I’m a big fan of harm reduction. Passkeys are better than passwords. Nuclear power is better than coal or LNG. Vaping is better (maybe?) than smoking.
Harm reduction isn’t perfect. It’s often not even good enough. But it’s better then the status quo, and that’s important.
Yes, moral hazard and risk homeostasis exist. We should always work toward improving things; adopting a better solution isn’t an excuse for complacency.
But better is still better. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Incremental improvement is real improvement. Embrace it!
I will actually try passkey for once based on your suggestion!
Including all nuclear accidents in history, coal and gas still kill thousands of times more people, in both absolute terms and on a per TwH basis. Always have.
Fully agree. Bluesky and Mastodon should build in native support for passkeys.
Can’t admit when you got something wrong so you gotta move goal posts, doubling down on not understanding the point of the original post.
Sure. Nuclear is .03 deaths/TWh, solar is .02. Better!
But gas is 2.8, and coal is ~28 (!), which make a .01 deaths/TWh difference pretty meaningless when there’s a huge undersupply and we need all the clean (enough!) and safe (enough!) energy we can get.
I invite you to read with your brain and not just your eyes.
You’re absolutely right, nuclear accidents are badly toxic! Coal particulate emissions are too. The good news is that we don’t have to guess at hypotheticals; we’ve run coal plants for decades, had multiple bad nuclear accidents, and measured the impacts of both. These numbers include all that.
The main problem with nuclear as is any resource extraction is incompetence and negligence. In theory it’s better but standards would have improve drastically in order for it to be worth the risk:
ratical.org/radiation/Fu…
running over 1 person with your trolley is better than running over 5
But what if that one person was the one who would’ve cured cancer?
What I disagree with is that spending money on nuclear can directly impact the funding of renewables. It is rarely the case you can directly substitute coal for nuclear with no additional investment. The total cost benefit needs to be accounted for, and it might be worth skipping the intermediate.