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It was in my school text book in the 80s. My conclusion, back then: nuclear power was the obvious answer. Of course sensible people were going go to solve this,
by tpmx 4y ago
It was in my school text book in the 80s. My conclusion, back then: nuclear power was the obvious answer. Of course sensible people were going go to solve this, since the technology was available...
That's how I felt about this as a politically native teenager in 1988, 2 years after Chernobyl, in Sweden which got a pretty large portion of the fallout. We couldn't eat moose meat for a few years, but we survived anyway, somehow.
I had given up on people accepting nuclear power, but now it's finally getting really, really popular.
- phone8675309 4y agoSwiftian modest proposal: Kill and eat all those against nuclear power. That'll flatten the curve on climate change, we'll finally be able to build nuclear power, and we'll solve world hunger.
- tpmx 4y agoI have to admit that I did not think of this brilliant idea in my early teens. Shame, really.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago“Soylent green is nuclear energy protestors” ?
- tharne 4y agoI can't believe how many people are still out there cheerleading nuclear power after watching what's happening in Ukraine. Nuclear power is great until you have a large-scale conflict in the vicinity of one of your plants. Then, one stray missile and you've got an enormous nuclear disaster on your hands.
- andromeduck 4y agoRenewables are much worse. Large scale disasters wikke make Chernobyl look like a joke and the brittleness of a long range transmission dependent solar/wind geoid woud have cast all of Europe into darkness.
- fwungy 4y agoPeople love James Hansen except for the part where he says nuclear power has to be part of the answer.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoObvious things are often wrong. There is insufficient uranium 235 to run the world and closed fuel cycles are even more expensive than PWRs that don't catch fire or shut down constantly due to corrosion. Wind was available and proven viable (albeit slightly more expensive in the first prototype than coal with no emissions controls) before the first fission reactor. The first practical (albeit misunderstood) PV array was 1906. A fraction of the investment put renewables further down the learning curve than nuclear. If these myths about nuclear were true, then china would not be building a single gas or coal plant right now. They have all the ingredients present in the US mythical golden age. Uranium mined by enslaved indigenous people and colonised foreigners with no safety, a government capable of steamrolling any opposition, a massive highly experienced and underpaid construction workforce, many recently built reactors, no environmental regulation, pressure and funding from military interests for plutonium. And yet they are constructing more coal than nuclear and an order of magnitude more renewables than both combined. Why? > I had given up on people accepting nuclear power, but now it's finally getting really, really popular You're confusing your own shilling in an echo chamber for popularity. Just because the industry is astroturfing like crazy and now has the backing of the fossil fuel industry's propaganda machine doesn't make it popular.