• 0 Posts
  • 9 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
cake
Cake day: November 22nd, 2023

help-circle
  • Coal is often radioactive when it comes out of the ground, and thanks to poor regulations, is often radioactive when it goes into the powerplant, leading to radioactive particles coming out of the smokestacks and landing anywhere downwind of the plants.

    More people have died from radiation poisoning from coal than from all of the nuclear accidents combined. But, as you said, 200 years vs. 70 years. But, also, nuclear is much more heavily regulated than coal in this regard due to the severity of those accidents. The risk of a dangerous nuclear power plant is nowhere near as large as commonly believed. It doesn’t take long to find longlasting environmental disasters due to fossil fuels, from oil spills to powerplant disasters. They’re used so heavily that it’s just so much more likely to occur and occur more often.

    All this to say that fossil fuels suck all around and we should be looking at all forms of replacement for them, nuclear being just one option we should be pursuing alongside all the others.


  • One thing to remember about the mining issue is that coal mining is just as bad, and coal is often radioactive as well. More people have died from radiation poisoning due to coal power/mining than have died from radiation poisoning due to nuclear power, even when you include disasters like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

    Of course, we’ve also been mining and using coal a lot longer, but the radioactive coal dust and possibly radioactive particles in the smoke from coal plants is something that many people are unaware of.

    But, like you said, the big thing is to move away from fossil fuels entirely, and nuclear power has its own issues. It doesn’t so much matter what we go with so long as we do actually go with something, and renewables are getting better and better all the time.



  • From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the blessed Machine.

    Your kind cling to your flesh, as if it will not decay and fail you. One day, the crude biomass that you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you.

    But I am already saved. For the Machine is immortal.




  • Unfortunately, all the electric train startups were bought up and closed down by diesel train companies decades ago, and the majority of the rail lines are owned by freight companies as well. This is partly why public train transit is so bad: the government has to lease the tracks from the freight companies, who get priority on the lines over public trains, meaning that if there’s freight traffic the commuter rail has to wait for the freight lines to go through first.


  • I heard a city planner talk about why adding a new lane doesn’t help, and the term they use is “induced demand.”

    Basically, people are going to take the route that they consider the most convenient, and that usually comes down to time and effort. Traffic hurts both by taking more time and being more stressful to deal with. When you add a new lane to a road, people think that the traffic will be easier there, so they take that route instead of their normal one. So you’re just adding more cars to the traffic that match or exceed the throughput of your new lane, basically putting you back at square one but a few billion dollars more poor.

    You’ve essentially added a single lane one-way road to help ease traffic across the entire city.