Experts Say Nuclear Power May Be Our Only Hope

[hunter]

37. Nuclear power IS our only hope if we want civilization to continue as it now exists...

Personally I'm a pessimist. We are fucked. We won't ban the use of fossil fuels, therefore Mother Nature is going to deal with us the old fashioned way, by killing off large numbers of us. Our current civilization is a fragile thing. We can't keep this up. Exponential growth of a species always ends poorly. Humans are not exceptional, the earth has seen this kind of thing before.

If our entire civilization had gone nuclear as France did, sure there would still be accidents, but nothing to comparable to the damage done to earth by fossil fuels every day. Industrial toxins are what they are, radioactive or not. The toxins of industry fueled by fossil fuels are often far worse than minor accidental releases of radioactive toxins like tritium or iodine from nuclear power plants. Our use of coal spews more radioactive toxins into the environment daily than any properly running nuclear power plant, but nobody pays attention to that. And then there are the greenhouse gases...

I'd much rather live near a competently run nuclear plant or even a nuclear "waste" repository than an oil refinery or fracking fields. I'd rather get my power from a nuclear power plant than a fossil fuel power plant, either coal or natural gas. Natural gas is especially bullshit; it never was clean or "natural," and is even dirtier when it is obtained by fracking. Sure it has less carbon, but that only means our civilization dies a little later rather than sooner.

Solar and wind are not "drop-in" replacements for fossil fuels. Nuclear power potentially is, especially with the development of modern electric transportation systems like high speed rail and electric automobiles.

An advanced solar and wind powered society would look very different. It would not be a "consumer" society. The most common form of transportation would be walking or bicycles (and for the mobility impaired, electric legs, wheelchairs, etc...) There would be no personal automobiles, no airlines, no great highway projects. The pace of life would be slow.

I strive to minimize my own participation in "consumer" society. I don't respect our consumer society, and it doesn't much respect me.

When I was a young and foolish man I bought a new car. My kids learned to drive in it that car. I won't buy a new car again. And I'm not at all ashamed of the car I drive now, an $800 special that is older than our adult kids and has a salvage title. I don't care what the neighbor's think. My computers, my cell phone are all salvage too. I only replace my computers when I find a better one that's been discarded by someone else.

Even my wife thinks I'm on the far fringes, but we do agree on the larger lifestyle issues. We met in Los Angeles in the mid 1980s. We were automobile commuters then. We haven't been commuters for nearly a quarter century now. (That's a lot of fossil fuel we didn't use...) We both like to make, repair, or repurpose things, so we have that in common.

There are many things worth saving in this society. Much of the medicine, the science, the two-way worldwide communication systems, the arts... these are all worth keeping. But that still leaves a lot of crap.