Saudi Arabia has sentenced to death a government critic who denounced alleged corruption and human rights abuses on social media, his brother and others familiar with the case told AFP on Monday.
The judgement was handed down against Mohammed al-Ghamdi in July by the Specialized Criminal Court, a secretive institution established in 2008 to try terrorism cases that has a history of unfair trials resulting in death sentences.
The charges against al-Ghamdi include conspiracy against the Saudi leadership, undermining state institutions and supporting terrorist ideology, sources briefed on the details of the case told AFP.
Why did we send a generations worth of our wealth to these people instead of developing solar and wind?
Conservatism. That’s why.
Better yet, go nuclear.
Same issue with providing countries
There are other alternatives to existing uranium-based nuclear power plants, like thorium which is much more abundant. Because nuclear isn’t mainstream in many places however, none of those alternatives have gained any steam to get built.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m for nuclear, and Thorium seems like a great alternative to uranium even if I haven’t researched it enough, but the issue with uranium is that it’s basically in dictatorships, just like oil
Current uranium reserves are expected to be depleted by the end of the century, at current use.
Fission as a serious replacement for just coal plants is a pipe dream without asteroid mining, and contrary to what people pretend we still don’t have a good answer for the waste, or what to do for developing nations that don’t have the human infrastructure to run them safely.
We need a global fusion research project and orbital solar. Simple as that.
Current uranium reserves are expected to be depleted by the end of the century, at current use.
More like somewhere between 200 years and a couple million years, assuming we fire back up and finish developing some 60-year old technologies.
Fission as a serious replacement for just coal plants is a pipe dream without asteroid mining.
pipe dream without asteroid mining
…Yeah, no. At least, not yet. Plus, the energetic and engineering challenges to just throw “asteroid mining” into the conversation are insane— So you’re burning either fossil or synthetic/biofuels for the launch, electric ion (which is itself insanely difficult and expensive) I presume (so, I.e. nuclear or solar) for in-orbit maneuvering, for rocks that aren’t even that that big and which you don’t even have the technology to do anything with.
We have most minerals in sufficient quantities in the Earth’s crust. And more importantly, we have the industrial processes to extract them efficiently. Fission is viable, has been for a long time, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
contrary to what people pretend we still don’t have a good answer for the waste.
It’s rocks. Processed “nuclear waste” is literally just rocks. (Well, technically it’s solid glass covered in welded steel.) It’s not like air pollution that we end up breathing in, and it’s not like the chemical waste from other industries (including from batteries and rare earth extraction) which finds its way to the water cycle where it then bioaccumulates. If you’re picturing a glowing green river, or a barrel full of leaking sludge— Well, that’s not it.
It can’t hurt you unless you powder it and huff it or build furniture with it or do something insanely stupid like that. And there are other much easier and more dangerous ways for malicious actors to hurt you too, that don’t involve breaking into secure facilities to steal the some of the heaviest elements known to exist.
Dig a big hole and toss the waste a kilometer or two down the Canadian Shield, and it will sit there inert for a billion years long after it’s burnt through all its dangerous levels of residual radioactivity.
We need a global fusion research project
We already have a couple of those. If everything goes perfectly for them, they might become commercially widespread right around the same time the hard-to-reverse effects of climate change might become truly apocalyptic in the second half of this century. If the past history of this field of research is any indication, they quite possibly won’t really work, will work but only a decade or two behind schedule and several times over budget, or will lead nowhere except for some media coverage that’s good for military-industrial stock prices or whatever.
This isn’t Sid Meier’s Civilization, where you can click “Global Fusion Research Project” and get a +100% boost to production after 20 turns. To quote Randall Munroe, “Magnetohydrodynamics combines the intuitive nature of Maxwell’s equations with the easy solvability of the Navier-Stokes equations”. Fusion is hard, or else we’d already be doing it, and though we know it’s definitely possible, there’s no guarantee of anything when it comes to actually engineering it.
orbital solar.
Uhh… No. Spending hundreds of millions of dollars to blast photovoltaics into an incredibly hostile environment, where they can’t even be cooled by dissipating into the atmosphere, is not probably going to bring energy costs down, at current or near-future technology levels.
Plus any system capable of precisely beaming terawatts of power from space into localized collectors on the planetary surface is (1) probably by definition an omnipresent death ray and (2) probably at least going to fuck up a lot of migrating birds and components of the atmosphere.
Simple as that.
…
We spent more on the Manhattan project than the disorganized fusion projects have spent in a decade, and will spend in the next decade as well.
Both are a pittance compared the US military’s current budget, much less global spending.
Thorium is a safe bet, but it also needs significant research.
