Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "DW Planet A"
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Great piece!
The way societies and politics are set now, it's pretty predictable what will happen to this site, and several others spread around the world in many nations that face similar or even worse situations.
It'll stay there until it starts leaking, at which point people will be evacuated and left without their homes, they family history, their places of origin.
And it'll happen this way because of what this piece has shown - even in modern affluent developed nations, the problem is that you get a string of politicians promising to take care of the problem, but never delivering it because it's too costly, and too controversial to touch once they are in power. It's a system set for failure, as is many other large scale costly problems that several nations face.
So you can only let things get to a point when the problem becomes impossible to ignore. And then it's reaction and remediation, rather than prevention.
You can find many parallels to this - including the one thing that might exacerbate this very issue - Climate Change.
The way out systems of governance, justice, politics and whatnot works right now, in several modern democratic nations, points out clearly to the inevitability of letting things escalate to ultimate consequences so immediate measures are needed.
This is particularly true for public infrastructure failure.
So, and I'm very sorry to say this for the poor people who will be directly affected by this, the most likely scenario for places like that in most nations, is that they mostly depend on luck for living in those neighborhoods, and even entire cities.
At some point in the future, the inevitable will happen - radioactive material will leak on water table and contaminate the environment, a large area around it will be deemed unlivable, and then people will be left to scramble to save themselves. That's if the country is in good government hands, depending on who is elected people might not even get any warnings and just find out what happened when it's already too late.
And then this zone could be chosen as a dump site, if well contained, because what else could you do there?
This is the whole story of places where radioactive waste, toxic trash, and dangerous stuff ends up in.
People encroach on it because they don't know, or because they ignored the warnings, and then generations later others will be paying for it.
Problem here is that governments, even when they are competent enough to understand the size of the problem, won't touch the thing with a 10 foot pole because it is bound to make them unpopular one way or another. If they spend the money to do it, this will have an economic impact to the nation as a whole, and people unsympathetic to the problem will complain. If they say they won't do anything, then it's the electorate worried with the problem that will attack them. It's a loss no matter how you see it. So they will knowingly or not, try to ignore it as much as possible.
And unfortunately, for all the good that the principle of alternance in power can have in funcional democracies, one of inevitable consequences is exactly the type of short term thinking that stops politicians from looking at problems for the long term.
Even if we pick Germany itself, there is a contradictory move right there that shows this. And it is directly related to the topic of this very video. You see, despite this very case serving as food for anti-nuclear power types to say that we cannot safely use nuclear power for energy production, the anti-nuclear movement and how it convinced Germany's government to shut down nuclear power plants operations, turning to Russia gas production instead, is partially behind the whole crisis that the country is facing now. So, premeditated reaction based policies that are fueled by FUD will often end in a worsening situation. Which in turn gives and excuse for government to be slow to take action. Which also only worsens the situation.
This whole system is why I'm making the prediction that I did. It can sound a bit alarmist and radical, but there are reasons why I think it's gonna go that way.
What the people in that town, the site itself, or people vouching for a rational solution need is kind of a kamikaze politician committed to solving the problem no matter what even if it costs him his career, his life and everything else. In other words - a radical. That is very much unlikely to ever be elected. Because this is a problem that the majority of people in the country can continue living their lives ignoring, turning their backs to, and living their everyday lives not really worried about it - until the worse happens. Just like Climate Change.
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I've been following news about molten salt thorium reactors for... well over a decade now if I'm not mistaken, my conclusion on it is that it just sits in an awkward middle ground that no one wants to fully dive in and put a ton of money into because of that.
So, evangelists and most pieces about it will always start saying how much cleaner, safer and generally better it is in comparison to traditional existing nuclear power plants, plus add the fact that we already had past research on it, and then comes the argument about it not being viable at the time because nuclear weapons and whatnot... good job questioning this DW.
Problem though, like that video already puts, those tests runs are still a long way away from proving it's viable at scale. That's what you really have to consider - this design is still one step behind proving it can produce results at scale reliably. Lots of evangelists say that we will eventually get there if just more money and time is put into research, but there is no way to know this for sure, so you have one risk point there.
Ok, now you should also consider that usually, the comparisons being made are sneaky... they often compare what the promises of one were, to early designs of what we got, or current designs, particularly the ones that failed spectacularly through history.
What the theoretical non-proven molten salt reactor design is rarely compare to are modern nuclear power plant designs that are an evolution of plants like Chernobyl, 3 Mile Island, and Fukushima Daichi. The principles are the same, sure, but the designs and tech used to build those also evolved over the years, and they would make for cleaner, safer and better plants too. And not only they already exist, the tech has been already thoroughly tested and proven to work.
See, the stat that is often left out of these talks is that the world currently has over 400 nuclear power plants in operation, some other 50+ in construction. Not knowing this and only paying attention to Chernobyl, Fukushima Daiichi and 3-mile Island is misleading. Yes, it's super scary when these major accidents happen, and there is an argument to be made about societies always being fallible, always having the potential to fall to corruption, and thus these nuclear power plants always being just a step away from a major catastrophe... I understand that.
But it is also true that new power plant designs limits damage, that only a very small portion of old designs had catastrophes, and that it was mostly due to a long chain of human errors and mishandling, not even because of faulty designs.
Chernobyl everyone knows how corrupt and flawed the entire handling of the operation was now that we have a documentary about it and lots of people who covered the subject.... sometime from now, you can bet the same thing will be done for Fukushima Daiichi. There was a long chain of corruption, mishandling, and problems there too, even more poignant than Chernobyl. Because despite lots of people thinking it was inevitable due to the unprecedented earthquake and ensuing tsunami, it actually wasn't, that scenario had been predicted 10 years prior, independent inspectors and regulators had warning both the government and the company behind the power plant repeatedly over the years that a small change would prevent disaster in such a scenario (moving backup power to higher ground), and because all those warnings were ignored that the disaster happened. So we once again had bad design, and a chain of corruption and mismanagement contributing to a disaster that was very much avoidable.
