“I shot a guy in the head, but then a different guy moved into the house where he lived, so it wasn’t that bad?”
Apparently, this is true.
Just WTF.
Mr Musk was talking about nuclear power with the former president when he said people have an unfounded fear of nuclear electricity generation. It is the “safest form of electricity generation”, he argued.
“People were asking me in California, are you worried about a nuclear cloud coming from Japan? I am like no, that’s crazy. It is actually, it is not even dangerous in Fukushima. I flew there and ate locally grown vegetables on TV to prove it," he said during the interview on his social media platform X on Monday.
Don’t know about solar but I know nuclear at least used to be statistically safer than wind per MW just due to injuries during construction. Gotta remember, it takes a lot of solar or wind to make the same amount of power as a nuclear plant and that means a lot of construction work. But I also haven’t seeen those stats for a while so it may have changed.
Nuclear is very safe assuming you don’t build the plant in a tsunami prone area which also happens to be practically on top of 4 different fault lines.
Here’s the argument. The byline every conservative I’ve talked to falls back on is “there’s no way to recycle the materials and they don’t last that long”. “Where’s my recycling?” “Same with wind turbine blades”.
You start to notice the repetition of the same statements across republicans when you talk to any number of them.
The repetition is a bit creepy, but this is how conservative talk radio works. They are fantastic at mobilizing their peeps and this is part of how they do it.
Remember, Trump thinks windmills give you cancer.
https://www.factcheck.org/2019/04/trumps-faulty-wind-power-claims/
Although he is far from a great person and his comparison with Hiroshima and Nagasaki is at best tactless and a downplay of a humanitarian catastrophe caused by the US, he got a point there…
Nuclear energy is by far the cleanest and one of the safest forms of energy generation. We have a problem with the spend fuel, but that is mostly due to the „not in my backyard“-Attitude and outdated informations regarding long term storage. Nuclear radiation is scary but handling it in a responsible way is much safer than perceived. On the other hand, the huge number of respiratory diseases and accompanied deaths are much more diffuse and not directly attributed by the public to fossile fuels. I think „Kurzgesagt“ has a really good video series covering nuclear energy.
It is a little sad that with all the necessary (and important) regulations the building process of a nuclear power plant is really long and public support (at least in Germany) is non existent. It could have covered our butts during the transition from fossile fuels to renewables.
404 that clip not found 🤔
“The injured were sprawled out over the railroad tracks, scorched and black. When I walked by, they moaned in agony. ‘Water… water…’
I heard a man in passing announce that giving water to the burn victims would kill them. I was torn. I knew that these people had hours, if not minutes, to live. These burn victims – they were no longer of this world.
‘Water… water…’
I decided to look for a water source. Luckily, I found a futon nearby engulfed in flames. I tore a piece of it off, dipped it in the rice paddy nearby, and wrang it over the burn victims’ mouths. There were about 40 of them. I went back and forth, from the rice paddy to the railroad tracks. They drank the muddy water eagerly. Among them was my dear friend Yamada. ‘Yama- da! Yamada!’ I exclaimed, giddy to see a familiar face. I placed my hand on his chest. His skin slid right off, exposing his flesh. I was mortified. ‘Water…’ he murmured. I wrang the water over his mouth. Five minutes later, he was dead.
…
Everywhere, as far as my eyes could reach, all the houses had collapsed, all the trees and electric poles had been broken down. About two kilometres away, around the spot which later proved to be the explosion centre, thick dark smoke whirled up from a sea of yellowish dust.
I remained stunned, completely stunned. The next moment I heard a faint groan, then disconnected words that seemed to come up from the bottom of the earth: “Yuko . . . dead . . . I’m dying . . . don’t stay …” It was my wife, but it was not anything like a voice uttered by a human being: it was a voice squeezed out from the last bit of life in death’s grip. “What? Be strong now! . . . Where are you? Where are you?” As if in reply, a pile of tangled timbers moved with a creaking noise. Bleeding all over, my wife stood upright, with our two-month-old baby tightly in her arms.
All around us we heard shouting, groaning, cursing, voices calling father, voices calling mother, voices in search of brothers and sisters. All over the central part of town flames were shooting out as if the earth’s crust had been ripped open. And these sorely burnt men and women all in stark nakedness! It was as if our corrupt world had come to an end, giving way to hell. My wife was most painfully wounded. On her whole body were stuck countless fragments of glass, large and small, that reflected pallid lights like a glittering spearhead of a demon. She could see nothing.
I took my wife on my back, and held the baby on my left arm. We walked three hundred metres, stepping barefooted on the debris and broken sheets of glass that went to pieces under our weight, and took refuge on a sand bank in a river where the tide had ebbed. Here we joined hundreds of suffering people, and the sound of the frantic search of parents for their children was heartrending enough to make one giddy.
