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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • In theory, when it’s working, yes it will. Only after being over a decade late and being everal times over budget. They’ll probably keep it going for as long as humanly possible, until the cost of maintaining it is no longer economically feasible. They’ll try to claw back as much of that investment as possible. But as we know with nuclear projects, they never will. It’s why China is betting big on renewables.

    You think nuclear powerplants don’t require parts replacements, maintenance, or shut down over the weather either? France, US, and Finland had to delay the opening of their latest plants because they already had to replace parts before they even started. This isn’t Finland’s first nuclear reactor. Their next one has been cancelled because of the war in Ukraine (Rosatom) The others are being throttled down for maintenance, and it won’t be long until this new one also requires it. As it is, they’re already understaffed.













  • So, you’re going to build a powerplant, that people don’t want to fund, that governments are reluctant to build? You’ll need to create a government agency responsible for the design and planning, another responsible for training new powerplant workers, another one for the decommissioning process, and another for insurance, and another as a safety watchdog, which might come online in a decade if you’re lucky, or closer to two decades if you’re not, only for it to not be as effective as renewables, be a constant drain on taxpayers, not be entirely reliable, and be more expensive as an energy source than renewables. Sure, good luck with that plan. I wish you well garnering political and academic support with that. In the meantime, universities, companies, and governments will generally avoid it like the plague. Unless or course, there’s a nuclear industry that already exists and needs to be subsidised, or a military nuclear requirement to keep the talent and designs ongoing.

    You’re deliberately going to build nuclear, ignore studies telling you that renewables decarbonise faster. Because you want to decarbonise. Only for your personal opinions, backed by the fossils and mining industry? You’re going to give the fossil industry a lot of money over the first 10 years of absolutely nothing happening.

    I will add, the election promises the conservative Swedes have made seem to have disappeared. How convenient.



  • Sweden was a bit of an outlier though. Most younger Swedes live alone. And they tend to follow government advisories. New Zealand’s strategy was stellar, particularly early on in the pandemic. You could do what you want. I remember we were out having concerts as if there was no pandemic, thanks to the zero COVID strategy. But by late-Delta, early-Omicron, zero COVID could not longer be sustained, and it was clear only mitigations would stick. The government hoped to eliminate it like they did the other times, but it was just impossible then, people had become complacent. But yes, on the healthcare-side and economic-side, NZ fared better than Sweden.