Meme - *run-down city with homeless people, syringes on the pavement & trash* *whistles while walking*
*clean area with lots of greenery* "YUCK! UN-WALKABLE SUBURBS..."
Meme - NPC: "What happens if we're wrong?"
NPCs: "Easy, we memory hole it as if it never happened."
The liberal memory hole churns on
Meme - "Learn Cyber bullying Online in 24 Weeks
UC DAVIS Continuing and Professional Education"
Meme - "Never forget the incel meet up vs the r/inceltears meet up *normal people vs unattractive people*"
Meme - "Yo bro"
"who is this?"
"This is Kayla's boyfriend"
"Ohhh ight what's up"
"Listen ima just keep it real with you.. I know she's been cheating on me with you and you're her side man and all, and you know what? I'm fine w that, cause if she's happy then I'm happy... thing is i'm messing with someone else rn too so I was gonna ask if you can chill with her on Sunday so I can take my other girl out"
"Shiiiiii man. that's a bet don't even worry what time"
2010 U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey | Pew Research Center - "Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions... Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons perform better than other groups on the survey even after controlling for differing levels of education... Atheists/agnostics and Jews also do particularly well on questions about the role of religion in public life, including a question about what the U.S. Constitution says about religion... More than four-in-ten Catholics in the United States (45%) do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the body and blood of Christ. About half of Protestants (53%) cannot correctly identify Martin Luther as the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant Reformation, which made their religion a separate branch of Christianity. Roughly four-in-ten Jews (43%) do not recognize that Maimonides, one of the most venerated rabbis in history, was Jewish... Out of a total of 41 knowledge questions (32 about religion and nine testing general knowledge) the single question that respondents most frequently get right is whether U.S. Supreme Court rulings allow teachers to lead public school classes in prayer. Nine-in-ten (89%) correctly say this is not allowed. But among the questions most often answered incorrectly is whether public school teachers are permitted to read from the Bible as an example of literature. Fully two-thirds of people surveyed (67%) also say “no” to this question, even though the Supreme Court has clearly stated that the Bible may be taught for its “literary and historic” qualities, as long as it is part of a secular curriculum. On a third question along these lines, just 36% of the public knows that comparative religion classes may be taught in public schools. Together, this block of questions suggests that many Americans think the constitutional restrictions on religion in public schools are tighter than they really are... On the full battery of seven questions about the Bible (five Old Testament and two New Testament items) Mormons do best, followed by white evangelical Protestants. Atheists/agnostics, black Protestants and Jews come next, all exhibiting greater knowledge of the Bible than white mainline Protestants and white Catholics, who in turn outscore those who describe their religion as nothing in particular."
BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Remembering Fukushima - "‘A year after the disaster, I decided to move to Japan. And since then, I've gone back over and over, especially to Fukushima. Looking back now with the benefit of 10 years’ hindsight, it's hard not to conclude that in those first months after the disaster, a lot of the reporting on Fukushima, including my own was wrong. A few days after that first explosion, I was back in Tokyo watching as huge Chinook helicopters circled over the plant, dumping buckets of water on the wrecked reactor buildings. Everyone around me was scared. Trains out of Tokyo were packed as rumors spread that the city might have to be evacuated. Then Prime Minister Naoto Kan later said he had feared he might have to give that order. The shocks spread around the world. The Fukushima disaster was headline news night after night. It led directly to the German government ending its nuclear power program. But it's now clear Tokyo was never in real danger. The pictures of the reactor buildings exploding were dramatic, but the containment system at Fukushima had worked. There was a large release of radioactive gas, but it was nothing like what had happened at Chernobyl, a disaster it is all too often compared to. The following year, I made my first foray into the badly damaged nuclear plant. We donned respirators and protective suits, radiation monitors pin to our chests. It felt a little scary, or radiation alarms going off made for dramatic TV reportage, but the danger was far from real. Gradually, as I made more trips to the plant, I learned that