Quote:
Robert M Watson Jr wrote:
Household power
My main point is coal is killing us for certain while well designed and built nuclear power plants are incomparably safer and suitable for long term high capacity needs.
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Yes, assuming they're well designed, well built, and I would add well operated and maintained.
People make mistakes. I think it's a pretty foolish enterprise to commit to a wide deployment of an extremely complicated technology when the negative impact of a failure is so high. Add to that the increased risk from transportation, processing and storage of very dangerous waste, which must be actively managed for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Yeah, dunno. Something will go wrong, somewhere. And the results will be nasty.
It's worth adding that many countries will struggle to do nuclear technology well. There are equity issues here. As always.
That said, risk is part of life, and maybe this will be one we have to take. However, I think it has to be seen as a last resort in the instance that we can't figure anything else out. If we can get fusion to work? That will be a new age.
As an aside - I reckon it's really interesting how the area around Chernobyl is now absolutely thriving as far as natural ecosystems go, since we're no longer there. Like most environmental issues - it's not really about the "planet", but us. Nature will be just fine. In my opinion the whole save the planet rhetoric underestimates (and I would add disrespects) how powerful and resilient life and nature is. It's more of the same anthropocentric arrogance that causes the problems in the first place. We may certainly struggle, though, when nature's feedback mechanisms go further down road of self correcting us out of existence.