[quote=“Huang Guang Chen”][quote=“Ducked”][quote=“Huang Guang Chen”] I want cold beer, loud music and an aircon!
HG[/quote]
New axiom? You don’t get them.
I could live with that. I’d guess future generations might think it a price worth paying too.
But I know it isn’t going to happen.[/quote]
More seriously, edithgow, apologies with all the noise and distractors, I hadn’t perhaps given credit where it’s due, and I do like the way you are thinking through all of this.
But I am curious why you think we need to give up the aircons (and Lord help me, my cold beer!) for the next generation? I suspect it’s because you’re opposed to nukes, fullstop. Would that be fair? Or are you referring to the possibility of a shortfall in summer power supply in Japan? Alternatively, just a simple case that this generation is sucking the future in environmental terms from the next?
Just trying to get a handle on your position.
HG[/quote]
Well, I guess its more a personal paradigm than an axiom, and its predicated on doubtful precepts like “We give a shit”, “We can take some pain”, “We can make do with less.”
Several posters on here have held up continued and accelerating global consumerism as a shining, immutable truth, and since the levers of (political and economic) power are mostly squidged in the chubby fists of lard-arses or wannabees, those posters are probably right.
The give-a-shit paradigm would, as a counter to a rise in living standards/energy consumption in the “third world”, lower the living standards/energy consumption in the “first world” to meet them.
That’s gotta huyt a bit, but technical “progress” is often driven by marketing rather than real utility. (Microsoft over the last couple of decades provides a good tits-on-a-bull-technology marketing tutorial.) I believe huge savings are achievable with relatively painless behavioural changes, even before we consider technical fixes/abstinance.
To take a seemingly trivial example, you can have a perfectly adequate wash, and rinse your clothes, with half a bucket of water, which you can then use to mop the floor/flush the toilet/water the garden, etc. “Third world” people do just that, but I’m the only first world punter I know who does it voluntarily. Doesn’t hurt a bit.
Some things would hurt more, but one can be selective. Your cold beer and loud music probably aren’t a big hit, if your fridge is smallish and efficient, and you havn’t borrowed The Stones On Tour PA system.
Aircon (and, further north, its corollary, space heating) is, however, a, perhaps the, big problem. I don’t use my domestic or car aircon, which is occasionally uncomfortable. The classrooms don’t have aircon, which is often uncomfortable but hasn’t killed me. I find I can’t avoid using aircon in my new office building, which, unlike the previous one which they had available as a model, has large, non-reflective, non-openable, externally unshaded windows. The small sliding window above the main ones provides some inadequate natural ventilation but has no insect screen, so you can’t open it at night. Progress? No. Fuck-witted new design? You betcha, and one sees examples of such fuck-witted design everywhere, every day.
Ironically enough, I remember reading that the Three Mile Island clean-up team developed a cold-pack solution to the heat-exhaustion caused by wearing anti-radiation suits. I wonder if a “personal” aircon system, as has been discussed on here for motorcyclists, perhaps combined with a lightweight shell-suit, could help avoid the need to aircon a whole building. Probably not going to be marketable while electricity is relatively cheap though. Too “uncool”.
In practice given the way we do things, rationing by price isn’t going to affect everyone equally, so, assuming you are fairly well heeled, your aircon is probably safe anyway, and I can do without mine. We could of course try and spread the pain equally, but that’s a whole other paradigm, and its been tried.
To answer your specific question, yes, I’m opposed to nukes, full stop. I think the risks are unacceptable, and I think the nuclear waste legacy is morally and practically indefensible.
Before this incident I thought nuclear power might be (reluctantly) defensible as a “short term” expedient response to climate change. I no longer think so, not because of what this incident has revealed about the inherent danger, since this was always evident, but because of the examples of gross operational irresponsibility and hubris. These convince me that people (EVEN THE JAPANESE, FFS!) can’t be trusted to run these things.
At the start of this incident I took cold comfort from the possibility that this would be a “never again” wake-up call and a death-blow to nuclear power. I no longer think so. I think it’s more likely that Joe publics entirely rational fear will be replaced with government/media-sponsored apathy and “smokers-denial”.
I’m pessimistic about nukes, but I’m more pessimistic about people.
So you, Huang Guang Chen, are probably right about the likely outcome for the industry.
And, in case you are in any doubt, you being right is very bad indeed. 
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