Cars are also not safe, especially at 200+ km/h but somehow it’s OK to drive them this fast in Germany.

Edit: What I want to say is that there is no absolute safety.

Waste from nuclear weapons is not the same as waste from commercial nuclear power plants.

Unfortunately use of fossil fuels also continues to hit record numbers year after year.

You basically need a few conditions to be met to make this useable: tide needs to be high enough, there needs to be suitable geological formation that enables building of such power plants, it has to be publicly acceptable to build there, and you need to connect it to the grid. The last two can especially cancel eachother out.

However, this assumes you use potential energy. What you are envisioning might be more like current power (so kinetic energy) where I’m not sure what the limitations are. Perhaps it’s not too practical to build huge plants underwater in locations with relatively constant current and connect them to the grid

Hehe, I walked right into this one. You’re right. I totally failed at trying to be a smartass.

Why are you comparing fossil fuels and nuclear “per tonne” that makes no sense. You replace tens of tones of nuclear fuel per year any you burn millions of tones in a comparable fosil fuel plant.

And regarding the carbon emissions from enrichment… Just use nuclear to power your enrichment plants. This way your emissions are extremely low because you don’t need much fuel and you use nuclear energy to produce nuclear fuel. French example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricastin_Nuclear_Power_Plant

With energy positive here I mean useful energy positive, so electricity or high temperature heat.

You are technically wrong, the worst kind of wrong :)

DT and DD fusion reactions release energy. More energy than is put in. It’s the whole system that hasn’t been energy positive. We’re close to breakeven in terms of plasma (heating power vs fusion power, and it’s not like heating power is lost from the system it still heats the reactor) but to be useful fusion power needs to be >10x heating power so the whole system is more than self-sufficient.

There’s also survivorship bias. All the crapily designed cars from 30-50 years ago are long scraped while some of the well designed ones are still around. With “current” cars you see the whole spectrum.

Indeed. Nicely worded.

And couple this with the fact that we are actively being conditioned that it is up to us to change things: “it’s your personal footprint that matters”, “vote with your wallet”… It’s not even that I disagree that personal action is important. It’s mostly that these narratives are a way for the corporations and governments to shift the blame from systemic to personal. And then we end up with feelings of paralysis because you can only do so much and guilt about not doing enough.

For me it comes down to basically having more and more things to feel worried/anxious about and fewer and fewer things to feel excited about every year. Partially I guess it is normal part of aging (but I’m supposed to be in my prime year for fucks sake) but there are also objectively shitty things that make it difficult to be hopeful that my mood/feelings about the world will improve. The acceleration in enshittification of the internet doesn’t help. At least Lemmy is a breath of fresh air in this regard.