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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.






  • I’m pretty sure the meaning isn’t that you aren’t allowed to turn an ordinary item into a weapon. It’s that you can weaponize ordinary items. If you make a pipe bomb, for example, it’s pretty obviously a bomb now, and not an ordinary pipe. Basically, making it so people have to fear using ordinary items is what we typically call terrorism.

    I don’t like that word, because it’s usually just used as a weapon against less conventional forces by states with more power, meanwhile the states typically still use fear to enforce a political agenda. In this case it’s unarguably the bad kind of terrorism, and they should be held responsible for it.