So he’d rather let his country burn than accept help and possibly lose face with his supporters.
That man has a small penis.
I wonder if he’d declare war if foreign countries flew firefighting planes over the fire and dropped extinguishing chemicals. Probably.
You’re giving him too much credit. He isn’t refusing the money out of pride; he’s refusing because he wants to burn the rainforest down while keeping some deniability that he’s doing it intentionally.
Stolen for parts?
Eaten by a sea monster.
West end of the Baltic Sea, eh?
I know what people would have said about an “environmental monitoring station” during the Cold War.
Viral marketing for the up-coming Godzilla movie.
Nope, capital cost and catastrophic risk still mean nuclear generation of electricity is the same public/private investment scam it’s always been.
Building new ones? Absolutely true.
But the ones that are already running might as well stay running for their scheduled operating life. The costs have been sunk; they’re low-carbon-footprint energy sources. Not using that capacity would amount to pouring more carbon into the air for no good reason.
Wasn’t there a sea cucumber at the bottom of the Mariana Trench? Doesn’t that mean familiar life can exist in the depths?
Well… as familiar as anything in the crawling chaos of the sea.
You’d enjoy it. It’s basically this:
Sunk cost is usually considered a fallacy. The financial cost to the public is the most likely to blow up anyway, as it is a byproduct of the highly developed nature of the technology. As the things age and operations get cut further to the bone, other risks might do some things, but the financial risk of past and future misdeeds on these projects is a certainty. Just think of the timeline of operations, the accruing future cost of the waste, the concentration of financial and policy-making power. It’s classic fail-cycling of elites.
“we can’t afford to put this widget into production at this time, Let’s melt all the tooling down and sell it for scrap value.”
The decision rarely hinges so dramatically.
It’s the remaining cost that matters. If these can’t be retro-fitted with adequate safety systems, that’s too high. If they can, it might not, and may be wiser to keep these in operation.
… When used to deflect from the future costs, sure.
If you’re eight billion dollars into a program, it’s going to cost four billion more, and you can get the same thing functional for two, then yes, it’s a sunk cost fallacy to insist that you should get something for the money already spent.
When something is already operational, then, unless the operating costs are higher than the total cost of ownership for a new solution, it’s not a sunk cost fallacy to wonder why we shouldn’t use this thing we poured so much money into.
Especially when you need to factor that, until we have full renewable options built out, any kWh that we don’t generate using a currently-functional nuclear plant will have to be made up with coal, or natural gas, and thus you have to add the future cost of the CO2 you’re pumping into the air to that TCO.
Nuclear fuel is not a fixed cost set at construction, for example, and creates a focus for financial risk given that so many costs are low-balled for the sake of greed and political expediency, and nuclear fuel processing, as a business, is known to be a shitshow of opportunities to get it wrong.
Other oddities of nuclear technology include… the metallurgy of the systems is estimated to be one thing, but because the system creates chemistry as it goes, the reality ends up being something else. There is really no such thing as a corrosion-proof system when all of the dynamics of inorganic chemistry are in play.
And then there’s just regular old fraud, waste, mismanagement and skimming to mix with that.
Don’t get me wrong, submarine reactors and space-exploration RTGs are great, good applications that can also go wrong. They aren’t really something that can take down a regional economy.