"I shot a guy in the head, but then a different guy moved into the house where he lived, so it wasn't that bad?"
Except there wasn't even a house left. There was a smoking patch of ground that a different guy moved to.
This is the classic argument against act utilitarianism. It's textbook ethics. Literally, every intro ethics textbook covers it.
Mr Musk was talking about nuclear power with the former president when he said people have an unfounded fear of nuclear electricity generation. It is the “safest form of electricity generation”, he argued.
“People were asking me in California, are you worried about a nuclear cloud coming from Japan? I am like no, that's crazy. It is actually, it is not even dangerous in Fukushima. I flew there and ate locally grown vegetables on TV to prove it," he said during the interview on his social media platform X on Monday.
Sensible people: Nuclear power is quite safe, likening it to a nuclear bomb isn't really a valid comparison.
Elon Musk: Nuclear power is quite safe, not all that different from nuclear bombs, which get a bad rap.
Don't know about solar but I know nuclear at least used to be statistically safer than wind per MW just due to injuries during construction. Gotta remember, it takes a lot of solar or wind to make the same amount of power as a nuclear plant and that means a lot of construction work. But I also haven't seeen those stats for a while so it may have changed.
Nuclear is very safe assuming you don't build the plant in a tsunami prone area which also happens to be practically on top of 4 different fault lines.
I was bullish on nuclear for a while but having looked at how expensive it is to build out I don’t think it really makes much sense anymore
It really depends on the location and situation. With the new generations of reactors they can also do things like seawater desalination with the waste heat alongside power production. You also have situations where the nuclear waste heat is used to heat entire communities far more efficiently than could be done with electricity. There are also many places where solar and wind just aren't practical for various reasons. In those areas nuclear may be a good option for base load power. Nuclear is also still far less environmentally destructive than hydro.
Yes, nuclear power plants are henoiusly expensive and there are definitely areas that they shouldn't be built, but they do still serve a purpose in certain areas. Most of the flack nuclear gets is just because most of our reactor fleet was built durring the cold war. New technologies can acheive far more with nuclear power far more safely and cost effectively than those old reactors.
What about the conversion of coal fired power plants to nuclear ones? I've seen that proposed quite a bit.
Wouldn't only the turbines and cooling tower be reusable? I thought the hard part was the reactor itself.
Even then I don't imagine it would be easy. Anything in a nuclear plant needs to be built to an extremely exacting standard that I'm pretty sure old coal powerplant components wouldn't be. I can't see how you could convert a coal plant into a nuclear plant without having to completely rebuild everything.
Most of the cost is regulatory, and for good reason. I’d like to think that the new small modular reactors will allow us to reduce cost but it’ll take a lot longer than we have available to us.
Two things could remove much of the expense and increase safety:
1- remove lawsuits and NIMBYism to overcome. That's where a lot of the cost and delay comes from when building these, so if millions didn't have to be spent on lawsuits just to get the goahead to begin construction it'd cut the cost massively.
2- remove profit from the equation. Without profit motive, the incentives that encourage discarding safety in favor of profit go way down.
Here’s the argument. The byline every conservative I’ve talked to falls back on is “there’s no way to recycle the materials and they don’t last that long”. “Where’s my recycling?” “Same with wind turbine blades”.
You start to notice the repetition of the same statements across republicans when you talk to any number of them.
The repetition is a bit creepy, but this is how conservative talk radio works. They are fantastic at mobilizing their peeps and this is part of how they do it.
I don't know about solar panels but fiberglass wind turbine blades are kinda recyclable. Fiberglass can be ground up and mixed into concrete to vastly improve the strength of that concrete.
Remember, Trump thinks windmills give you cancer.
https://www.factcheck.org/2019/04/trumps-faulty-wind-power-claims/
Although he is far from a great person and his comparison with Hiroshima and Nagasaki is at best tactless and a downplay of a humanitarian catastrophe caused by the US, he got a point there…
Nuclear energy is by far the cleanest and one of the safest forms of energy generation. We have a problem with the spend fuel, but that is mostly due to the „not in my backyard“-Attitude and outdated informations regarding long term storage. Nuclear radiation is scary but handling it in a responsible way is much safer than perceived. On the other hand, the huge number of respiratory diseases and accompanied deaths are much more diffuse and not directly attributed by the public to fossile fuels. I think „Kurzgesagt“ has a really good video series covering nuclear energy.
It is a little sad that with all the necessary (and important) regulations the building process of a nuclear power plant is really long and public support (at least in Germany) is non existent. It could have covered our butts during the transition from fossile fuels to renewables.
The part that is problematic is lower down on the article:
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed but now they are full cities again," the multibillionaire owner of Tesla, SpaceX and X said.
