My view is regrettably that too much damage has been done to restore a significant fraction of what has been lost or save that which is currently threatened, but this said, were I in charge - which I never will be - I know what I would do.
A rather long post on another website from a few years back - some links in the references are dead, but most are intact - I gave the most complete statement of my views: Current World Energy Demand, Ethical World Energy Demand, Depleted Uranium and the Centuries to Come
With some minor (and wholly technical) changes, this post expresses the views I still more or less hold, although my hostility to so called "renewable energy" is rapidly increasing, particularly since the coast line of my beautiful state, New Jersey is about to be converted into a wind turbine industrial park.
While I believe that our current nuclear infrastructure has performed extremely well (cf. Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)) despite catcalls from people with very poor thinking skills, I think it is time to move to fast spectrum reactors, this to eliminate the need for all energy related mining for several centuries.
I recently obtained a scanned copy of this book from 1966: Fast Breeder Reactors 1st Edition Proceedings of the London Conference on Fast Breeder Reactors Organized by the British Nuclear Energy Society, 17th–19th May 1966.
Leafing through it, I'm struck with awe.
This work is a transcription of a meeting of prominent nuclear scientists and engineers exploring ideas around what was then a very new technology being explored in a time that uranium was thought to be in limited supply. Not only are the talks transcribed, but also the questions asked and discussions of the questions asked are transcribed.
It is a remarkable document, given that it took place at the height of the cold war and that the discussion included American, British, French, German, Japanese and Russian scientists in a frank and open exchange of views.
It was written in a time before powerful computers, at a time when the tools, instruments and techniques of modern chemistry and materials science were only crudely developed, at a time when nuclear power was an afterthought of nuclear armaments, and still...and still...
Yet the things discussed were filled with original and frankly, valid, thought. They were creative, innovative, and startlingly realistic. Many of the questions asked in 1966 have clear answers now, we know a great deal more than we did then.
Fast fission is the only reasonable approach left to us. (Most existing nuclear reactors are not fast reactors, but a few can demonstrate similar breeding were they fueled by the thorium waste left over from lanthanide mining.)
I am acutely aware of the fact that I am very much a voice in the Wilderness, having had the occasion yesterday to confront a very stupid man from the wrongly praised Sierra Club hawking a "100% renewable New Jersey by 2050" that will never come, any more than any of tens of thousands of similar statements over the last half a century purported we'd be "there" with so called "renewable energy" "by 2020" or "by 2000" and so on proved to be true.
(Ironically this was a panel discussion at the "New Jersey March for Science" where everyone was wearing "Facts Matter" buttons.)
Facts don't matter, either in the Sierra Club or in the Republican Party.
Both are guilty of deliberate, inflexible, mindless and insistent ignorance, about which they chant in defiance of reality. As a person who lives in the wilderness - albeit the intellectual wilderness, and not the biological or ecological wilderness - I extremely object to the rhetoric of the New Jersey Sierra Club which is working with our government to destroy the wilderness represented by New Jersey's continental shelf biome.
The "by such and such a date" rhetoric in political discourse with reference to "renewable energy" is a cynical effort to dump responsibility that we are ourselves have declined to take upon a generation now in infancy, adolescence, and all generations thereafter, as I stated earlier.
I've been hearing this bullshit for half a century, and if I'm the only one left who can say, "Fool me once, shame on you..." who is unwilling to remain someone who will not continue to be fooled, again and again and again, well, there's nothing I can do about it.
I'm pissing in the wind I know, the soon to be industrialized wind, which will be safe for neither birds, nor fish, nor human beings, but since you were kind enough to ask, this is what I think.
One thing is for sure. If we really gave a shit about the wilderness, we wouldn't be tearing it up with trucks and ships sent to install wind turbines that will be either landfill or rotting useless eyesores in less than 20 years.
Thanks for asking.
Have a nice evening.
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