An attempt was actually made to power McMurdo with an atomic reactor in the late 60s I think. It was the size of a shipping container roughly, and ran on HEU (or HEPu, don't know, don't matter). I say "attempt" because it proved unreliable, and was so temperamental it required a whole team of physicists to keep it going.

Oh, and because it was small, it leaked neutron radiation that turned the entire container and everything around it radioactive.

Nuclear power to provide emission free power for people = something that is at least arguable for

Nuclear power to power the AI slop machine = screw this bullshit.

You're joking-but-not-joking, but don't forget - The central reason that America has virtually no public transit infrastructure that deserves the name is because after WWII, auto makers bought and systematically destroyed all of it they could, and set about manipulating city planning in order to make anyone who doesn't drive the next thing to a prisoner in their own home.

Remember, you are a slave who exists only to service the holy economy, not a human being who the economy exists to serve.

10MW scale gas turbines are single-cycle and achieve, maybe, 35% thermal efficiency.

Gigawatt scale combined cycle gas turbines are now pushing past 60% efficiency.

The first nuclear reactor should be shut down when the last coal burner is demolished. There is absolutely -zero- comparison between the ecological, environmental and climate damage done by the two.

Based on reported data (attributable to the fact that that monstrosity of a virus does a tap dance on your circulatory system too, because your blood vessels are lined with cells that have... *drum roll*... ACE2 receptors), covid actually does cause ED. It usually resolves, eventually, just like long covid symptoms usually do.

There's other things that will be happy to step into mosquitos' place.

And it's not about exterminating "all" mosquitos. Only ones that bite humans.

Project 2025 may be the psychopaths controlling him, but his cult is not the sort of thing that outlives Dear Leader.

And even if could be, all of the people who would scramble to take his place have the charm and charisma of a wet sock.

The difference between the AI slop machine and Amazon or Uber is that even when those were losing money, it was none the less clear that if they scaled up then scaling efficiencies would yield a lower cost/unit and they'd become profitable. The pathway to making money instead of setting it on fire clearly existed. It also existed because it was clear even before they super-scaled that Amazon and Uber were doing something useful for which where existed a demand.

So far all we are seeing with the generative AI delusion is an exponentially exploding waste of resources in order to pollute my Youtube feed with slop. Every enterprise is trying "AI" and essentially all of them are finding it does not do what the people selling the tin claim it can.

There were no Amazon, or Uber or Internet evangelists trying to convince everyone that those things were useful or invent uses for them because there was no need: the value was obvious and real.

After decades of sci-fi movies warning us of the danger of runaway AI, it is now clear to see that we are living through exactly such an event: The social poison called "social media" is an out-of-control "AI" designed exclusively to maximize the amount of attention it gets, and it will gleefully steer civilization off a Nazi cliff to do it.

I love how the idea that nuclear power taking 100% account for its waste products up front, as they are produced, is portrayed as a NEGATIVE.

You know, as opposed to throwing billions of tons of pollution up into the air, along with so much mercury that everyone in the world now has a lifetime allowance for seafish, not to mention all the radioactivity from the uranium in the coal, or the fly ash piles that would set off the alarms at most nuclear plants and destroy entire ecosystems when they get rained on and burst.

Guess what everyone - we're all gonna pay a WAY higher price for burning all the buried carbon than we EVER will for all the world's atomic waste. It just won't be on a fucking beancounter's spreadsheet labelled "cost of CO2 release."

Planetary temperatures are measured using satellites. Which measure the temperature of the entire planet's surface, every day. On-ground weather stations are nice as far as providing high time resolution data for points, but that's all.

What do you even say this level of malignant, willful ignorance?

More of, just 25 years for another 0.5C of warming.

Most projections show that we blew past 1.5* a few years ago, and the perpetual growth delusionists still have our foot firmly holding the gas pedal to the floor in terms of emissions. Solar and wind power output is growing incredibly rapidly, but it's not going to happen in time to prevent absolute catastrophe by the end of the century. If Q snapped his fingers and all power was renewable tomorrow, just the warming that's going to happen due to past emissions will take us to or just past +2* by 2100.