Bernardo Kastrup is the executive director of Essentia Foundation. His work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially mental.
If you’re looking for people well off the mainstream, you’ve found one. Author of such books as Why Materialism Is Baloney and Rationalist Spirituality. I mean, there’s contrarian and there’s cuckoo for cocoa puffs, and Kastrup appears to be in the latter category.
What precisely is my “extreme” view about contrarians?
And that is the point too, incidentally his bio pointed out that he has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), so one has to notice here that you prejudged what he said about Hossenfelder. Bad form there.
And that is the radical thing, one has to be humble and realize that contrarians may have a point, but that they have a higher standard to follow, elsewhere I noticed that she has dismissed a lot of climate science modeling, and therefore, a lot of what needs to be done, problem is that she concentrates in extreme events and misses that in general, the issue of not worrying about climate change is not as muddy as she makes it to be.
To be honest, I read only enough to discover it was about some kind of YouTube drama which I’m not interested in. It didn’t appear to have anything to do with actual physics. I’m just surprised you would cite someone well into crank territory when trying to argue against contrarian positions. I also laughed a bit at the " Bernardo Kastrup, PhD, PhD" at the top. Who does that?
So… you agree with me? That contrarians shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand?
I’m not sure what specifically you’re referring to, or even in “which direction” you think she’s muddied the picture. What she’s said–and which shouldn’t be contrarian–is that we’re obviously going to blow past the 1.5 C targets, and given economic realities we’re going to be in immense trouble if we stick to a “just cut fossil fuels” strategy. We almost certainly need geoengineering.
It’s about her still trying to push the pretty much discredited hidden variables theory, long past its sell-by date, in the face of numerous recent experiments that pretty conclusively rule them out.
Experiments don’t rule out superdeterminism. The no-hidden-variables proof relies on the idea that experimental choices are independent from each other.
Critics argue that adopting superdeterminism breaks all of science–how could we know anything if there’s a “conspiracy” that alters our measurements? But that’s not really an argument, just a form of wishful thinking.
Experiments have verified Bell’s Theorem rule out local hidden variable interpretations but do not (and cannot) invalidate non-local hidden variable interpretations, and in fact they are functionally equivalent to pilot wave theory (de Broglie-Bohmian mechanics), which is widely considered a leading interpretation along with the ‘standard’ Copenhagen interpretation (which doesn’t actually allow for any realism, local or otherwise), and the relative state (a.k.a Everett-DeWitt ‘Many Worlds interpretation’). People have spent decades arguing over various interpretation of quantum mechanics without defining any means of actually uniquely falsifying down to a particular interpretation, and if there were non-local hidden variables it would be definitionally impossible to inspect them within a quantum system, so it is kind of a pointless thing to argue about
Regardless, Hossenfelder is not an expert on nuclear power engineering, and as noted above skips on many salient aspects of practicalities of expanding fission power production which can be understood by reading any introductory text on nuclear engineering such as Murray and a basic understanding of the challenges of technical infrastructure development.
Again, by the ‘Nature of Wrong’, it is that when a contrarian is dismissed that that, has not the same value as when a contrarian dismisses the “status quo”; what you miss is that giving a contrarian dismissal the same value as a dismissal of what is “the status quo” is, is what Asimov noted what is wrong.
Guess then what tool we will also need to use to judge if a geoengineering solution will be ok? By using the models that she disparages…
Yeah but they do it with carbon offsets which to me indicates they have merely made a marketing decision that money spent on offsets (resulting in increased “green goodwill”) will be offset itself by greater sales, name recognition, and market share.
I am not a vegan or vegetarian but it seems to me that while you can mitigate the environmental degradation from agriculture/horticulture you can never keep it from happening at all. I think it’s disingenuous to call your milk “carbon-free”.
You’ve completely misunderstood Asimov’s point. It has nothing to do with contrarians. If anything, it’s making the exact opposite point you’re (seemingly?) trying to make.
Asimov is simply pointing out that there are degrees of wrongness. Every scientific theory, for all time, is wrong. Epicycles were wrong, Copernicus was wrong, Kepler was wrong, Newton was wrong, and Einstein was wrong (General Relativity happens to be the best theory of planetary motion we have, but we know it can’t be quite right).
But despite all of them being wrong, they were not all wrong to the same degree. Einstein is very close to being right, and we can’t yet perform an experiment showing otherwise, except that we know the theory must break down some of the time. Epicycles failed out of the gate, even if they had some predictive value.
And, Asimov says, anyone who cannot perceive these degrees of wrongness–or worse, uses it to somehow claim that science isn’t progressing, or that some whack-a-doodle claim isn’t any worse than a highly predictive theory–is more wrong than all of the rest put together.
As it happens, scientific revolutions are led by contrarians, virtually by definition. So each step in any chain of increasingly accurate theories likely has one at the helm. While some progress is made incrementally–people developed ever more accurate versions of epicycles as they incorporated more observation–the real jumps were by those who threw out the old ways and went in a different direction (bound only by consistency with the evidence).
Which climate models is she disparaging? She’s spent some time pointing out the limits of modeling–especially when interpreted through the lens of the mass media–but that’s hardly disparaging anything.
Uh, that is my line, the issue is that you are not noticing that basically thinking that a contrarian is as likely to be right as the establishment is, isn’t a good idea. Because, yes, the evidence has to be consistent.
