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What is a belief you’ve done a total 180 on? (lemmy.ca)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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I used to be strictly materialist and atheist. Now I’m pretty spiritual. Don’t necessarily follow a religion and don’t support bigotry but yeah, I’m fairly spiritual now. This is a recent development and I never thought I’d be here like 5 years ago.

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[–] 73 points 8 months ago* (9 children)

I used to be anti-nuclear energy until I learned a bunch of science and engineering behind it. Turns out things are less scary when you know more about them.

Edit: I also learned that it's okay, and usually preferable, to not have a strong opinion about things that you don't know about.

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  • [+] 12 points 8 months ago (2 children)
    [removed by mod]
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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    I suppose that is true of everything in the world though. Cars jump to mind pretty quickly.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago*

    I used to be strictly against nuclear energy until like 2025 or so.

    I recently looked into it again due to a school project and realized that nuclear energy is actually fine. Renewable energy is still better but nuclear energy is fine. The biggest problem with nuclear energy is high cost; And renewable energy is just nuclear energy with the most difficult parts outsourced (to the sun).

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (4 children)

    The main problem with nuclear power is that it's the most expensive form of electricity. People who say otherwise are only looking at the cost of running the generator, rather than including all the true costs involved in generating each watt, which is called the "Levelized Cost Of Electricity" (LCOE)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity

    So there's no reason to build any new nuclear generators now that renewables+storage are the cheapest form of electricity, and are also the easiest and fastest to build.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    I know nuclear is expensive, but power generation isn't the only reason to build nuclear reactors. Nuclear power plants basically prop up nuclear science. Without nuclear power plants, you're hampering the chances of discovering a breakthrough that could lead to cheaper nuclear energy. And you're pushing back the timeline on fusion.

    Also, medical isotopes used for cancer treatments are created in nuclear reactors.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    fusion is a pipe dream at this point; nuclear physics has been so thoroughly researched through CERN and other organizations that it's utterly unlikely that any big break-throughs are gonna happen anytime in the next 100 years.

    the only optimization that could still happen is in the reactor design, that is, in everything except the nuclear physics part. stuff like how do you build cheaper plumbing through a 1 m thick concrete wall ... not really exciting stuff.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    I'm curious how SMRs will end up affecting overall cost of nuclear as well. Once we get into a unit that can be mass produced rather than tailor making each site, I could see the line going down at least a bit and would also allow us to keep pushing those boundaries.

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