The other side of consideration is that because molten salt thorium reactors is unproven and requires more research, there is no way to know for sure how much it would cost to build such plants once there is enough solid theoretical grounds for it - but it is often theorized that they will be more expensive than current tech because of several of it's characteristics.
You kinda end up in this middleground where you could simply build new plants with improved designs and tech today to offset dirty energy, and then the other end being to wait for nuclear fusion tech to mature and become viable, which is even further away, way further than Thorium would be. But we only have a finite amount of resources to put on it, so we have to chose the battles.
One way or another, neither Thorium not Fusion are in developed enough stages to be used to fight Climate Change. If anyone is waiting for those to solve our problems, stop waiting. Both are too far away from production at scale. And if we don't do a whole ton of other things to reduce greenhouse gases, we might not have a future to keep researching those technologies. Our future without catastrophic Climate Change scenario depends on other things. Molten Salt Thorium Reactors might play a part of a future that we have already controlled Climate Change and are seeking to ramp up cleaner forms of power generation, but for Climate Change itself we need to use what we have at our disposal now.
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Too much handwaving of problems and apparently trying to ignore real problems presented to put a sheen of miracle cure on this thing there, even if the video repeats several times that there are problems with it....
See, India's problem with burning stubbles has everything to do with costs. You can't present biochar as a solution if no one is offering to take all that stubble away to transform into biochar. And if you will pay for the extra cost of taking all that stubble out, it's not like biochar is the only solution to recycle it.
Furthermore, it seems to me that the very complex very self contained plant is expensive and huge for a reason... if you are going to make "portable" biochar conversion plants and it's gonna leak all the CO2 out anyways because it's not airtight and not well controlled, then it's not doing the proposed job in the first place, is it?
Is that really producing biochar, or just charcoal with some carbon capture? If those portable things are doing the job properly, why do you need a huge million dollar plant to do the same?
This is key about the tech. I'm already seeing a whole lot of people commenting that they already do this on their own, but I highly doubt it's the biochar that is shown in the piece. Like explained, for it to be actual biochar as demonstrated it needs to be burned at high temperatures in a low to no oxygen environment. Sounds to me that there are diminishing returns if you can't control temperature and take oxygen out properly.
And then, of course, in order to create and maintain a proper environment to do this correctly, it costs a lot of money.
You end up with a hydrogen as fuel conundrum. Meaning it can be done, but because of costs of doing in a "green" way, it ends up not being feasible. Most hydrogen fuel produced these days is done via a polluting process, so it ends up not counting as green energy in the long run. You have the possibility of doing it using solar panels and green energy, but it's not cost effective for now. In the sense that, if you are going to install solar panels to get hydrogen fuel from electrolysis, it's just better to take that power and put it into the grid instead.
In any case, it should be a subject of research because of possibilities of a breakthrough or something, but for now, current tech doesn't look like it can scale while keeping it's carbon negative characteristics.
It indeed is a super interesting material with lots of potential applications, but we'll have to see where research goes on this, and specially if it really will result in something that can scale up. We have tons upon tons of promising tech to address Climate Change and to replace dirty, toxic, dangerous or highly polluting industrial processes, but going from lab to scale is always a huge obstacle.
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If the world hadn't been so cheap in helping nations in the African country to power up and have it's essential infrastructure propped up for the modern era in poor nations, we might not even need to have this conversation... solar farms could be built in deserts, and it'd have enough excess to export to several other nations.
The crazy amounts of money spent on sh*t and stupid cr*p no one needs would be more than enough to have all these infrastructure interconnects at least started up to a reasonable degree.
And it's exactly those types of projects that can bring jobs, better the lives of people, and level the playing field better in terms of geopolitics and whatnot.
In the end, it just seems we won't be able to change our ways in time for major problems to happen. We'll likely have more than a few wars, genocides, and major humanitarian issues directly related to Climate Change, fossil fuels usage, and stuff like that, until we really have enough interconnected power, water and whatnot with backups that we'll truly need moving forward.
Until then, it's more of the same. The rich won't suffer because they'll be able to build backup for themselves alone. The poor will remain dependent on unreliable infrastructure with no backup - if any at all.
I mean, it's already happening, you all know this. How many videos of YouTubers making their own grid independent solar power local system you've already seen out there? This all might look cool and interesting from a tech perspective, that someone with enough money can create a grid free backup nowadays, but if you look at this from a different perspective, it means yet another divide that privileges the very few. It's yet another individualistic privilege based phenomena that takes power away from communities, collective, and those who cannot afford such projects. If I have guaranteed backup power to myself, I have less reason to demand a strong collective infrastructure from representatives, power companies and governments. Doesn't matter if the national or state level grid is crumbling and failing, I always have my backup to prop it up, so it's less of an issue.
Anyways, back to the video. I agree. A global super grid is an almost inevitability that needs to happen sometime in the future. Which will become more and more pressing over the years, I'll add. We should have started this a long time ago, but we likely won't seriously start considering the whole thing until major catastrophes start happening.
It is just a component part of the challenges that Climate Change will bring.
The question is if we'll be able to unify and work on those challenges while also dealing with all the problems that Climate Change will bring. And on that part, I'm not too sure. We're still on the global late-stage capitalism era with small percentages of the population having the most resources and power, and that model is fundamentally incompatible with the politics and diplomacy necessary for something like a global grid, or Climate Change reversal super projects. So it comes down to maintaining the status quo and going extinct (or losing huge portions of the global population), or changing directions to have a fighting chance.
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