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The civil nuclear power stuff that you refer to is just easily funded incremental refinement of the military applications from way back when, and those had huge
by fulafel 5y ago
The civil nuclear power stuff that you refer to is just easily funded incremental refinement of the military applications from way back when, and those had huge budgets that were risky bets. Especially if we account for compound interest of all that 40s and 50s fundamentals research and applications research money, representing the opportunity cost, it's.. a lot. And a lot of time to develop materials (60-70 years).
- orwin 5y agoAgree, but that's the reason why even replacing nuclear research with something else wouldn't have improved at all renewables (au contraire). Science is incremental. You wouldn't have any of the new materials research without nuclear research. Any. Because you can't understand them if you don't understand the atom, you can't observe them without the electronic microscope, you can't test the interactions without a collider. Also, scientific discoveries are either focused by the state/profit, or happenstance, luck and opportunity (if Einstein did not work at Bern's patent office, we wouldn't have taken an interest on time and space). And all the new material we think can revolutionize storage are lucky breaks. Supraconductors, especially the new ceramic ones, are complete luck. You could've throne any amount of money on graphene research, i'm pretty sure you wouldn't have had the technology we have now without luck (and electronic microscope). I'd say "but you're right, the war budget...", but i forgot that the war economy gave use the basics of the computer, new tools, and the cold war was even better for scientific discoveries.