensive research demonstrates to be untrue.

    The reality is that renewable energy is unpredictable and best suited to flexible generation. Please do not misunderstand me, I fully support the development of all renewable technologies. However, when we wean ourselves of fossil fuels, we will need new baseload power plants. Nuclear is currently the best option to provide stable baseload generation.


  • So, nuclear waste is undeniably a problem,but the reality is that most of it is low-level and not that difficult to dispose of.

    Other industries have much worse by-products that are more costly and challenging to dispose of. Many mineral extraction chains produce far more toxic hazardous waste than nuclear power does. Heavy industry deals with chemicals significantly more toxic and dangerous to humans.

    It’s easy to be scared and to drum up fear of nuclear waste due to its longevity. That fear shouldn’t be dismissed, we do need secure facilities for high-level nuclear waste—but that type accounts for about 3% of all nuclear waste and is currently being safely disposed of in deep-level purpose-built facilities.

    A far greater risk of exposure and contamination exists from any number of ongoing industrial processes—a single processing plant failure (on almost any production chain) is liable to release more toxic material into the environment and result in a greater impact on human and animal life than any risk from nuclear waste.