Summary: <br> Denis Duff, author of the website <a href="http://bene.ie/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">Better Environment with Nuclear Energy</a>. He’s also a mechanical engineer with 30 years experience in ESB power generation, and is now an independent engineering consultant in Ireland and abroad. <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> I mentioned projections of how long global uranium <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">deposits – known and unknown – are likely to last</a>, at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption%20" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">current rate of consumption, in which nuclear provides 4 per cent of global energy</a>. <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> Death rates in energy production show that <a href="https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">by that measure, nuclear energy produces by a huge margin the lowest number of deaths per unit of electricity produced</a>, however as I pointed out, this does not include the deaths that may happen in the future that are attributable to nuclear power use now or in the past; Denis pointed out that the figures for fossil fuels don’t include any deaths arising from climate change.<br> <br> <br> <br> *****<br> <br> <br> <br> If, when I say <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">TikTok</a>, your mind goes to a<br> clock, then you are not in the demographic for TikTok, but if you’ve heard that<br> music in the background, screeching out of mobile phones in your house, then<br> somebody close to you probably is.<br> <br> <br> <br> TikTok is a video-sharing app, with a very<br> young demographic. It’s got something approaching a billion users, and that’s<br> not counting the users of a parallel app in China called Douyin, which is<br> basically identical, except firewalled off, to comply with Chinese censorship<br> laws.<br> <br> <br> <br> To put that in context, Facebook took<br> almost eight years to get to a billion users. TikTok won’t be three years old<br> until September.<br> <br> <br> <br> The videos are limited to 15 seconds in<br> duration, and as you might expect they normally center on music and youth<br> culture. If you want to feel old, download it and swipe through a few videos.<br> Users who get more than 1,000 followers unlock a feature that allows you to do<br> live streams to all of those followers, and broadcast live video to them. So<br> far, so standard social media.<br> <br> <br> <br> But the other aspect of TikTok is the<br> ability to <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/en/virtual-items" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">send virtual gifts</a>.<br> Basically users can send digital gifts to each other. In case you don’t know<br> what that is, it just means that a cute little symbol pops up on the user’s<br> screen. Obviously they don’t have any value, except when they do.<br> <br> <br> <br> Gifts have cute <a href="https://www.techjunkie.com/how-do-tiktok-gifts-work/" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">names like Panda,<br> Rainbow Puke, Sun Cream and Drama Queen</a>. But to send them, users must pay<br> for them, and the prices range from a few cents for the panda to almost €50 for<br> the Drama Queen. Remember that there is nothing of value here, apart from the<br> fact that young users seem to be willing to pay to send them.<br> <br> <br> <br> And they are sending them to TikTok stars,<br> those people with more than a thousand followers – or in some cases millions of<br> followers. Bytedance, the company that owns TikTok and its Chinese equivalent Douyin<br> seems to have hit on a formula that <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48725515" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">encourages young people to<br> hand over their money in return for very insubstantial benefits</a>, like<br> having their favourite tiktok star call out their name on a live stream.<br> <br> <br> <br>