the radiation dose I was getting each time was tiny, roughly equivalent to what I'd get flying from Tokyo to London, and far, far less than a mammogram or a CT scan. The fear generated by the Fukushima disaster has had real consequences, and not just for nuclear energy. I was recently asked by someone in China, whether I wasn't scared to eat the food in Japan. China, South Korea and Taiwan continue to ban the import of seafood caught off Japan's east coast. The scientific justification for such bans is weak, to say the least. The disaster did release large volumes of radioactive isotopes into the Pacific Ocean, but those amounts are small, when compared to the much larger volume of radiation already in the Pacific, thanks to decades of nuclear weapons tests by America, France and Britain. Even here in Japan, fear and ignorance continue to cause discrimination against the people of Fukushima. Last week I was back in the contamination zone. When I’d last visited a couple of years ago, large areas of farmland remained abandoned and overgrown, but also astonishingly rich in wildlife, the springtime air alive with birdsong. Now those same fields had been stripped bare, their topsoil removed: part of the massive effort to cleanse the land around the plant. I don't know why they bother, my local guide said. No one's going to grow anything on those fields. There's no one to do it. And even if there were, no one would buy the produce. This place will always be considered tainted, he said. It's true. Shoppers in Tokyo continue to shun produce labeled Fukushima, even if it's grown far away from the official contamination zone. Despite all of this or perhaps because of it, the Japanese government continues its program to decontaminate the land, removing millions of tons of topsoil, cutting down woodland and orchards. The bill for the cleanup is thought to run into hundreds of billions of dollars. But most of those forced to flee 10 years ago now say they don't want to go home. It's taken too long, and now they have new lives elsewhere. I asked one evacuee I know whether he thought the money was being well spent. It's a complete waste, he said. They should just put a big fence around the whole place and leave it. They could use the money to support us instead'"
Fukushima's nuclear meltdown hasn't been the environmental calamity we feared - "A 2013 study from the World Health Organization failed to find an observable increase in local cancer rates immediately following the meltdown. And, in 2016, Jordi Vives i Batlle of the Belgian Nuclear Research Centre published a study in the journal Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management, found that radiation levels within the Fukushima fauna were actually lower following the incident than initially predicted. “Exposures were too low for acute effects at the population level to be observed in marine organisms,” the study’s researchers wrote. Furthermore, a follow-on study from this past March found that, to date, local residents had suffered “no adverse health effects” due to the 2011 incident’s fallout... Of all the radiation present in the oceans today, Fisher estimates that only between 1 and 2 percent of it originated from humans and, of that tiny amount, 99 percent of which was generated through nuclear weapons testing in the ‘40s - ‘60s — not accidents like Chernobyl, Three-Mile Island or Fukushima. “The [health] effects are virtually negligible”"
Facebook - "German media has again been brazenly lying, so I updated my worst-of list of anti-nuclear disinformation. This time, a German public-service news programme claimed that 18,500 people died as a consequence of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, when in reality 0 died...
1. UN finds 'no adverse health effects' from Fukushima disaster
2. No excess mutations in the children of Chernobyl survivors, new study finds
3. Nuclear waste isn't a problem
4. We solved nuclear waste decades ago
5. Nuclear fuel will last us for 4 billion years
6. Nuclear power plants can be built very quickly: “France did things differently back in the 1970s, when they decarbonised in under 12 years through building nuclear power plants, which means that they have one of the cleanest energy mixes in Europe.”
7. Nuclear power is very safe: 440 reactors producing electricity in their fourth to sixth decade of service...100s more power ships & submarines...just 3 accidents...No one has called for closing chemical plants—even though there have been far more fatal chemical plant accidents.
8. Nuclear power is expensive because of overregulation"
Not surprising, given that anti-nuclear activists are at least partly motivated by their left wing agenda, which is about destroying capitalism
Facebook - "A woman went to a climate strike in Germany with a pro-nuclear power sign and was violently attacked. They now threaten to sue anyone who shares the video of the attack or even a screenshot."
