Warren Dunes
Pre-takeoff checklist
- Joined
- Dec 2, 2021
- Messages
- 141
- Location
- 92.5 inches aft of datum
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Warren Dunes
IMHO I have never seen an honest cost-benefit analysis. It is just too politicized. I laugh at the electric car crowd touting "pollution free transportation," well... except for that huge coal fired power-plant that moves all the electrons back and forth in the first place. Human beings die digging fossil fuels from the earth and transporting them, they die from the pollution created by burning them. Destroying mountaintops, fracking, and off-shore drilling degrade the environment. Turbines kill birds, dams kill fish... No system is perfect. To pretend that the waste handling and storage issues with nuclear power are uniquely unsolvable is self-deception. To do anything "right" (or "wrong") entails cost.Yes, if you ignore the pollution that nuclear energy produces by only focusing on one part of life cycle then it looks very clean.
And, in fairness, it's not a super terrible option from an environmental perspective. A lot of its harmful pollutants can be controlled and sequestered, which is not something you can say of fossil fuels.
Nothing is ever "too cheap to meter," even when it currently is. In the 1970s one of the big cities in the east (I forget which one, EC 101 was 30+ years ago) decided that the cost of billing for water was roughly equal to receipts from water service. So they decided to stop billing. The fact that people pay for things requires them to make choices. Water was almost free, but people turned off the taps, replaced leaky washers, and reported broken lines when they paid for it.It was advertised for a long time as being power that would be too cheap to meter.
Once they stopped paying for it, use tripled. And the number of service calls to repair broken water lines fell dramatically. Because the city had stopped billing but had not removed the meters they were able to plot the "learning curve" as residents became more and more wasteful because there was no economic incentive to conserve and a time disincentive to report problems.
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