3 ms·
Sadly, the actually-plausible generational risks don't get anywhere near this care. A breached nuclear cask in the very specific case that civilisation has col
by adhesive_wombat 3y ago
Sadly, the actually-plausible generational risks don't get anywhere near this care.
A breached nuclear cask in the very specific case that civilisation has collapsed and lost all knowledge of nuclear material and signage is a limited local event. Low impact on a societal level (admittedly high on the guy with the hand tools cutting into it) and low probability.
Climate change is a probability-1 event that affects everyone. So is plastic pollution. For that matter, indeed, lack of affordable housing probably will end up with worse consequences projected into the far future than a hypothetical deep-time grave-robbing mishap.
While doing a good job of handling nuclear waste is obviously extremely important, handwringing over the effect on a contrived far-future devolved society to the extent that we inhibited the one power source that could have avoided the latter 70 years of the fossil fuel boom in the first place, a boom which actually has plausible civilisation-scale effects, seems backwards.
Admittedly it's now getting to the point where non-nuclear non-fossil energy may be the cheaper and scalable option (pending a mind-boggling but physically-possible amount of storage) so maybe the moment for a nuclear-based energy system has passed. I don't really buy it and still think only nuclear is likely to deliver the energy needed over the next 100 years, including decarbonisation of heating, industry, transport and also possibly environmental remediation. In any case, assuming human civilisation retains knowledge of the 20th and 21st centuries, they're going to be wondering what the hell we were thinking between the 1950s and the 2050s when we had nuclear energy in our hands and nearly destroyed the biosphere anyway by choice (and that "nearly" is only there because this assumes enough of it survives for someone to be looking back in the first place).