Nuclear Power Isn’t Perfect. Is It Good Enough? - Freakonomics - "
There are a number of misconceptions about nuclear power. Let’s start with a simple image — that huge, hourglass-shaped cooling tower, with steam billowing out the top. Spooky, right? Just about every article you’ve ever seen about nuclear power has been accompanied by a photograph of a cooling tower like that. It has essentially become a symbol for nuclear power.
GOLDSTEIN: It’s a terrible symbol because a lot of coal plants have the cooling towers and a lot of nuclear plants don’t have them. But I know that’s what people think of...
Sweden and France, both in the 1970s, were affected by the energy crisis in which the Middle East conflicts had led to a shutoff of oil exports. And suddenly there were lines at the gas station and so forth, it was a big political issue at that time. So Sweden just built a dozen reactors or so in short order. Same thing France did. And their carbon emissions dropped by half just in 15 years, and their economy doubled in that time and their electricity use doubled...
GOLDSTEIN: The price of wind and solar has come down a lot and they’re very cheap now when they produce. But the problem is, when they’re not producing, then the grid needs to go somewhere else to get electricity. Battery storage is still very expensive, and the amount of storage that you would need is incredibly large if you intend to power a whole society or whole grid or the world with just intermittent wind and solar power...
DUBNER: I often see the Chernobyl event referred to as the “Chernobyl Nuclear Accident.” In fact, I’m looking at a page here from the World Nuclear Association, and the article is titled “Chernobyl Accident 1986.” I’m curious whether you think “accident” is an appropriate word for what happened there, or no?
MAZIN: From a technical point of view: no, because, to me — I call it “disaster,” not simply because of the scale, but also because I think in part it was borderline intentional. When you look at what they did, it’s hard to call that an accident. Do you call it a car accident if somebody decides to take a turn that’s listed at 20 miles an hour at 90 miles an hour? It’s hard to say that’s an accident. I call it a disaster...
How did we go from inventing nuclear power to essentially shunning it? Yes, there was the fear created by Chernobyl and evenThree Mile Island. But Goldstein says we shouldn’t underestimate the power of the environmentalist movement.
GOLDSTEIN: So it really predates all those accidents. I would go back to 1973, when the Sierra Club, which had always been pro-nuclear power because it’s so environmentally — it’s why I love it, I’m an environmentalist. Then they flipped and became anti-nuclear power. And then they went to Ohio, where Ohio was burning coal and was planning to build nuclear plants. And the Sierra Club successfully sued and agitated and raised money and got them to shut down most of what was being built there. And today, Ohio is still running on coal. So that’s decades of coal, decades of cancer and emphysema, decades of carbon emissions and so forth. And I think if you went back before that, to the path we were on, we were taking a new technology and we were going to power our cities with it, spread it around the world. And we literally wouldn’t have the climate crisis that we have today if we had stayed on that track. And we would have saved all these lives that died from coal pollution.
DUBNER: What made an organization like that change its position so concretely?
GOLDSTEIN: There was a strand — and I remember this from back then — a strand of thought that technology was bad. The population was growing too fast, too many people, people were bad. And the head of the Sierra Club, David Brower, subscribed to that. His predecessor had — I mean, the Sierra Club voted in favor of the Diablo Canyon nuclear reactor twice, the membership. But David Brower was anti-nuclear and shared these beliefs about technology, population, and so forth. And he left the Sierra Club and went over and founded Friends of the Earth, which was a explicitly anti-nuclear group. And he did it with a check from the head of Arco Petroleum. So, you know, the fossil industry has always had an interest in shutting down nuclear for obvious reasons. It’s competition...
Energy prices in California are already the highest in the country... It’s worth noting that at the same time California was preparing to shut down Diablo Canyon, they also launched The California Harm Reduction Initiative to fight drug overdoses by funding what are called “syringe service programs.” It’s also worth noting there are more fatal drug overdoses per year in the U.S. alone than deaths from nuclear power ever."
