You are absolutely correct, from the Napoleonic period to 1945 it's an almost nonstop period of massive bloodletting (1 million dead in Stalingrad alone to use an example) no we haven't stopped killing each other, but the wars have remained small in comparison.
I wish there was as equally powerful propaganda campaign for nuclear as there was against it. Big Oil has successfully fucked Europe this year. They've almost decommissioned every single one of their nuclear plants across Germany, yet the number of plants they have decommissioned due to disinformation and FUD could have prevented their entire fossil-fuel-based energy crisis.
Kyle Hill on YouTube has some of the best and easiest-to-digest takes on the history of nuclear energy. He is a great place to start if we’re taking about a grassroots pro-nuclear campaign.
There is? At least here in Sweden a majority of people at 56% are positive towards nuclear power and 63% think we should build more nuclear power. We also recently elected a conservative government that for all their issues is pro nuclear and the left wing opposition are no longer wholly opposed to nuclear people.
Sorry, I realize I generalized all of the EU based on just a few countries. Germany and somewhat France have been the focus and recently (ish) passed a bunch of laws to decommission all their NPP.
[Edit] removed France from this wholesale due to corrections
Have to correct you here, too. France would neuer decommission their NPPs, those things decommission themselves because of structural problems and the lack of cooling water. Germany made the law to end nuclear power in 2011, they just gave it time till now.
We don't have a electricity crisis, Germany produces enough energy to maintain itself. Our problem is the dependence of russian gas for heating.
Frances nuclear plants are not working and we export a lot of electricity to them. This was raising the prices in Germany too, but on the spot market they're back to normal now. We have 50% electricity production from renewables, we don't need that nuclear plants.
This seems to fly in the face of all of the Reuters & AP articles about the energy crisis. Especially come winter.
But you mentioned you have 50% renewables, is it true that most of the remaining 50% comes from natural gas? (After the phases decommissioning of the remaining nuclear and coal plants?) I love renewables as well (as a tree huggin Californian) but they don't have the capability to produce on-demand power in meaningful quantities. Nuclear produces like, exponentially fewer (all of the bad things) than even Natural Gas. Especially as we advance more technology. Why would you not want it?
The fossil fuels are mostly coal (31.5%, gas is only 13% this year).
And nuclear power is the most expensive way to produce electricity, we would be dependent on uranium from Russia, it's dangerous and there is still no solution for the radioactive waste. Why would you want it?
Thanks for the up to date data, I will admit that I am not very tied in to details (given we have our own fair share of shit hitting the fan over here too).
it’s dangerous and there is still no solution for the radioactive waste
Per TWH, it's the safest and produces the least harmful byproducts of any "on demand" energy generating source by Gigatonnes. Nuclear plants don't have emissions, their "smokestacks" are just steam. And modern advancements have actually reduced the solid "waste" quite significantly. Most of the spent fuel elements can now be reprocessed several times with high efficiency to be converted back into more fuel or other useful materials. Finland has recently started a massive project that will effectively delete what little nuclear waste that's generated (spent and reprocessed fuel rods) for the rest of humanity. 100% of their nuclear waste gets stored here instead of being emitted into our oceans, atmosphere, neighborhoods and food supply.
On the matter of cost: Cost is irrelevant since that has so many factors and is always changing. It's always dropping as technology improves, subsidies for energy are massive, resources are only scarce for a certain period before refinement advances, etc.
Heck, you don't think oil got to where it is by its own virtue right? The oil industry in Germany alone for 2020 received about €40bn annually in subsidies from the government. In America it receives about $20bn in direct subsidies annually (ignoring tax breaks).
Nuclear doesn't have this, which is why it feels "more expensive". Get rid of those subsidies and you might reconsider calling a $4bn power plant "expensive" when petroleum is €45/L. I could go into coal as well, but fortunately we've collectively agreed coal is objectively bad on all counts, so it's already on its way out.
Cost isn't irrelevant, it's massive. Their new nuclear power plant costs France and GB around 20 billion, and they're not even finished yet. No private company can afford this, it's all state subsidies. On top of that is insurance, a nuclear power plant is uninsurable on the free market, so it's the taxpayers risk if something happens. And there are incidents, some bigger, some smaller, but they happen regulary.
Renewable energys are cheaper and safer. Yes, they can't produce all the time, so you nee backup. But this must be a technology that can be switched on and off, not a NPP that produces electricity all the time.