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“The injured were sprawled out over the railroad tracks, scorched and black. When I walked by, they moaned in agony. ‘Water… water…’
I heard a man in passing announce that giving water to the burn victims would kill them. I was torn. I knew that these people had hours, if not minutes, to live. These burn victims – they were no longer of this world.
‘Water… water…’
I decided to look for a water source. Luckily, I found a futon nearby engulfed in flames. I tore a piece of it off, dipped it in the rice paddy nearby, and wrang it over the burn victims’ mouths. There were about 40 of them. I went back and forth, from the rice paddy to the railroad tracks. They drank the muddy water eagerly. Among them was my dear friend Yamada. ‘Yama- da! Yamada!’ I exclaimed, giddy to see a familiar face. I placed my hand on his chest. His skin slid right off, exposing his flesh. I was mortified. ‘Water…’ he murmured. I wrang the water over his mouth. Five minutes later, he was dead.
...
Everywhere, as far as my eyes could reach, all the houses had collapsed, all the trees and electric poles had been broken down. About two kilometres away, around the spot which later proved to be the explosion centre, thick dark smoke whirled up from a sea of yellowish dust.
I remained stunned, completely stunned. The next moment I heard a faint groan, then disconnected words that seemed to come up from the bottom of the earth: "Yuko . . . dead . . . I’m dying . . . don't stay ..." It was my wife, but it was not anything like a voice uttered by a human being: it was a voice squeezed out from the last bit of life in death's grip. "What? Be strong now! . . . Where are you? Where are you?" As if in reply, a pile of tangled timbers moved with a creaking noise. Bleeding all over, my wife stood upright, with our two-month-old baby tightly in her arms.
All around us we heard shouting, groaning, cursing, voices calling father, voices calling mother, voices in search of brothers and sisters. All over the central part of town flames were shooting out as if the earth's crust had been ripped open. And these sorely burnt men and women all in stark nakedness! It was as if our corrupt world had come to an end, giving way to hell. My wife was most painfully wounded. On her whole body were stuck countless fragments of glass, large and small, that reflected pallid lights like a glittering spearhead of a demon. She could see nothing.
I took my wife on my back, and held the baby on my left arm. We walked three hundred metres, stepping barefooted on the debris and broken sheets of glass that went to pieces under our weight, and took refuge on a sand bank in a river where the tide had ebbed. Here we joined hundreds of suffering people, and the sound of the frantic search of parents for their children was heartrending enough to make one giddy.
....
But it wasn't that bad, right?
is this your source? - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima
if not I’m curious to read the full source text please.
Oh wow. They have the full book there?
This is from the book Hiroshima by John Hersey. I remember reading it in high school. It's a great book.
•
I'm sorry, I just googled for eyewitness accounts, but I can't remember what article I copied from.
Yeah, the bombs’ effects were horrific. It’s absolutely amazing that even that level of devastation was able, in the balance, to save lives.
The prevailing sentiment was that the Japanese would not surrender until their home islands were totally conquered. Their government was in the process of preparing the civilian population to fight to the death. (Research the invasion of Okinawa if you want to know what a US invasion of the main island would have been like.) In a version of the trolley dilemma, the American rational was that the loss of life in two horrific attacks that would shock the Japanese into surrender was less evil than the alternative of invading their home islands.
I'm not making that argument, or saying there were no alternatives, just that the Americans were weighing the loss of life (including civilians) involved in a nuclear bombing against the loss of life (including civilians) in invading the islands.
Notwithstanding other unthought of solutions, the strategy worked, and the apparent alternative would have been brutal.
The belief that the nukes accelerated Japanese surrender is 100% cope made up by people to avoid feeling guilty for the weapons' deployment. The Japanese were already in the process of reaching out to surrender before the bombs were dropped, and it isn't clear that the military administration was even fully aware that the nuclear bombings were different from the many hundreds of other bombings that had already occurred in the months previous due to Japan completely losing control over the sea and sky around its home islands.
Their only term was that they get to keep the Emperor, which they were allowed to do anyway.
lol, the prevailing sentiment according to Taniwha420, the human pretzel, so called for the shocking degrees they bend facts to fit their narrative. puff puff? I think I'll pass.
There's just as many voices, and evidence, that the Japanese were looking for a way out of the war. There were other "non-brutal" options you ignore, pretending they didn't exist. It would be one thing if you presented both sides honestly, but clearly you're just AFP, another fucking propagandist.
They did not save any lives, that is a completely made up invention. In fact Imperial Japan cared little about the atomic bomb, and even if a land invasion had become necessary, the USA had made a deal with the USSR to invade on land.
This was the real reason for the bombings, not to beat Japan into submission, which Roosevelt's deal with the USSR for a land invasion ensured, but to show the USSR the destructive power the US held. Truman was a staunch anticommunist, and refused to let the USSR play the part Roosevelt negociated in a land invasion.