…
But it wasn’t that bad, right?
is this your source? - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima
if not I’m curious to read the full source text please.
Yeah, the bombs’ effects were horrific. It’s absolutely amazing that even that level of devastation was able, in the balance, to save lives.
The prevailing sentiment was that the Japanese would not surrender until their home islands were totally conquered. Their government was in the process of preparing the civilian population to fight to the death. (Research the invasion of Okinawa if you want to know what a US invasion of the main island would have been like.) In a version of the trolley dilemma, the American rational was that the loss of life in two horrific attacks that would shock the Japanese into surrender was less evil than the alternative of invading their home islands.
I’m not making that argument, or saying there were no alternatives, just that the Americans were weighing the loss of life (including civilians) involved in a nuclear bombing against the loss of life (including civilians) in invading the islands.
Notwithstanding other unthought of solutions, the strategy worked, and the apparent alternative would have been brutal.
They did not save any lives, that is a completely made up invention. In fact Imperial Japan cared little about the atomic bomb, and even if a land invasion had become necessary, the USA had made a deal with the USSR to invade on land.
This was the real reason for the bombings, not to beat Japan into submission, which Roosevelt’s deal with the USSR for a land invasion ensured, but to show the USSR the destructive power the US held. Truman was a staunch anticommunist, and refused to let the USSR play the part Roosevelt negociated in a land invasion.
It was a war crime with no benefits at all except to show off to the USSR, who would develop nukes themselves 4 years later anyway. An absolute tragedy which proved to be entirely useless.
Did he just say the Atomic bombs were not that bad??? The Fucking ATOMIC BOMBS?!
Can we just drop one on his house now?
This is the same guy who told Steven Colbert he wants to nuke the Martian poles.
To which Colbert replied, “Are you SURE you’re not a supervillain?”
That was in 2016.
To be fair, that’s not totally outlandish and no one lives on Mars. It’s a fast way to inject heat. Is it actually a good idea with the radiation? Idk. I’ve seen it proposed for terraforminf before though.
The collateral damage would be awful. Don’t punish people for being unlucky enough to live next to Musk.
I know it wasn’t. I still feel bad that he likely has neighbors.
Imaging having to live next door to him after the bullshit with the X sign at twitter headquarters.
I didn’t want to take this at face value without context so I found when they discussed this. Check around 1:17:00 in this video.
https://youtu.be/lfBQoWxQaEM?si=6Ev6rx62KESH-HgR
And yeah, he did say exactly what the OP states. So… yeah.
To give the absolute benefit of the doubt, I could say they were referring specifically to nuclear fallout rather than the initial explosion, as a full on explosion is less likely in a nuclear plant emergency. But even assuming it was just an incredibly distasteful way to reference that, there are still thousands of deaths and even more injuries/illnesses associated principally with radiation poisoning.
This is not to say I’m against nuclear energy, but by god we’ve got to have more careful consideration than this.
Edit: As a bonus, Musk talks about his views on global warming around the 1:10 mark. The issue with greenhouse gasses is, uh… making it hard to breathe?
For more context: hes comparing nuclear energy disasters like chernobyl to the bombings of japan, saying that because those cities recovered therefore people are wrong about chernobyl still being uninhabitable and that people shouldn’t be so scared of nuclear energy. Hes not saying bombing cities isnt so bad in general, just that its not as bad as how “(((they)))” say it is at chernobyl. Nevemind the fact that even if chernobyl was able to rebound it still would’ve been a major and tragic disaster!
This actually perfectly demonstrates his lack of knowledge and ability to perceive himself unduly as an intelligent person because of his financial success. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were able to rebuild and the nuclear fallout was short-lived because the bombs were detonated miles above the ground to maximize their immediate devastation, while the chernobyl reactor exploded on/in the ground and there is still uncontained radioactive material within the compound because it is basically impossible to clean up.
Also, the comments on that video are depressing.
I haven’t watched the video - so I’m going on what is said above, but its like these billionaires are not seeing people as human. They see that after Hiroshima people live in the city but cannot understand that those people weren’t fungible. We didn’t replace them - they are different people.
Two other small points, but first a caveat - I’m very pro civil nuclear power.
It simply isn’t possible for any nuclear power plant to explode like a nuclear bomb. That can’t happen - like my car contains an engine but can’t fly like a plane. There have been nuclear leaks and chemical explosions in nuclear plants - these are bad. However, they are very different things from what happened to Japan.
Modern nuclear weapons would have much higher yields and probably fallout. Here’s a terrifying tool for the morbidly curious:
