I know what this looks like, the government wants to make sure you read its narrative on everything first.

And I'm sure it will be abused for that.

But there is actually another, more genuine, reason for wanting it. We have a huge problem with misinformation in the UK. Much of it coming from Russia, and the far right, and grifters. It's actually quite lucrative, and devastatingly effective.

It's 10 years since the Brexit vote today. The amount of misinformation is hard to comprehend. Even today, people still believe those lies. Even back then, we were decades into debunking some of them. One of the biggest liars, Boris Johnson, transitioned from publishing lies in newspapers to telling lies as Prime Minister. Misinformation became the most effective political strategy.

This probably isn't the right way to go about it, but I also find it hard to believe that e.g. Facebook can't label Russia trolls easily enough. Whenever information leaks from those sites, the fake Russian accounts are very easy to spot. Twitter had to remove their public location information because as soon as they enabled it everyone noticed that many of the top accounts were Russian, pretending to be European or American.

Accounting for risk just means they looked at the design and decided that the probability of a meltdown was low, which incidentally is exactly what the Soviets did. Even assuming that their evaluation was correct and we get lucky and none of the failure modes they found actually happen, there is also a chance that it wasn't built exactly to spec and that causes problems.

Molten salt is a bad idea. Liquid sodium ignites on contact with air, so if there is any small leak you have a really nasty fire. The ones in China are tiny research reactors.

Politicians seem to like nuclear. Lots of public money for their pals, and it takes so long they will be long gone by the time it gets delayed and costs overrun.

Hopefully Slashdot will be around in 14 years time, and if it is I will eat my metaphorical hat if they have 10 new reactors online and actually producing useful amounts of energy for the grid.

So when the job market collapse is the tax base collapses with it.

That means you can no longer afford police.

It also means that in a country with more guns than people you have millions of people with nothing to lose and no police to keep them in line.

I know a lot of right wingers who are looking forward to this because they think that means they get to shoot people.

So here's the thing yeah maybe you get to shoot the first punk who tries to break in and raid your fridge.

What about the next punk? And one after that? By the 5th or sixth one they get around off and it hits you in the shoulder. You can't hold your rifle anymore. You switch to a pistol but you're not as good with that. The next one gets your wife because of it maybe one of your kids or your dog. Now you're alone and five or six of them show up this time and gun you down.

The baby boomers don't mind this because they're old and they have nothing left to live for so they think it sounds cool to go out guns blazing. In reality you're lying there with a slug in your gut slowly bleeding out but you don't think about that until it's happening.

Meanwhile civilization has collapsed in your 401k has been stolen by a trillionaire so you're living off cat food.

And you made it a point to think about absolutely none of this. Because you've seen way too many Clint Eastwood movies

You need to come up with an answer to that and you need to do it fast. Nobody likes having "their" money taken from them and given to somebody else. We just had a thread about a California billionaire tax and half the comments were people convinced that if we tax billionaires a few percentage points than the next step is to take their fucking houses... That's not an exaggeration.

We are not socially equipped to deal with a work shortage. It doesn't matter how many times you speak reasonably nobody wants to hear it. The average American reads at the level of a 12-year-old and that implies that they think at the level of a 12 year old. Which is why black and white phrases like, if you don't work you don't eat, are so popular.

I am open to suggestions but I want to be clear that explaining to people is not a solution. Like Ronald Reagan said when you're explaining you're losing

They've got plenty of land and wind and solar are both cheaper and safer.

This is for AI slop isn't it? We're going to get a whole bunch of unsafe nuclear reactors thrown up as cheaply as possible to power AI data centers. Meanwhile by 2030 AI slop will be guzzling enough water for 1 billion people.

There is no way the businessmen involved in building these reactors are going to want to spend the time and money to properly maintain them let alone decommission and shut them down when they are no longer safe to run.

The problem with nuclear is social not technical. There is absolutely no reason nuclear power can't be safe but wind and solar are so much better there is absolutely no reason to run nuclear power in any country that has a reasonable supply of land and with the exception of Japan that's pretty much every country. So if somebody is building nuclear reactors in a country with plenty of land like Canada there is a reason for it and it's not good

Ah, that explains it. SMRs do go through fuel even faster than full size reactors.

Sounds very expensive, and potentially a big problem when they have a meltdown. What water source are they using for cooling?

Betting on international markets developing seems unwise. There are proliferation issues, and countries we do trust to have civilian nuclear tend to want it to buy the technology in and run it themselves, so they aren't dependent on someone else to keep it operating, and so that the huge investment goes back into their own market.

And since you mention climate change making some types of generation fail, France is shutting down nuclear plants again due to the extreme heat.

Solar and wind are fine with climate change. The sun isn't going to stop rising, the wind if anything will get stronger. It may shift around a bit, but wind turbines have a lifespan measured in decades so will simply follow it. That said, it's unlikely that currently prime locations will ever stop being good for wind.

Nuclear power is already highly uncompetitive on cost. If you look at how fast renewables are growing, and how far ahead with them some other countries are, it's pretty clear that by 2050 the market is going to be saturated with cheap and abundant energy.

Is it really fit fur purpose when it's so expensive, and takes so long to build? 2050 is a long time to wait for some expensive energy. Don't Canadian industry and domestic customers need it ASAP?

It's not an arbitrary limit either. Previously they killed a large amount of wildlife and plants by dumping hot water into the river during a heatwave. Their nuclear plants were not designed for climate change.

If they can put nuclear there, they can put other stuff there. The Chinese have solved the terrain issues too, they install wind turbines and solar panels on the sides of mountains with drones.

https://noticiasambientales.co...

Nobody wants a nuclear plant in their back yard either.

What's the real motivation here? Are they thinking that they missed the bus on renewables and that nuclear might be an export industry one day in the distant future? Or just back handers for politicians making this decision? Surely they don't want weapons.

Because by 2050 nuclear is going to be completely irrelevant and look like an even worse economic deal than it is today.