It was a war crime with no benefits at all except to show off to the USSR, who would develop nukes themselves 4 years later anyway. An absolute tragedy which proved to be entirely useless.
Your understanding of the historical record is not only fatally incomplete; it’s also riddled with inaccuracies and purposefully promulgated falsehoods. Get less history from pop sources and ideologically steered texts.
Did he just say the Atomic bombs were not that bad??? The Fucking ATOMIC BOMBS?!
Can we just drop one on his house now?
This is the same guy who told Steven Colbert he wants to nuke the Martian poles.
To which Colbert replied, “Are you SURE you’re not a supervillain?”
That was in 2016.
To be fair, that's not totally outlandish and no one lives on Mars. It's a fast way to inject heat. Is it actually a good idea with the radiation? Idk. I've seen it proposed for terraforminf before though.
There's also no other biological activity there on the surface
Maybe there is some in the deep underground, but they wouldn't be affected by nukes and terraforming
The collateral damage would be awful. Don’t punish people for being unlucky enough to live next to Musk.
I know it wasn’t. I still feel bad that he likely has neighbors.
Imaging having to live next door to him after the bullshit with the X sign at twitter headquarters.
I can imagine what is the "next door" for a billionaire would be another part of town, distance wise, for normal people.
I didn't want to take this at face value without context so I found when they discussed this. Check around 1:17:00 in this video.
https://youtu.be/lfBQoWxQaEM?si=6Ev6rx62KESH-HgR
And yeah, he did say exactly what the OP states. So... yeah.
To give the absolute benefit of the doubt, I could say they were referring specifically to nuclear fallout rather than the initial explosion, as a full on explosion is less likely in a nuclear plant emergency. But even assuming it was just an incredibly distasteful way to reference that, there are still thousands of deaths and even more injuries/illnesses associated principally with radiation poisoning.
This is not to say I'm against nuclear energy, but by god we've got to have more careful consideration than this.
Edit: As a bonus, Musk talks about his views on global warming around the 1:10 mark. The issue with greenhouse gasses is, uh... making it hard to breathe?
Musk is not that bright. He pretends to be smart but just throws money at smart people and then acts as if he is actually the smart one. But he's just a dumbass with apartheid money.
For more context: hes comparing nuclear energy disasters like chernobyl to the bombings of japan, saying that because those cities recovered therefore people are wrong about chernobyl still being uninhabitable and that people shouldn't be so scared of nuclear energy. Hes not saying bombing cities isnt so bad in general, just that its not as bad as how "(((they)))" say it is at chernobyl. Nevemind the fact that even if chernobyl was able to rebound it still would've been a major and tragic disaster!
This actually perfectly demonstrates his lack of knowledge and ability to perceive himself unduly as an intelligent person because of his financial success. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were able to rebuild and the nuclear fallout was short-lived because the bombs were detonated miles above the ground to maximize their immediate devastation, while the chernobyl reactor exploded on/in the ground and there is still uncontained radioactive material within the compound because it is basically impossible to clean up.
Also, the comments on that video are depressing.
I haven't watched the video - so I'm going on what is said above, but its like these billionaires are not seeing people as human. They see that after Hiroshima people live in the city but cannot understand that those people weren't fungible. We didn't replace them - they are different people.
Two other small points, but first a caveat - I'm very pro civil nuclear power.
It simply isn't possible for any nuclear power plant to explode like a nuclear bomb. That can't happen - like my car contains an engine but can't fly like a plane. There have been nuclear leaks and chemical explosions in nuclear plants - these are bad. However, they are very different things from what happened to Japan.
Modern nuclear weapons would have much higher yields and probably fallout. Here's a terrifying tool for the morbidly curious:
I feel like Musk needs to meet the Elephant’s Foot so he can understand why Chernobyl is not inhabitable
Meanwhile the fallout from hiroshima and nagasaki is mostly disappated by now.
I listened to a bit of the interview and it's just insane nonsense, trump is ALL over the place with his topics, calling folks losers as a child would. But what was really odd was trump had this lisp almost like he had too much saliva in his mouth. It was gross and resembled that of an old man rambling incoherently
The lisp is probably loose dentures. After all, Trump IS the oldest presidential nominee in US history. Come to think of it, that explains the incoherent ramblings also.
Yeah, the loose dentures have been noticable since his first campaign, there's just so much other wretched shit going on with him that people don't notice as much.
