But lately I cannot help but wonder how did these people get to be this specifically stupid!? I mean, most of them aren't even living in reality at this point!?
Savitri Devi wrote something about how literate/educated societies are counterintuitively more receptive to mass propaganda, since, in their hubris, they believe they are too smart to be affected by it.
False Leftists just need to see an infographic or random news article quote from an "expert" they've never heard of, and boom, they have been just as easily herded as any rightist. No need for fact checking or rational thinking. They commit all the irrational follies they observe rightists committing; they just place their trust in different sources.
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Also, here's what I was mentioning before:
Long-time nuclear waste warning messages are intended to deter human intrusion at nuclear waste repositories in the far future, within or above the order of magnitude of 10,000 years. Nuclear semiotics is an interdisciplinary field of research, first done by the Human Interference Task Force in 1981.
A 1993 report from Sandia National Laboratories recommended that such messages be constructed at several levels of complexity. They suggested that the sites should include foreboding physical features which would immediately convey to future visitors that the site was both man-made and dangerous, as well as providing pictographic information attempting to convey some details of the danger, and written explanations for those able to read it.
[...]
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant has done extensive research in development of written or pictorial messages to warn future generations. Since today's written languages are unlikely to survive,[2] the research team has considered pictograms and hostile architecture in addition to them.[1] Texts were proposed to be translated to every UN written language. In 1994, Level II, III, and IV messages in English were translated into French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, and Navajo, with plans to continue testing and revision of the original English text and subsequent eventual translation into further languages.[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warning_messagesWe don't need that for carbon dioxide because trees literally use carbon dioxide as food--using it to grow their wood and make sugar/starch (which nearly all life forms use as food)... We don't even need that for other potent greenhouse gases like methane either.
Yeah that's actually a major issue with nuclear waste.
And my (and many others) biggest issue with nuclear power. We haven't actually solved the waste issue. Our best idea is bury it, hope it doesn't leak, and hope the civilization 1000-10,000 years from now doesn't stumble on it unawares. That last problem illustrates just how unsolved these issues are. As we don't actually have a means of conveying danger reliably to a future society. All the proposed solutions, have major flaws. Case in point: Illustrations won't work because a skull and crossbones might mean death to us, but could be a symbol of their god, or a comic strip style showing someone getting sick and dying could easily be read backwards and inadvertently show someone becoming healthy.
And that's just the holes in our plan for what we should do to protect people 10,000 years from now. Our plans for protecting people today are just as flawed. Especially since we already have so much nuclear waste permanently stored in temporary storage facilities that every square inch of future storage facilities is already spoken for 2x over. Because only a handful of places on the globe have the conditions to store it long term. And even then many of those risk leaks into ground water etc.
Oh yeah, and there's the glaring issue that we don't actually know with certainty that whatever structures we build to store it will even be able to survive the millenia until the radioactivity has gone down to safe levels. And with them shoved 200ft below the surface it would be years before we even knew something was wrong, at which point it would be too late.
One barrel per year per reactor is extremely small. We could store all of it for safely thousands of years in a single facility (like the one in Nevada).
It's a political issue - not an engineering or environmental issue.
In a couple hundred years, we'll likely have the technology to recycle it anyway.
The problem with the facility in Nevada is that the groundwater is percolating through the fractures in the tuff much, much faster that modeled. They’re seeing isotopes from the nuclear testing in the 40s and 50s in the groundwater adjacent to the facility, which the groundwater is connected to flows that exit the area to the southeast, that are populated. That, and due to the plutonium having close to a 2 million year half-life, the EPA wants a stable facility capable of being nonpollutive for 1 million years. The failed rift zone by the Baja has the potential also to reactivate the currently inactive/extinct volcanoes in the area as well. There are definitely some scientific and environmental concerns.
https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/rcktxo/til_the_us_strategic_petroleum_reserves_are/hnw341x/Western governments can't even do basic things like shelter homeless people (despite more than enough vacant housing to house all of them), etc. Hell, they can't even plan beyond a single election cycle for massive, unignorable problems (e.g. global warming, overpopulation)! Why would anyone think they are competent enough to STORE DEADLY WASTE FOR HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS? (Especially given all of the hundreds of nuclear accidents that have happened so far?) Assuming the quotation above is accurate, the "simple" and "fool-proof" Western plans to contain nuclear waste have
already failed and polluted the groundwater...
People criticized Trump for his "magical thinking" of believing he could just will things into existence. That's literally what "progressives" are doing when they take for granted that "although we are doomed with current rates of pollution and resource use, _surely_ people in the future will invent something to fix all this, so don't worry!"
Insanity.
A cornucopian is a futurist who believes that continued progress and provision of material items for mankind can be met by similarly continued advances in technology. Fundamentally they believe that there are enough matter and energy on the Earth to provide for the population of the world.
Looking further into the future, they posit that the abundance of matter and energy in space would appear to give humanity almost unlimited room for growth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CornucopianAccording to Malthusian theory, the size and growth of the population depend on the food supply and agricultural methods. In Boserup's theory, agricultural methods depend on the size of the population. In the Malthusian view, when food is not sufficient for everyone, the excess population will die. However, Boserup argued that in those times of pressure, people will find ways to increase the production of food by increasing workforce, machinery, fertilizers, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ester_Boserup#Scholarly_contributionsThinking future generations can just magic their way out of a problem so we don't have to deal with it today is just insanity. Even in (authentically) conservative societies they understand that they have a responsibility to ensure future generations are not overburdened by problems created during our lifetimes, because the conservative fears this will eventually disrupt the continuity of their traditions.
But False Left "progressives"... Unless I'm just being uncharitable here, it seems they care even less about the welfare of future generations than (authentic) conservatives.