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RatifyGuy1776 wrote (edited )

My understanding is that nuke plants don't have to be ecocide. The ones we have are bad on purpose because the empire builds them, and the empire derives its power from the petrodollar. Alternatives to burning stuff always have to be worse as a matter of "defense" policy.

They don't even need to come with massive hierarchy; in addition to being much cleaner (virtually no waste compared to existing power plants) and safer (overheating makes the fuel drop completely out of the reaction chamber) than anything we're doing right now, thorium reactors can be much, much smaller. We might one day have a little one in every basement, or a bigger one that powers a block. At that point, rather than being huge public works, the main "hierarchical load" of the technology is just that from mining the materials. I know you don't really want that, either, but good luck on getting humans to stop digging holes, tbh.

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ziq OP wrote

theoretical technology that doesn't exist doesn't make nuclear power non-ecocidal. if all the nuclear power that exists in the world is functionally ecocidal, it's not incorrect to state that nuclear power is ecocidal. speculative science fiction isn't really relevant here

it's also not 'safer' when you consider the much wider implications of a nuclear meltdown on the environment than e.g. a solar farm, like the meltdown in Japan just a few years ago, and the fact that the supposed safety is wholly dependent on status quo geopolitics (look how dangerous the situation is in Ukraine when that's no longer the case), an economically healthy state (or safety precautions and waste disposal stops being a priority) and continued geological stability (which would be incredibly foolish considering the massive changes wrought to the ecosystem by climate change).

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RatifyGuy1776 wrote

The technology does exist. It's not being built essentially because it doesn't justify the state's present scale.

The implications of a nuclear meltdown in a thorium reactor are "the plant stops reacting." These designs fundamentally cannot run away from the operator, because thorium won't do the thing on its own. When you remove it from the tiny little piece of plutonium that activates it, it stops.

To the best of my knowledge, this isn't just not science fiction, the designs are stupidly simple. These things haven't been built solely because electrical power generation is currently synonymous with political power generation. It's a suppressed technology, not a fictional one.

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