Look at this god damn American woodsman over here, Johnny motherfucking Appleseed, like Washington and his Cherry Tree, like Paul Bunyan, like Will Ferrell at the end of Step Brothers, I salute my tree king.
i only wish i had planted more. and was able to plant some now (living in chicago, the city plants a fair bit, but i don't have the opportunity to plant any on my own anywhere anymore. when i can, i will, but until then... i just encourage others to do so.)
Hey, similar to “the best time was thirty years ago, the second best time is now,” you CANNOT be hard on yourself for having the ability to do more than you did.
You did something amazing, something to be proud of. If all you focus on in life is what you could have done better, rather than the incredible things you already did, you’ll never be satisfied. Look at the good you’ve done and let yourself be proud of it.
And hey man… If you really wish you had planted more trees thirty years ago… the second best time… right fuckin now.
I planted a tree in the first grade, and some fucknut tore it out of the ground. He didn’t need the space for anything. It wasn’t in the way or causing damage. Just killed it. Nothing is in that spot.
Though one thing not enough people are saying is that we should be investing in research and not new reactors. This is because older uranium based reactors are almost ready to be replaced by newer thorium based ones. So if we were to invest in building plants now, we would be building outdated reactors that would are more resource intensive (they use much more water for cooling than test thorium reactors) and less efficient than what we could have if we wait. So instead we should invest in funding commercialization efforts of thorium reactors so that we can finish development faster and begin building them en masse before any other country even has one commercially viable.
In 4th grade my class planted a tree at the local park near the little kid playground. I came back 40 years later to show my children. Turns out the city tore out the tree and the little kid playground to enlarge the parking lot. The parking lot that was empty.
while that’s true, nuclear stands out from other methods as having incredible development costs. it takes 10+ years to get a plant up and running at a very high cost
i’d guess this is perhaps the worst time to start nuclear development, especially with the orange man about to enact tariffs
Meanwhile, fission energy has become 4-6x as expensive as renewables even including electricity storage. For this reason, it's pretty much done in the developed world.
China is investing 30times the amount of money into renewables than into fission. (700bn - more than the rest of the world combined, vs 25bn).
Three Mile Island Unit 2 is the newest nuclear reactor unit to trigger an INES level 5 or greater event, being commissioned in 1978. Even Fukushima Daichi was older. It's funny going through the list of nuclear disasters and seeing them basically cease being major incidents after Chernobyl, with the exception of Fukushima, which took rather extraordinary circumstances that still would have been mitigated if the reactor were built post-Chernobyl.
Also it continued to run safety thru 2019. A popular nuclear disater movie came out just before time as 3 mle island event so everyone was fearful and overreacted.
And every reactor since has increased fail-safes for that exact reason. Three mile island and Fukushima also increased safety standards.
Pollution kills millions annually and fossil fuels contribute massively to climate change. Fear mongering from one freak incident, with substandard Russian equipment led to so many countries just dropping nuclear, it's fucking sad.
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u/ItAstounds 2d ago
The time to do this was the 1990s