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I just don't get how I, a poor, was able to finance with Care Credit and time out my visits to have implants put in, so i could fix my grill. He couldn't come up with a grift for someone to pay for his?? Which reminds me... these chompers should finally get paid off this year!🥳
Just some numbers to put into relation :
| Casualties |
Hiroshima:- 90,000–166,000 killed
- 80,000–156,000 civilians
- 10,000 soldiers
- 12 Allied prisoners of war
Nagasaki:- 60,000–80,000 killed
- 60,000–80,000 civilians
- 150 soldiers
- 8–13 Allied prisoners of war
Total killed (by end of 1945): 150,000–246,000
Source: Wikipedia - Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Hiroshima:- 90,000–166,000 killed
80,000–156,000 civilians
And modern nukes are SIXTY TIMES more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Not just that, but far more of them. And also missiles that consist of dozen of smaller warheads inside
And these missiles can travel to literally any place on earth, no matter where they started, as they follow a sub-orbital trajectory into space
And then, in the aftermath of the decision to wipe those cities off the map, the United States said "That worked great. Let's make thousands more of those."
This country is vomitous.
Well, the US and every other 1st world country. Nobody wants to be the guy without nuclear weapons when the nuclear war starts - the ones that can't defend themselves would be easy first targets. That's what the cold war was all about - 2 countries, each just waiting for the other to drop the bomb they're sure is coming eventually.
The thing is, the MAD doctrine works. We enjoy relatively more peace than we had before.
It works until it catastrophically fails. That's the gimmick. You can partly offset the risk by bringing the overall nuke count down to dozens or hundreds per country, but only partly. And how many dictators want to create a small nuclear arsenal these days? It's the only way to keep others out. Which brings the risk back up.
And how many dictators want to create a small nuclear arsenal these days? It's the only way to keep others out.
I mean, we basically have two classes of countries - those who do not have the power to catastrophically end all life on earth and those who do and sit at the big kids table. The first group is routinely used for dick measuring proxy wars., until they develop nukes and get to join the second group.
I'm not so sure it does. This comedy sketch succinctly explains why, but thankfully nobody's tested it.
To people like Trump and Musk Nazi labor camps are just a good example of an efficient workplace.
Everyone got showers, I don't know what the big deal is. I've seen pictures, have you seen the pictures? All of those people were in great shape. My doctor says I'm as healthy as someone half my age, but I'd kill to be in as good a shape as some of the people in those pictures.
Great, really love to see the consent being manufactured for a lil nuclear war! Just a limited engagement bro, just a couple of nukes bro!
Damnit, it's tough but I just don't think dying in a nuclear holocaust is worth it to know that those dumb fucks will also suffer and die.
As Americans get more belligerent and less rich, it's only a matter of time before we roll out our archaic nuclear arsenal and see what still works.
After all, better to launch a nuclear strike on our enemies than let them win
Oh, no, they're gearing up to make new ones. Russia has worked to undermine nuclear treaties, and looks poised to reverse the progress we've made on getting rid of these damn fool things. The United States will go tit for tat.
Russia has worked to undermine nuclear treaties
I don't think Americans get to talk shit about undermining confidence in anti-proliferation treaties. Between Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, Americans consistently violate their own terms and conditions whenever it is even momentarily advantageous to them. Russians aren't the only ones walking away from the table after what Bush pulled with Curveball and the way Trump tore up the Obama deal with Iran.
The United States will go tit for tat.
The US already has more nuclear weapons than every other country (but Russia) combined. I believe we already have north of 4000 warheads, which is absurd considering the estimates to obliterate the entire planet come in at under 300 successful strikes.
You don't have to ascribe any altruistic features to the United States on this one. The US faces no existential threat to a conventional military. The other countries on its continent would never be capable of invading and conquering the US, and an oversea invasion is logistically impossible.
Nukes are the only real existential military threat to the US. It's therefore in our best interest that nobody has them. If that means getting rid of our own, then so be it. The US is perfectly capable of gunboat diplomacy without them.
Lets just ignore the increase in cancer in the survivors. (https://www.rerf.or.jp/en/programs/roadmap_e/health_effects-en/late-en/cancrisk/#:~:text=Tumor%20registries%20were%20initiated%20in,(10.7%25)%20(Table).)
And that there was a massive and expensive undertaking to rebuild hiroshima and nagasaki, who were lucky to only end up with short acting radioisotopes, unlike places like chernobyl. (https://davidson.weizmann.ac.il/en/online/askexpert/recovery-time-nuclear-disaster)
Both of these dudes are idiots.
Launching things into the sun is surprisingly energy intensive, I hear. It'd be far more reasonable to launch them thirty feet into the air with one of Elon's dodgy rockets.
30 feet is still pretty survivable. We're gonna need a slightly better rocket than that.
This is similar to what kept coming to mind while listening to it last night:
“This is a former POTUS and the richest guy on the planet, and they’re both so… dumb”.
Blows my damn mind man.
