Comment by qqtt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qqtt | Hacker News Reader

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The discussion and debate about nuclear energy needs to be a constant war of attrition against the long held and stubborn inertia of anti-nuclear sentiment.

This letter signed by 25 "intellectuals" (oddly vague name for writers and journalists) is part of the puzzle insofar as it gets the discussion into the news. But unless there is a sustained conversation which carries the attention of the public and really drives and beats back the misinformation back to the shadows, nothing will change.

The same tired anti-nuclear talking points need to be systemically deconstructed and refuted over and over again until it is pushed into being a fringe belief.

Unfortunately humans are really not set up to have these conversations about "boring" things like global warming and nuclear energy. Unless there is a crisis front and center (like the pandemic) it is hard to reverberate change throughout society.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but watching all this play out is like witnessing a devastating car crash happen in slow motion, and being helpless to do anything to prevent it.

The Cold War takes a lot of the blame: everything from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, to the subsequent ugly arms race, to bomb testing and its environmental effects. Plus events like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Generation X kids were born into an era which felt the threat of global nuclear war, and those people are decision makers today.

Frankly, non-nuclear is austerity in disguise. "Too cheap to meter" electricity is like full employment, objectively better but a huge target politically. It's not a coincidence that US gave up on both at the same time.

https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf does justice to the full employment situation, and the same arguments apply. In the econ case it's kind of incredible we filled our minds with nonsense to convince ourselves the thing we had been doing is no longer possible. I suppose the nuclear hysteria served the same roll.

To be clear, I am not trying to argue some sort of conspiracy here. I think it all happened organically, which is frankly even more fascinating. Shows that "truth is endogenous" and the post-modernists had a point long before people whined about Trump.

I agree with you on both points of full employment and abundant energy.

And IMO the same political forces are behind both -- it's a nasty mix of elites and high income professionals who genuinely believe people need to suffer. They love austerity, and micromanagement of the population. It's the same reason we have ugly architecture, because the architects think we deserve to be surrounded by ugly, inhuman buildings.

And the econ-sadists are more than happy to punish the eco-masochists.

> ugly architecture

An interesting one to bring up. There is a cultural dimension, but also the fact the modern architecture is much less labor intensive even though it will break down.

Generally I like such a response to labor shortages, but clearly we've gone wrong. Perhaps we just need to value key buildings more, based on a long lifespan, and just admit they will be crawling with craftsman to a large degree?

Or, we can get more serious about improving construction productivity to make it less 0-sum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchyovka are pretty ugly, but might nonetheless have a better "beauty * efficiency" score than much more prestigious modern architecture?

This isn't just an issue about things not being handmade. The ornate victorians with lots of flourishes were actually assembled from mass produced pieces. This is about architects intentionally turning away from beauty, because they believe the world is ugly, and their architecture needs to show this 'truth'.

Check out the famous debate between Christopher Alexander (traditionalist) and Peter Eisenman (modernist) in 1982. They were discussing a modernist arcade by Moneo, pictured here:

http://forum.woodenboat.com/showthread.php?228787-quot-A-Pat...

Moneo's arcade is intentionally designed to be uncomfortable. It does not provide any shade. It does not protect well from the rain. It is not human scale. It draws attention to itself. It is intentionally jarring and unpleasant.

In short, it does not fulfill the traditional role of an arcade, which is as a shaded, quiet place from which to enjoy a garden or public place.

You can read the debate here: http://www.katarxis3.com/Alexander_Eisenman_Debate.htm

Eisenman basically points out that we no longer believe the "old cosmology" and it's time for a "new" cosmology, one which tries to "invert" or find the "negative" values of the old cosmology. That the world is filled with anxiety and disharmony and so architecture, to be "truthful", should reflect that ugliness. These are intentional design elements to make things unpleasant. It has nothing to do with labor costs or expense. Modernist buildings are not cheap, and when you take into account that most of them are disposable and have huge maintenance costs (due to being made of concrete rather than brick, and not taking into account those old fashioned things like putting eaves on windows to limit water damage). In other words, there is real sadism here. Intentional unpleasantness. A desire to inflict punishment on the masses.

There is a nice write up here: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contempo...

Now compare this to the medieval cathedral. Only a fool would think that modern life is more unpleasant than medieval life. But they built aspirational buildings to capture the beauty of the divine. We make buildings to capture our longing for self-annihilation. We are surrounded by life and long for death. They were surrounded by death and celebrated life.

Yeah the Current Affairs one is one I read before.

I guess having spent a lot of time with "western art music", I've seen what happens when people tried to transcend culture over the last 100 years in what is ultimately a culturally-specific practice. With music, people have other choices, with buildings the effective monopoly is quite something.

The forum post doesn't really render right for me, but I'll check out the others, thanks.

> "Too cheap to meter" electricity

How about electricity that doesn't flow through a meter because it goes from the roof into the socket?

I do like solar on roofs more than huge solar farms.

Might as well take better advantage of the land we already annihilated. But taking out a bunch more is iffy.

With rising temperature it might be a good idea to put solar on metal trusses over fields and annihilate almost no land. Helps with soil erosion, hail and saves irrigation.

Why invest into something that will only last 100 years in fuel, take 30k years to deconstruct and may blow into your face at every point in time. Sounds insane.

Nuclear reactors cannot explode. It is not physically possible. It isn't even close to physically possible. Reactor-grade uranium is about 5% U235 while you need >90% to make something that can explode.

May as well ask why we use wind turbines when they might take off and start dropping napalm.

> Nuclear reactors cannot explode. It is not physically possible. It isn't even close to physically possible.

They can and they do (see: Chernobyl, Fukushima). But it's not a nuclear explosion (as you say, it's not possible with their fuel enrichment and geometry); it's a steam or hydrogen explosion.

Lots of things can go wrong and I certainly don't intend to downplay the risks. Mismanagement like at Fukushima or Chernobyl can do a lot of harm.

But there are a lot of people who think a nuclear reactor can level a city, which is totally impossible.

Can you provide more info around nuclear fuel running out in 100 years? I had been thinking we had an abundance of nuclear fuel available tIo us. I have not heard of a 100 year limit before and am interested to learn more.

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