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Unless we invent Nuclear Energy and do what France did in the 1970's and build a handful of reactors which provided for almost all of their energy needs, which

Unless we invent Nuclear Energy and do what France did in the 1970's and build a handful of reactors which provided for almost all of their energy needs, which uses a small amount of fuel plentifully found in Australia and Canada and which will last for 1000's of years, and, for which we actually do have feasible ways to store waste.

dboreham 5y ago
Just remember not to lie to everyone about the relative safety of your plants.
- elihu 5y ago
  That's the hard part, though. I think the debate about whether or not to use nuclear is less about whether we can design a safe reactor, and more about whether we can design a human organizational structure to maintain the reactors over their whole lifetime in such a way that people who don't have specialized knowledge can be highly confident that the reactors are being managed in a safe way. The model of having a for-profit company run the plant with a government regulator looking over their shoulder works most of the time, but it breaks down when the regulators become too friendly with the industry they oversee (regulatory capture). Maybe there are other, better models. We don't have the same risk with wind and solar because the damage that can be done with a broken windmill or malfunctioning solar array is much less. The public doesn't have to trust the operators to the same degree.
erentz 5y ago
Thought recently seen somewhere but don’t know who to credit: If nuclear power were just discovered yesterday, we’d all be hailing it as the miracle to solve climate change.
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  The problem with climate change is it doesn't kill people quick enough for us to take action. Covid on the other hand, we rushed out vaccines and people have generally accepted massive disruption to their lives to tame it. Even with Covid not all governments wanted to react quickly. If we treated climate change like covid, we'd be finding a way to create lots of nuclear reactors around the world really quickly. We might even create a few hundred of them in the middle of Australia and use it to make hydrogen or some other fuel and ship it around.
  - erentz 5y ago
    Yep. The thought experiment does a good job I think of highlighting just how much being linked to nuclear weapons and thus became a target for peace and environmental action has screwed us. Take that history away, drop this gift from the universe in our lap yesterday, and every environmentalist would be on board today.
    - quickthrower2 5y ago
      Yes that and Chernobyl too creates a bad image of nuclear.

dboreham 5y ago

Just remember not to lie to everyone about the relative safety of your plants.

elihu 5y ago
That's the hard part, though. I think the debate about whether or not to use nuclear is less about whether we can design a safe reactor, and more about whether we can design a human organizational structure to maintain the reactors over their whole lifetime in such a way that people who don't have specialized knowledge can be highly confident that the reactors are being managed in a safe way. The model of having a for-profit company run the plant with a government regulator looking over their shoulder works most of the time, but it breaks down when the regulators become too friendly with the industry they oversee (regulatory capture). Maybe there are other, better models. We don't have the same risk with wind and solar because the damage that can be done with a broken windmill or malfunctioning solar array is much less. The public doesn't have to trust the operators to the same degree.

erentz 5y ago

Thought recently seen somewhere but don’t know who to credit: If nuclear power were just discovered yesterday, we’d all be hailing it as the miracle to solve climate change.

quickthrower2 5y ago
The problem with climate change is it doesn't kill people quick enough for us to take action. Covid on the other hand, we rushed out vaccines and people have generally accepted massive disruption to their lives to tame it. Even with Covid not all governments wanted to react quickly. If we treated climate change like covid, we'd be finding a way to create lots of nuclear reactors around the world really quickly. We might even create a few hundred of them in the middle of Australia and use it to make hydrogen or some other fuel and ship it around.
- erentz 5y ago
  Yep. The thought experiment does a good job I think of highlighting just how much being linked to nuclear weapons and thus became a target for peace and environmental action has screwed us. Take that history away, drop this gift from the universe in our lap yesterday, and every environmentalist would be on board today.
  - quickthrower2 5y ago
    Yes that and Chernobyl too creates a bad image of nuclear.