For a long time I've seen nuclear as a good environmental solution. It doesn't emit CO2, is reliable unlike most green solutions. It requires less mining per Joule of energy it produces vs some green methods that need rare Earth metals.

I've had one reason to be slightly against it for a while that I will get to secondly but before that I want to talk about the new reason, and as a lead up I need to talk about a connected third reason. So I'm not completely against nuclear power but there are maybe three reasons for me to be against it.

Precursor argument one is that it's not economical for grid power. If you guys don't know, Three Mile Island had two reactors. The one that made the news for a failure was shut down. But it's sibling reactor continued to operate until 2019. Why was it shut down in 2019? Because it loses money compared to cheaper natural gas.

That means it's not efficient. At least not as efficient. Something costing more means it used up more resources. Mined resources and energy. "But not everything that goes into a process is physical resources or energy. There is labor." Labor is a resource. That labor could be used to solve other problems. Same with capital and finance costs. Capital is a resource, the same argument applies.

So when you let the market stack up the costs for you and measure what resources it uses up natural gas is more efficient than nuclear.

So this brings us to where there is a market for nuclear energy if it doesn't outperform other forms of energy in the grid market.

Every new proposal for a nuclear plant in the US, something we haven't seen in years, are each have as their target consumer a single client. AI. Specifically for the kinds of firms that do things I don't like with AI. Centralized AI that seems to have maintaining control over what people think as one of its core ethical values.

So that's it. No nuclear that is going in today, or is being talked about going in, is going to power anything I like. It's only going to power things I see as having negative value for humanity. Rent seeking control over human thought is not a real economic output bettering people's lives. And if centralized AI is infeasible because the centralized power to pursue it is infeasible then that will change what AI develops into, into something I think will actually have value for individuals.

Not only will nuclear power give these people the advantage they need to win a culture war in AI but it also grows the scale of what data they can process through it. That's a bad thing. Larry Ellison from Oracle who is now on Project Stargate once said that with AI they will be able to correctly control citizens because there is and can be video feed of everything. They just need to process all of it. Then these misbehaviors whether legal or illegal can be punished by a corporate oligarchy with social credit scores. It sounds like made up fear porn but this is what this guy is actually for. He has no shame in saying it. "Citizens will behave" Larry Ellison. I think that's what project Stargate is. They need nuclear power to run transformer models over video, live, at the scale of a country. It may even be that nuclear power couldn't get them there. But they will get as far along their goal as power permits. So why would we permit more power, rather than less?

Now Microsoft is proposing to re-launch Three Mile Island just for their data centers.

Now my last argument against nuclear power that I've semi played around with in my head for years takes it in another direction.

Has anyone seen the WKUK sketch titled "Anarchy." In it the country has been taken over by anarchists and they are at the very beginning of creating an anarchist utopia. But bad news, there is an existing nuclear power plant that is going to need continued maintenance or everybody dies.

So my last and weakest argument against it is that it depends too much on large institutions to operate. The actual anarchist in me doesn't like solutions that create dependence on systems I don't like. I'm a little more relaxed in that view now because my confidence that private firms can run a nuclear plant with zero government involvement is much higher now.

But an interesting thing is created by this dependence in the current system. A system will always benefit those for whom that system depends on. If it didn't benefit them then those institutions would not get involved. Whoever a system depends on has leverage over that system. So not only does it create a dependence on government and other large centralized institutions with powers none of us peons can wield (I should try building a nuclear device), those are exactly who any specific nuclear project will benefit. The amount of discretionary permitting needed from the government to start a nuclear power plant means that plant must benefit them or not exist. And the only thing large institutions care about is cementing and expanding their power. So you never know in what way a particular new nuclear power plant does that, but it does.

Could the power it generates help reduce scarcity? Sure. But we no longer have material scarcity. Most of the remaining material scarcity we have is BS and a reflection of the one true remaining scarcity that will always exist. Power. Like political power. So if that particular kind of power plant only increases asymmetric power, and increases control, then it's not alleviating any scarcity I care about. In fact it's increasing it.. by shifting more of it away from me and people like me.

That doesn't mean I'm 100% against nuclear power. I still think it's cool as fuck. But sometimes I like to argue one side. So that's all my arguments for one side. Among them is definately not the nuclear waste problem. That problem is solved multiple ways if we'd just accept any of the answers.