I agree that the article is wrong on that point. It was still objectively dishonest to make a comment about how nuclear power is unclean without mentioning either fission or fusion specifically. Your comment was begging for a caveat or some sort of “but.”
There is no indication at all that nuclear fusion is going to create harmful byproducts in the same way that fission does, and so make a comment that criticizes “nuclear power” as a whole is a very stupid thing to do overall.
I’ll also point out that the whole basis for your above comment was to cherry-pick one of the very worst examples of fission energy out there. Look up any modern plant, it’s cost per kilowatt hour, and it’s waste disposal procedure. A single poorly-designed nuclear power plant that predates the Kennedy admin doesn’t move the needle on fission power’s overall efficacy.
I’ll quote Steely Dan here: “Unhand that gun, begone. There’s no one to fire upon.”
As infuriating and frustrating it is to live in a world plagued with systemic issues, it’s important to recognize that many of the world’s problems can’t be traced back to a single person, government, organization, or ideology. Some things are just nobody’s fault, and can’t be solved be a mere change of leadership.
Every society in the world today, no matter how it is structured or who it is lead by, will be subject to a list of inevitable problems. Scarcity. Bigotry. Violence. Crime. Incompetence. Selfishness. The uncomfortable fact is that nobody knows how to structure a society such so that all citizens meet their basic needs in exchange for an amount of work that they find tolerable.
This is true of the United States, of Europe, of the Soviet Union, of China under the CCP, and of every other country to ever exist. Some countries are, of course, worse than others. But in many countries you find that people and politicians try in earnest to improve society and simply fall short, sometimes because they misidentify the core issues, and other times because they don’t have good enough ideas for solving them.
I encourage everyone to look at politics as groups of impassioned people with strong opinions about how their lives might be improved. At the end of the day, those of us with kind hearts are trying our best to defeat a common enemy, and merely differ in approach. I think a lot of people would do good to realize that.
U.S. lab says it repeated fusion energy feat — with higher yield (www.washingtonpost.com)
What is something you think leftists are not ready to hear but need to hear it?
That’s leftists. Not Democrats. Anyone to the left of Democratic socialist. So not Bernie Sanders either.