On the other hand, why not both?
we still don’t have a good answer for the waste
Yes we do, because 95% of the waste is low level waste that is safe within a dozen years. This waste is currently almost entirely stored on site at every plant. These are things like paperwork, clothing, safety materials, etc. The remaining 5% high level waste that humanity has ever produced from all plants worldwide, the stuff that’s dangerous for thousands of years, would fit within an area the size of a football field.
Nuclear waste is a boogeyman just like nuclear power in general has become due to a poorly educated public and a ton of misinformation. Just look at the blowback from the recent Fukushima news regarding the release of radioactive water into the ocean bcause the holding tanks are finally running out of capacity. The treated water only has one radioactive isotope, Tritium, that can’t be filtered since it’s an isotope of Hydrogen, and that’s kid of a big part of water itself. It’s not uranium that nearly every damned comment I’ve seen online seems to assume. Tritum is a weak source of beta radiation, too weak to even penetrate the skin. The treated water is being diluted further with seawater and the plan will take decades to release the water off the coast through an undersea tunnel which would further dilute it. The resulting release would be lower than that of many currently operating plants that release similar water else where in the world every day. In addition, the half life of Tritium is only 12 years, and the oldest portions of this water which would be released first date back to the disaster in 2011, which is already 12 years ago now, so effectively the released water would already be halfway decayed. Numerous professors and nuclear experts have stated that the risk from this is nearly non-existent both to humans and to marine life. Yet people are stupid and panic about things they don’t understand.
People just aren’t educated about how radiation works, they only see the extreme cases because that’s what makes for good media. The media is absolutely fucking terrible now at anything that requires nuance or a true explanation. If it can’t be summarized in a simple catchy headline, and the public needs to get some ecuation to understand it properly, the media doesn’t care enough to report it properly. It won’t bring in that ad revenue from clicks online.
Yes, yes. A well done fusion plant is ∞ times better than covering tens of kilometers in solar panels or wind turbines.
Supporting something doesn’t mean I can’t acknowledge its cons
but the issue with uranium is that it’s basically in dictatorships
you have good intentions,
but
“our welth”? 🤡
Solar powered diesel trucks? How is that supposed to work?
Im struggling to see if you are serious and you don’t see how utterly stupid that question is or if you are playing the fool for comical reasons.
Electric semis dude. They are definitely coming.
Because oil is more efficient, simple as that
It was more profitable.
And? You make it sound like it isn’t obvious that oil is cheaper than investing in an experimental source of energy where not being in deficit is an achievement
experimental source of energy where not being in a deficit is an achievement
No one is talking about fusion here.
It’s not just fusion
This descriptor only applies to fusion.
The rest of renewables are pretty inefficient compared to oil tho
Or hear me out. Maybe we don’t give money to tyrants who kill their people who criticizing the government. It’s a crazy, novel idea, I know, but it’s possible.
Where do you think you get the resources to make a power generator from?
Its was short sighted, we could have been cutting edge leaders in the energy of the future, but we let oil refiners convince us that it was in our best interest to let China and others take that mantle. Now we lag behind. We could have used renewable technology and sanctions against hydrocarbon energy to shape the emerging markets of the world but noooooo let all that soft power slip away so oil barons can get more money. Oil was extremely expensive for all of us we just haven’t seen the true bill yet.
Our “ally”
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Saudís have been whitewashing their reputation for a while now.
Look at all the shenanigans during the World Cup and Liv Golf. They’ve bought governments and they’re not going anywhere.
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Don’t bash their prophets, bash their profits
Or Iraq them
That’s the dumbest fucking thing I heard in a while, and I just watched the GQP primaries.
Why would you do that to yourself?
Know your enemy
They’re not very enigmatic or opaque. It’s pretty obvious who and what they are without the need for self-torture.
Yeah I didn’t learn anything. My thought was to understand them better, but it was too vapid to learn anything.
Know both yourself and your enemies.
That’s a great Idea let created EVEN MORE TERRORIST GROUPS. BECAUSE WE DONT HAVE ENOUGH
like Jamal Khashoggi with extra steps
Hey remember all those times the US government did business with Saudi Arabia? I wish I could come up with something to say about that that wouldn’t get me visited by at least 9 letters worth of government agencies
Why did ?
As European, I’m laughing or crying, depend, to see we have turned Putin to this…
I wish I could come up with something to say about that that wouldn’t get me visited by at least 9 letters worth of government agencies
Lol what? Yeah, no. That’s silly.
What’s silly is that we keep voting for people who keep selling weapons to terrorists
Ok. Still not going to be visited by several alphabet agencies for criticizing Saudi Arabia on the internet LOL
And yet, dubai is advertisedd by many influencer as a dream place to live.
But it’s an autocratic hell, they live on the backs of slaves and they aren’t save from repercussions
Dubai isn’t in Saudi Arabia.
My bad, got them mixed up
Different country
Seems my Geographie is rusted, got it mixed up
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