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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • They were actually designed to be very safe. It was thought that they literally couldn’t fail dangerously. Chernobyl was a huge fluke (that had preventions put in place to ensure it never happened again) that was just a lot of weird things combining at once. The other reactors at Chernobyl continued operating for decades safely, similarly to three mile island which only stopped on 2019 because it wasn’t profitable, but now it appears it is again. Both of these nations (and child nations/successors) continued to operate many more nuclear plants without issues. Nuclear is, by far, the safest energy source, including green energy like solar.


  • No, that’s only because the US has constructed barriers to make it cost more and take longer, to protect conventional dirty energy. Those barriers do not need to be as large. A new reactor being built would take several years, and they don’t want to wait for that. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be profitable, although again the barriers may make it unprofitable or at least a riskier investment.

    Edit: also, they aren’t buying this reactor. They are not in the energy business. They’re buying 100% of the output of unit 1. That’s all. The previous owners are still running it. It stopped temporarily in 2019 because Methane undercut it, because Methane does not have to pay for its pollution like nuclear does.






  • That’s not a silly argument if your argument is about national security. For the exact same reason, China blocks almost all western apps. It gives a potential route for whatever nation is considered hostile to influence your population, and TikTok has actually activated this influence at least once directly. They tried to activate their users to protest congress from passing laws restricting them.

    Basically, they have the ability to influence users, and they also have the will to do so as they’ve already shown. In what world eould they not be a national security threat? It’s also really hard for me to accept this argument from a Chinese company when China has the great firewall to “protect” it’d citizens from outside influence.

    You can argue that it is not to benefit the citizens and rather just the state, which is fair. You can’t reasonably argue that the state has nothing to fear.