The radiation explains why his right arm is long enough that he could scratch his shins standing up
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2026
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$ 0.001
The Jetsons/strangelove era pricing for nuclear energy was based on fuel costs only, and certainly scale was needed rather than this absurd wafer system. The fuel costs were based on no one using any yet, and maybe children yearning for the cancer.
Kilo wat
Imagine using something dangerous to generate power or heat for a home. Something that if it leaks into your home could suffocate you overnight or explode, or that in normal use can give children respiratory issues or cause cancer. Thank goodness we're too smart to use something like that unlike the absolute imbeciles in this comic
Imagine if we had to move it around in such large quantities that there were thousands of kilometres of unwatched pipelines just out there, potentially leaking.
And imagine people fight pointless wars over resources instead of using the renewables that are available for free.
Not only that, but mining for it produces massive quantities of dangerous runoff and radioactive waste. Good thing coal doesn't do that!
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You forgot the /s at the end.
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tell me you dont understand how nuclear-powered energy without telling me you dont understand nuclear-powered energy
Beta-voltaic batteries are fairly safe, work for 50 years, no recharging.
Almos tuseless at like 0.1 milliwats.
It's easy: just boil some water
“Junior please walk 30cm to the left and do this task that would have been easier for me to do than ask you to do it”
30cm can make a big difference
It's just one of those things you can do yourself, but you want the kid to feel valuable too.
Besides, if you're getting radiation poisoning, you want that little shit to go down with you.
It's faster, cleaner, and far more efficient for me to clean my kids' rooms.
And if I always do it, they'll never do it on their own.
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I guess renewables are still cheaper.
At least personally and anecdotally, because it doesn't happen often, but it has happened more than once, that I have purchased electricity at negative prices due to overflow from renewables, which is a hell of lot cheaper than paying a tenth of a cent per kilowatt hour.
no radioactive waste to deal with either.
and with solar, most of the hardware can be recycled now into new units; with a 20 year lifespan, that's going to pull thousands of kilowatts out of the sky, that'll do just fine.
I don't understand why waste was such a big anti-nuclear talking point. The raw material was mined. Just put the waste back in the same hole.
i don't understand it either, because there's so little of it. and also, we know how to handle dangerous substances. like, asbestos stays dangerous forever.
Oh, this is one i actually know. I wish I could find the exact YouTube video where I learned it, butnuclear waste disposal is a massive long-term problem.
It boiled down to answering the question of - how do you prevent people from digging up all your buried nuclear waste for the tens of thousands of years it will continue to be radioactive? It was a super interesting watch, so I'll see if I came find the vid after I get off work.
yeah "no great deed is commemorated here" etc etc etc. spooky stuff.
but... that's also true for asbestos. except it's worse because the moment you dig it gets worse, it can get into the water supply, and it doesn't stop being dangerous. it's carcinogenic forever. there are entire mining towns in canada that are condemned and cordoned off because of the risks of asbestos in the air.
like, there are as of right now two countries that have long-term storage plans for nuclear waste, and they both are "dig a big hole". ...okay? so just do that. there are thousands of abandoned mines that go down almost a kilometer where we have extracted millions, billions of tons of material. the total amount of nuclear waste ever produced is like... 200 000 tons. and uranium is dense, so by volume it's not a lot. just fucking dump it in an old mine if you want.
or better yet... don't! the fact that it is still radioactive means that it is still useful for generation. with the technology we have today, we can breed away like 40% into inert substances and new fuel. if we dump it all down a hole, what will happen is we'll have to dig it back up again in 20 years because it's too valuable to leave down there.
i used to live next to the biggest iron mine in the world, the luossavaara-kirunavaara mine. they have mountains of slag and waste product. far bigger than the actual mountain the mine is in. and in the mid-2000's, they started mining the slag. because there's still so much useful material in there.
That was always so frustrating and annoying to me. "We won't invest money on nuclear power because someone in 10,000 years might get radiation poisoning from the waste we will carefully very underground. So, let's keep burning coal, pump the waste smoke into the air that will kill the atmosphere whitin three decades and give everyone radioactive poisoning, today!"
Humanity was handed the key to stop global warming dead in its tracks and skip straight to renewables with a healthy planet. But we can't seem to resist the temptation of blowing people up for a slightly higher profit next quarter.
the raw material was mined. Just put the waste back in the same hole.
yeah it seems really simple, but then, you have the realities:
lots of uranium mining is open pits. like this one in namibia -
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that's not going to keep stuff in one place.
transporting it, hell even getting the producers to agree to accepting it for storage - would be a political nightmare.
even in places where it was mined underground, you have water tables to worry about. it's simply not that simple.
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My main thing with solar is I wish they'd put panels over existing parking lots or large buildings. This is a thing that is already done in some places, this is a solved engineering problem, but in my area anywhere a solar farm has sprung up it's been a field that previously either grew crops or was undeveloped woods. And I know the reason someone's going to come back with: To install solar awnings over an existing Wal Mart parking lot, you need to tear up the asphalt to install power lines, build the actual structure, permitting is probably more expensive, and you have to have some or all of the parking lot down for awhile during construction restricting the use of the store. Meanwhile, clear cut 10 acres of forest and you get lumber to sell to a paper mill.
I disagree, only thinking we should cover EVERYTHING - any human building / structure etc should have solar all over. yeah, it's not cheap to build them, but we should stop playing fuckaround and get it done, it'll be cheaper to do it today than tomorrow.
But re: fields - they can do double duty via agrivoltaics - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics
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Pretty sure that kid's arm would hang down to his ankle if he straightened it. Must be all those atomic wafers.
He's actually the bass player in a metal band.
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"Kilowat"
Might have questioned the reliability of that source even back then already...
Yes, the kilo-wat. For when a simple "wat" doesn't accurately capture the absurdity of the situation.
For example, asking junior to put an atomic wafer in the power box, when you are standing right fucking next to it.
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