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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • Peer pressure is real. Kids get social media accounts way too early because it’s difficult to justify holding off when all of their classmates have them. It causes actual social issues for kids when they are the only one without something. They get bullied etc, so parents are effectively forced to accede. Making it illegal gives parents a reason to say no, which might slow down the uptake.
















  • Your comment doesn’t stand up. It seems you’ve got something against fusion energy for some reason.
    On cost: it’s a best guess, since we don’t yet have a working fusion reactor. The error bars on the cost estimates are huge, so while it is possible fusion will be more expensive, with current data you absolutely cannot guarantee it. Add to that the decreasing costs as the technology matures, like we’ve seen in wind and especially solar over recent decades.
    On nuclear physics PhDs: that’s no different to any energy generation, you need dozens of experts to build and run any installation.
    On waste: where are you getting this info on the blanket? The old beryllium blanket design has been replaced with tungsten and no longer needs to be replaced. The next step is to test a lithium blanket which will actually generate nuclear fuel as the reaction processes.
    This is the important fact that you have omitted, for some reason.

    Nuclear fusion reactors produce no high activity, long-lived nuclear waste. The activation of components in a fusion reactor is low enough for the materials to be recycled or reused within 100 years

    And that is why it’s so important this technology is developed. It’s incredibly clean and, yes, limitless.

    As for your advice, there was a time not long ago when we didn’t understand how to build fission plants either, and it cost a lot of time and money to learn how. I wonder if people back then were saying we should just stick to burning coal because we know how that works.