Just to stick to the point, what @Stranger_On_A_Train has mentioned about Hossenfelder, should be enough to notice that her issues with the practicalities about nuclear power shows that it’s less likely to see her leading a revolution on that front, neither in the climate change one. for all we know, she does disparage climate modelers and deniers enjoy that profitable contrarianism. Only that it does ignore that others do continue to make progress. And as Richard Alley showed on his linked video, what Hossenfelder omits is how in general models where very good in the past to predict what was going to happen in general, what I noticed many times in the past is contrarians like her disparaging models as if there is no progress being made also in the prediction and attribution of extreme events.
Here I should mention that by experience on reading and discussing nuclear and climate issues, the biggest issue I have with her is that ignoring the harmful effects that are more likely in general and betting that yet other harmful effects (like extreme events) will be less intense or numerous in a warming world, is a very reckless bet.
Partly true. I understand the NRC reformed its procedures this century. But even during the 1990s, standardization could have played a big role in limiting cost overruns, something that has plagued US designs and every other country including Canada, at least for their first reactor. Admittedly that’s not an on-budget expense, so any US advocate of standardization would have to base their argument on fewer expected surprises, a tougher sell.
I think it’s significant that the Energy Policy Act of 2005 was supported heavily by industry and was suppose to usher in a nuclear renaissance. There was no shortage of political will: it included subsidies that in the words of the economist John Quiggin, the “developers of wind and solar power could only dream of”. Ok, that got us Vogtle. But there was no nuclear renaissance. Which makes me think that the US nuclear industry was never quite clear on the concept.1
Since then, the Inflation Reduction Act has boosted subsidies further. We very well might see a few more plants built, mainly because data centers want green and reliable energy – both at the same time.
1Eg: Nuclear power is creature of big government. No nuclear power plant has ever been built anywhere in the world without massive subsidies. It’s entirely non-coincidental that Vogtle was built by an old-fashioned regulated utility, and not within a deregulated energy market.
ETA:
Apologies to everyone. I posted this fission story to the fusion thread. Dang-nammit. I should have posted it here: Nuclear Power News and Debates I’ll report this mess to the mods.
Certainly a good development. I hope they succeed.
TerraPower previously worked on the “travelling-wave reactor,” which wouldn’t have needed uranium enrichment. At least hypothetically. They seem to have abandoned that for now.
The “Natrium” sodium reactor has a molten salt storage system. Should be a good combination with renewables. The issue that nuclear reactors face with respect to renewables is that they’re base load–but that means they’re generating even when solar, etc. are at their peak. Ideally, they’d be complementary with renewables, producing only at night or when the wind has died down. You can achieve this with batteries, but that’s expensive. Thermal systems have been tried before but they’re inefficient if you have to produce the heat with electricity. But if you’re already starting with heat (and nuclear reactors run pretty hot, obviously), then thermal storage starts to make sense. They can produce heat 24/7 but only use it for electricity when required.
All that said… I’m skeptical that they can scale this up as rapidly as needed. Solar+batteries are just growing too quickly for anything else to make a dent. We may be reaching a point where batteries are cheaper than the equivalent vat of molten salt and required support equipment.
Seems like it should help. As for “too little, too late”–well, I think the bulk of the renewable energy transition will be handled by solar+batteries, but it’s not going to be a seamless one. Extremely cheap energy will unlock some interesting industries, but it will only be cheap at peak times. I expect there will be times where consumption will have to be curtailed so that more critical uses still have energy when the sun isn’t shining.
That is still an easy trade compared to the worst consequences of climate change, and so we should absolutely still go that route. But it would be nice to eventually solve the intermittency problem as well, and that means power sources that aren’t so variable. So even if a nuclear rampup is still a few decades out–too late for a meaningful impact on the overall course of climate change–it’s still valuable, assuming we can avoid the worst of it in the shorter term.
Still pretty sure we’ll need some geoengineering. Maybe China will do it if we don’t.
Saw this tweet, which really puts the waste problem into perspective:
It’s not ideal, but we can go for centuries before really solving the waste problem.
Those might indeed be the spent fuel casks. The rest of the radioactive waste of that plant, including its eventual decommissioning and dismantling, would be a decent sized hill by comparison.
True enough, but when people get up in arms about nuclear waste, this is the stuff they’re thinking of. Or trying to get others to imagine.
The low-level waste may not even be much above background radiation levels. It’s certainly not possible to use for a dirty bomb, nuclear weapon, etc. It might slightly increase your likelihood of cancer if you stood next to it for long enough. Just bury it so no one can stand next to it.
I mostly agree. When “nuclear waste” is latex gloves the techs used while drawing water, yeah, just bury that crap 5 feet down and forget about it until next year when it’ll be non-radioactive.
When “nuclear waste” is the plumbing that used to be the primary cooling loop before the reactor was decommissioned and disassembled, well, that’s a different kettle of much longer-lived isotopes. And a much greater mass of them. But despite the greater hazards it does represent, you’re certainly correct that it doesn’t represent a true proliferation hazard. Nobody is going to reprocess that used high tech steel into bomb fuel.
Our opposition leader has been caught in the lie that a small modular nuke only makes enough waste in a year to fill one Coke can. It turns out that is the amount of fuel needed to power one person’s needs for a year; the actual volume of waste is much higher, in the order of tonnes.