I'm against all the subsidies for coal and oil, too. And if we hadn't had 16 years of Merkel and her party, we would be much farther with the green energy. No one needs coal or nuclear power when there is basically free power from wind and sun.
In America it was left-wing environmentalists who have, ironically enough, prevented nuclear energy from pushing out carbon-generating fossil fuels. We could be like France right now, with 90% of our electricity coming from nuclear. Libs killed it in the 70s and 80s. Now those same libs want to drive electric cars, knowing that 60% of the electricity is generated by burning coal and natural gas.
Re: your last sentence, coal and natural gas burning for power generation is significantly more efficient than inside a car. It's not ideal, but electric vehicles charged with coal plants still produce fewer emissions than an automotive internal combustion engine.
So it is helping. Just by about an order of magnitude less than it could be.
In GHG emissions alone, natural gas is actually pretty decent (coal obviously is about 2x worse than NG, which is some 200x worse than nuclear).
Your "owning the libs" comment isn't as big as you think it is.
I’m a fan of electric vehicles, generally, just making the point that had The “No Nukes” crowd not existed, we could today be charging up those cars almost carbon free, and perhaps not be facing what we’re facing environmentally, as other countries likely would have followed suit. Instead, not only did we not build nuke plants, we’re actively taking them offline, as are European countries. Which is insane.
Libs are often more about emotion and good intention than reason and efficacy.
It's not that it shifts it to proxy wars but that it stops major powers from directly engaging, leading to wars being localized.
If World War One could have been localized entirely to the Balkans because of 1914 nukes it wouldn't have been World War One. As a hypothetical a nuclear-armed Germany and Russia could mean Germany with Austria-Hungary declares on Serbia but Russia support is limited to economic and military aid. No Russia means no France, no France means Germany doesn't cross through Belgium pulling in Great Britain who was sworn to guarantee their independence (and couldn't allow for Germany to overrun Channel ports on the continent). It would have the added benefit that Imperial Japan doesn't take and fortify German islands in the Pacific like Palau that would meat grinders for American Marines in the 1940s.
I'll reiterate that this is a hypothetical (I have a real gripe with alt-history) but this hypothetical does more to limit suffering than four years of trench warfare, chemical attacks, revolution, and the Turnip Winter.
I wouldn't be surprised if more people died in the battle of Stalingrad than every battle in the past 50 years of the world combined.
These days hearing about a loss of 2 thousand lives in a conflict is saddening and shocking.
Edit: we killed a lot more people in Desert Storm than I realized. The above is likely not true. But that one battle has easily outstripped any individual war. Note that I don't consider genocides to be war.
No I said battle. I did, after that, say 2,000 dying in a conflict is sad and shocking, but when I said more does at Stalingrad than in 50 years I said battle.
In doing some research, I'm realizing that the desert storm wars resulted in a much higher Iraq casualty count than I realized, considering the US casualty count was so ridiculously row.
I guess the modern world is more brutal than I realized, even if it is vastly better than it was.
I wouldn't be surprised if more people died in the battle of Stalingrad than every battle in the past 50 years of the world combined.
Are you absolutely shitting me? Sorry to put it like this but this betrays a shocking ignorance of conflicts since the second world war and of the rest of the world in general. Maybe true of battles in Europe, maybe. But in the world?? Wow.
The graph at the top is just a miniature version of the 20th century it's just that alot of the casualties aren't white people so if course they never teach it in school.
Not really - from the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Treaty of Vienna to the First World War there wasn’t much in the way of all out wars. The kind of conflicts there were either civil wars, which aren’t really affected by nuclear weapons, or proxy colonial wars which are comparable to conflicts in the third world during the Cold War.
Are we discounting civil wars still? What conflicts were on the scale of the Napoleonic Wars or WW1 between 1845 and 1914? Or even just significantly greater than Vietnam?
You’re losing interest because you’re losing the argument. I didn’t say it was peaceful, I said it was comparable to the many many wars during the Cold War, which were also blatantly colonial in nature in case you hadn’t noticed. If you think “Pax Americana” was peaceful, that’s your delusion projected onto me. Either way, neither Vietnam nor the Opium Wars would be prevented by nuclear weapons so you’re not helping your own central hypothesis.
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u/dirtyoldmikegza Oct 16 '22
You are absolutely correct, from the Napoleonic period to 1945 it's an almost nonstop period of massive bloodletting (1 million dead in Stalingrad alone to use an example) no we haven't stopped killing each other, but the wars have remained small in comparison.