I am sure there is a topic somewhere on it in these forums, but didn't want to "necro" an old post. Makes some people grumpy for some odd reason.
Don't worry about it. Frankly, as a Moderator, I would much prefer posts to be added to an existing thread. This makes it easier for people to review the entire discussion and avoid repeating what's already been said. That's what makes me grumpy!
To the rest, what is your opinion about nuclear energy?
I think it is the only short-term (~300 years) solution to our energy problem.
The only long-term solution is to build giant solar collectors in orbit and beam the energy down in microwave form. The problem with this is that it will be the largest project ever undertaken by mankind--by more than one order of magnitude. This will require international cooperation on a scale we've never come close to achieving in the past. We'll have to wait a while until the United Nations is more than a page in a stamp collector's album before we can even think about launching it. And then of course it will take more than a century to complete--assuming that we'd like to reserve some of our labor and capital for other purposes such as producing food.
So until then we'll have to make do. First with fossil fuels until our entire species begins to notice the needle hovering near "Empty." Then we'll have no choice but to shout down the objections, grit our teeth, and get serious about nuclear power.
Why do you think society, generally, has a negative feeling about nuclear energy?
Hiroshima, Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl, Ahmadinejad's grandiose visions, a poorly managed former Soviet arsenal--yatta yatta. "Nuclear" means "DANGER!" to the whole human race, even the ones who can pronounce it correctly. More to the point, we don't trust either corporations or governments to do a proper job of risk analysis and risk management--with good reason.
But even if we can reduce the probability of an accident to something that people can live with (which is more a matter of spin doctoring than actual engineering, considering that every American seems to be quite content with a 2% probability of a drunk driver being his cause of death) the real issue for many of us is waste disposal. Civilization has only existed on this planet for a little over 10,000 years, and the oldest
continuous civilization only goes back 4,000 years. Can our descendants be trusted to remember where the waste dumps are, to be able to read the warning signs, and to not still have dysfunctional corporations that will take a chance of exposing the waste in order to pursue some hare-brained profit-making scheme? Or to not have fought World War III or IV and finally bombed themselves back to the Stone Age, so there's no continuity of civilization and within a few generations no one will know what nuclear energy even was, much less what those funny signs mean?
And whose responsibility is it to educate the public on nuclear power (assuming education is the issue)?
I don't know what country you live in, but in the USA the best way to get something done is to do it yourself. Remember: It's always easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.
Simple questions, I know, but I am interested in what people outside of the industry think about it. Specifically what concerns do you have about nuclear energy?
I don't want to leave nuclear waste dumps for future generations to have to deal with. I've been convinced that it's impractical to launch the waste off the planet in rockets and dump it into the sun, if only because there would be so many of them that one is bound to crash back into the earth, probably in downtown Omaha or Marseilles. So my only choice is to put a strict time limit on the nuclear power industry, hoping that the nuclear waste of just 300 years is manageable, while we build those orbiting solar collectors.
Of course this will never happen. I'm in the I.T. industry, and in 1988 I just happened to scroll too far forward in my calendar and discovered that the year 2000 was only 12 years away. Along with a very small number of other people I began reminding everyone that most of our automated systems had two-digit year fields, which would cause unpredictable results when it turned over to double-zero.
The response was underwhelming. Except for a few visionaries (like the County of Los Angeles, who launched their Y2K remediation project in 1995 and completed it in 1998), every IT manager chose to put it off and let his successor worry about it.
Since we actually had an immovable drop-dead date, the industry actually did finally wake up in the second half of 1998 and recruited every retired Cobol programmer on earth to remediate old code. We got all the red-blanket systems fixed by December 31--the ones that really would have shut down building access systems, thrown open the doors to mental hospitals, halted shipments of food and fuel, etc. But plenty of yellow-blanket systems failed in 2000. (My bank didn't get a single mortgage statement right in the entire year--which, by the way, seemed to have thirteen months--but at least they got the ATMs working. And I kept buying cases of diet soda with expired aspartame--but at least they got the expiration dates printed correctly on batches of insulin.)
Our problem with nuclear power plants and orbiting solar collectors is that
there is no immovable drop-dead date. Each political administration can make the decision to put off the launch of the project and let their successors worry about it. 300 years, 1,000 years, 5,000 years, and before you know it our worst nightmare comes true. The surface of the earth is peppered with nuclear waste dumps, built over the centuries with different technologies, different laws and different languages, and because of wars, terrorist attacks and bureaucratic incompetence, we no longer know where they all are and whether some corporation taking a short cut or some country full of starving people or some raving lunatic representing the militant new Worldwide Temple of Zarathushtra is going to accidentally dig one up.
Sure we can't do that now, but what kind of excavation rigs will they have in 5011CE?
My wife keeps insisting that I shouldn't lose any sleep over this. You see, we don't have any children. She argues that if the people who have children are satisfied with the world they are bequeathing to them--deforestation, greenhouse gases, national governments on the brink of bankruptcy, etc.--then we should trust their judgment and enjoy the ride.
At our age (67), I have to say that it's tempting.