Once again, environmentalism is not actually about saving the environment, but pushing a left wing agenda
The unintended effects from halting nuclear power production: Evidence from Fukushima Daiichi accident - "This paper provides novel evidence of the unintended health effects stemming from the halt in nuclear power production after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. After the accident, nuclear power stations ceased operation and nuclear power was replaced by fossil fuels, causing an increase in electricity prices. We find that this increase led to a reduction in energy consumption, which caused an increase in mortality during very cold temperatures, given the protective role that climate control plays against the elements. Our results contribute to the debate surrounding the use of nuclear as a source of energy by documenting a yet unexplored health benefit from using nuclear power, and more broadly to regulatory policy approaches implemented during periods of scientific uncertainty about potential adverse effects."
Time to ramp up nuclear hysteria so more people will die from a lack of nuclear than would ever die due to it, so this can be blamed on "climate change"
Why nuclear power plants cost so much—and what can be done about it - "Because the capital costs of nuclear power are so significant, the most effective way to reduce the total price of nuclear energy is to design and construct plants more efficiently. Historically, especially in the United States, new nuclear plants varied significantly in design, due to the continual incorporation of new technological advancements—and also because of differences in location, layout, climate conditions, and cooling methods. Several tens of electric utilities, nuclear equipment vendors, and engineering companies were involved in US nuclear plant construction and thus very little standardization was achieved. Contrast this with the situation in France, which had one national electric utility, one equipment manufacturer, and essentially one supporting engineering corporation. The global trend is now moving toward more standardized designs... Small modular reactors might be especially well suited to off-site construction. Because of their small size and relative design simplicity, it is feasible to build modules primarily in a factory setting and then transport the completed modules to the plant site for installation. This would significantly improve construction efficiency and reduce capital costs... In recent years, many nuclear power experts have called for small modular reactors that do not require the same level of active safety systems and strict regulations as previous generations of reactors, given their more simplified designs and passive safety measures. These simplified reactors are also expected to have lower operating and maintenance costs. Due to the higher surface-to-volume ratio for these reactors compared with traditional reactors, many safety provisions for heat removal are unnecessary"
Why America abandoned nuclear power (and what we can learn from South Korea) - " Nuclear construction costs in the US did spiral out of control, especially after the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979. But this wasn't universal. Countries like France, Japan, and Canada kept costs fairly stable during this period. And South Korea actually drove nuclear costs down, at a rate similar to what you see for solar. Studying these countries can offer lessons for how to make nuclear cheaper — so that it can become a useful clean energy resource around the world. "The biggest thing we found is that there's nothing intrinsic to nuclear that leads to cost escalations," Lovering told me. "It depends on what policies are in place, on the market dynamics. You get very different cases in different countries."... In its 1971 Calvert Cliffs decision, the DC Circuit Court ordered nuclear regulators to change their rules to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act. That opened the door for citizen lawsuits to intervene in the licensing and construction process, sometimes causing further slowdowns. Then nuclear suffered a mortal blow after the much-publicized (but nonfatal) meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979. Every reactor still under construction at the time — 51 in total — suddenly faced major regulatory delays, changes in safety procedures, and new back-fit requirements. Construction times doubled, stretching out past 10 years. Costs went through the roof, past $7,000/kW for some reactors... France started making a big push for nuclear power in the 1960s, starting with gas-cooled reactors and pressurized water reactor designs from the US and later, in the 1970s, developing its own PWR designs. As Lovering, Yip, and Nordhaus show, overnight construction costs stayed relatively stable throughout this period, hovering around €1,400/kW ($1,500/kW). Nuclear kept expanding until it provided more than 75 percent of France's electricity. How did France pull this off? It helped that the country had only one utility (EDF) and one builder (Areva) working closely together. They settled on a few standard reactor designs and built them over and over again, often putting multiple reactors on a single site. That allowed them to standardize their processes and get better at finding efficiencies. Canada and Japan kept costs relatively stable with similar tactics. Contrast this with the US, where our electricity sector is split up among dozens of different utilities and state regulators. As a result, US nuclear vendors had to develop dozens of variations on the light-water reactor to satisfy a variety of customers. That pushed up costs. France's regulatory process was also less adversarial than America's — and, for better or worse, doesn't allow legal intervention by outside groups once construction gets underway. After the Soviet Union's Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the government tweaked safety rules, leading to some delays. But costs didn't skyrocket like they did in the US after Three Mile Island... South Korea had an advantage in that it didn't start entirely from scratch. The country imported proven US, French, and Canadian designs in the 1970s and learned from other countries' experiences before developing its own domestic reactors in 1989. It developed stable regulations, had a single utility overseeing construction, and built reactors in pairs at single sites. The results were remarkable: overnight construction costs fell 50 percent between 1971 and 2008 as South Korea built 28 reactors in all. In fact, the Energy Policy paper notes, the decline in South Korean nuclear power costs is comparable to the decline in solar power costs in Germany over the same time period...
