World News
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
view the rest of the comments
The thing is that things are evolving incredibly fast in this space. Renewables have gone from being more expensive than the alternatives to being the cheapest option by a large margin in the span of a decade, and prices are still plummeting. This trend can be observed for both renewables (solar/wind) and different storage technologies. The reason we're not seeing them online at a large scale yet is that they've quite simply just recently become economical to do so. Nuclear does very much not have this property - it trends towards being more expensive over time. Given how long these projects take to build, it's not out of the question that they will have to shut down on account of being just way too expensive in comparison once the projects are finished.
I generally agree with this - any private actor that wants to build nuclear completely on their own dime and at their own risk should be able to do so. The problem is that this is not what's happening - these companies often get government funding for these initiatives, which displace investments that could otherwise be going to other more viable solutions.
Take Sweden for example, where the right wing government campaigned on renewables being too woke and that nuclear is the only option. The way they are making nuclear happen is by guaranteeing financing at favourable terms, plus offering guaranteed pricing of the output electricity for these plants. This is going to be massively expensive for tax payers, and is actively making it so that other renewables are not getting built.
Since nuclear takes so much time to build out and is so unviable from a financial perspective, it's also used as an excuse by fossil fuel interests, that get to stay in business comparatively longer in a scenario where the world tries to pursue nuclear vs where the world pursues renewables.
This is why nuclear support should generally be met with skepsis.
I don’t think we have the time to wait on and expect breakthroughs anymore. A decade ago, sure, but if we end up having major issues with storage and don’t make those breakthroughs 10 years from now, and we start building nuclear plants then, we’re in for an even worse timeline.
Re: government support, sure. If this is a zero sum game and we have to choose one or the other, I’ll probably go renewable. From what I’ve seen, the zero sum mentality itself is the conservative trap. They keep us fighting against each other when we could just say “do both”.
When the IRA passed in the states, there was some amount of funding for nukes. Not a ton, but some. Yet there was skepticism of that, there were calls on the left to defund that among circles I frequented. Why? The support for nukes was much less than renewables and storage, and like an order of magnitude less. It was a hedge - keep investing in alternatives to renewables in case they don’t work out, because we don’t have a crystal ball. So why be divided on this?
The trap isn’t nuclear. It’s division and scarcity thinking. It’s zero-sum politics.
We aren't waiting for storage breakthroughs though. The current technology is good enough, cheap enough, and faster to build. And meeting the reaction times needed to use renewables correctly.
My understanding is that this is not the case for providing baseload to entire cities, and it’s unlikely to be the case as we increase energy usage (which has been spiking again, thanks to crypto and AI among other things). With current battery tech it would require massive amounts of lithium that would have far greater environmental impact, and still not really cover all needs. And other mechanisms, like stored energy (pumping water, spinning disks)are more theoretical.
I think I would be much more open to the argument once we have a full modern city converted at least partially to 80-90% renewables, with emergency services and other core infrastructure running off of storage instead of existing power plants. If we get there, then I’d probably stop saying we should invest in nuclear in parallel.
And to be clear, we should get there, if possible. We should push forward full throttle, because all of that innovation would be incredible, and I don’t want us to rely solely on one power source at all, be that renewables, nuclear, or whatever else. A smart strategy is have backups, which is why I think we should do both.
I agree with the end statement. We should be doing anything we can to reduce fossil fuels.
We need to think beyond lithium for grid storage. Lithium is great where space is limited as in a house or something similar. There will be multiple technologies that will provide storage on the grid.
I think the bigger problem for nuclear is reaction time. You need plants that can react quickly to compliment renewables. Storage is handling a lot of this but I don't know if nuclear could. It is my understanding that base load isn't really a thing.
Nuclear is cool. Has its pros and cons. I don't know if we should be pushing it so hard. It's too expensive, takes too long to build, and the decommissioning of a plant takes decades. I just don't see the future for it.
Hmm, I think of baseload as the following:
Some of these can be mitigated significantly, but some of these are just things that really can never be down and have to have like 99.999% reliability. As we electrify, I’m going to be looking at storage solutions for these things and seeing if we really feel confident in that up time and having extra reserves. Engineers usually over design, so if we expect to need like 0.1 gigawatts for a week for emergency services during an abnormal weather event, I would want to plan for 1 gigawatt for two weeks for instance.
If that can be done with storage, then that’s awesome, and once we start seeing that roll out widely I will stop advocating for the “do both” strategy.