1) Stable regulations are essential for nuclear power to thrive.
2) Standardization of design helps.
3) Build multiple reactors at the same site.
4) Smaller reactors may be the way to go."
Many Americans praise the federal system for allowing different states to do things in different ways. But this isn't always good
Regulations Hurt Economics of Nuclear Power - "Besides competition from low-cost natural gas plants and subsidies and state mandates to wind and solar power, regulatory costs are clearly contributing to the premature retirement of nuclear plants in this country... It has taken the NRC an average of 80 months to approve the most recent combined construction and operation licenses. This contrasts to regulatory approval in the United Kingdom, which can be completed in about 54 months. Furthermore, license renewals in the United States take as long as approval for uprates. The uncertainty of being granted a license renewal and the long wait time for a license extension have caused some plants to shut down prematurely rather than wait multiple years. In 2016, a paper in Energy Policy documented the delays and costs of nuclear power generation around the world. The study examined overnight construction costs for nearly every nuclear plant in history. For the United States, costs increased from $650 per kilowatt to around $11,000 per kilowatt. Between 1970 and 1978, overnight construction costs increased by up to 200 percent, or 5 to 15 percent annually. The authors concluded that licensing, regulatory delays, and back-fit requirements were significant contributors to the rising cost trend... In Canada, regulators approved the initial phase of a design review for a molten-salt nuclear power plant—a technology developed decades ago in the United States. Other fourth-generation-reactor companies such as London-based Moltex Energy and Advanced Reactor Concepts of Delaware have opted to pursue early regulatory approval in Canada, rather than the United States."
Nuclear Wasted: Why the Cost of Nuclear Energy is Misunderstood - "Lazard, a leading investment and asset management firm, uses Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) to estimate the average cost of various forms of energy. Lazard found that utility-scale solar and wind is around $40 per megawatt-hour, while nuclear plants average around $175. Because LCOE is often used to argue for renewables and against nuclear (Lovins and Reuters both use LCOE in the articles referenced above), it requires closer examination. Mark Nelson, environmentalist and managing director of Radiant Energy Fund, explains that LCOE was developed as a tool to describe “the cost of energy for power plants of a given nature.” But this tool fails when it attempts to compare the different energy sources needed to provide reliable, 24/7 electricity supply. “[T]he cost and performance of an electricity grid is dominated by the ‘extremes’ and the worst case,” Nelson says. “And what are the extremes? Extreme shortages of supply. Extreme difficulties with combining the right generators at the right time at the right user load.” Nelson uses the following example to illustrate the inability of LCOE to take into account the inadequacy of solar and wind: Imagine you are standing in Manhattan and need to get to London in the most cost-effective way. We would find that swimming is the cheapest! By the cost per mile of swimming, it is far cheaper than building a boat, and the infrastructure needed to use a plane would be very expensive; swimming is clearly the cheapest way to get to London. Furthermore, you can have a reasoned debate with the top experts in ocean-crossing and you can all agree that you’re using the same metric. Of course, none of you have any plans on swimming there. After all, it’s not physically possible. That doesn’t stop the experts from advocating that other people be required by government mandate to swim because it’s cheap. Another factor that cost analyses like levelized cost of energy miss is the energy density of each form of electricity and the subsequent environmental impact of the facilities themselves. A wind facility would require more than 140,000 acres — 170 times the land needed for a nuclear reactor — “to generate the same amount of electricity as a 1,000 megawatt reactor,” according to the Nuclear Energy Institute. The institute notes that while nuclear requires 103 acres per million megawatt-hours, solar needs 3,200 acres, and wind uses up 17,800 acres. Considering the LCOE of new sources also misses the comparatively low cost of existing generation, according to a 2019 report by the Institute for Energy Research. “The average LCOEs for existing coal ($41/megawatt-hour), CC [combined-cycle] gas ($36/MWh), nuclear ($33/MWh) and hydro ($38/MWh) resources are less than half the cost of new wind resources ($90/MWh) or new PV solar resources ($88.7/MWh) with imposed costs included,” the report states. Imposed costs include the need to keep baseload energy like coal or natural gas idling in case the wind or solar are not producing enough energy to meet demand; such costs are often ignored by advocates of wind and solar. Thus, levelized cost of energy misrepresents the cost of solar and wind as too low, puts nuclear energy’s costs as too high, and misses key parts of the picture. However, the cost of nuclear power itself doesn’t need to be as high as it is in the United States. Japanese nuclear power plants only take an average of three to four years to build, from pouring concrete foundation to grid connection. French power plants mostly took between five and eight years to build. American plants used to be built at a similar pace, before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission began to regulate the most minute aspects of construction... The NRC has a 32-step construction licensing process, and many of those steps require approval from other regulatory agencies that impose their own multi-step approval processes. While federal, state and local agencies are legally obligated to draw up their reports within set timeframes, they routinely take significantly longer. For example, the NRC is required by law to create an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) within two years. “However,” as author and nuclear engineer Robert Zubrin notes, “the NRC operates as if without constraint by law and actually takes an average of four years, sometimes as long as six, to write the EIS.”... Given that solar and wind receive almost five times the subsidies that nuclear receives and more than 50 times the subsidies (when considered in terms of dollars of subsidy received per unit of energy produced), the competition is hardly slanted in nuclear’s favor."
Small Nuclear Reactors Get Boost As Western Cities Vote ‘Yes’ - "A consortium of cities in four western U.S. states have voted in favor of moving forward with a plan to build a demonstration small modular reactor (SMR) power plant in Idaho, which if successful, could lead to a six-reactor project coming online by 2030 and providing carbon free power."
Fusion Power is Coming - "why is a tokamak that began operating 35 years ago still the best in the world? Or more broadly, why has the progress developing fusion power been so slow?... the head of the Soviet program, Igor Kurchatov, was better informed about the British program than the Brits themselves were, so much so, that in 1956 he even came to the British Harwell lab to deliver a surprise guest lecture. Without revealing his sources, he then generously explained a mistake that “someone” might make (as the Brits actually were) in measuring the number of fusion reactions occurring within a plasma. (The Soviets apparently wanted the Western controlled fusion programs to succeed, as it would create an energy source they did not have the means to develop themselves.)... This was followed by the wonderful Atoms for Peace conference held in Switzerland in 1958, where the all-male contingent of American fusion researchers had the pleasure of spending many long hours chatting with the vivacious young women of the Soviet translation service, all of whom evidenced an intense interest in experimental and theoretical physics rarely encountered among college girls back home... A breakthrough has happened. Through its dramatic and rapid development of reusable launch rockets, Elon Musk’s SpaceX company demonstrated that it is possible for a well-run lean and creative entrepreneurial organization to achieve things—and do so much faster—that were previously thought to require the efforts of major power governments. This has hit observers of the fusion program like a bolt from the blue. Could it be that the seemingly insurmountable barriers to the achievement of controlled fusion—like the barriers to the attainment of cheap space launch—were not really technical, but institutional? Venturesome investors suddenly became interested."
