Call me chicken little but my beef with nuclear has always been about the people not the science. If we paint the Earth with reactors it’s a statistical likelihood that through corruption or incompetence someone will screw up. We can’t even keep 50 year old bridges from collapsing in the U.S and meanwhile every time a republican gets into office they bleed FEMA and the EPA dry. We currently have 55 power plants total but would need about 100x that to even put a dent in our electricity bill. Who’s going to build them? Contractors? How are those F-35s Lockheed made going? Another issue is that there are significant odds that global society is on a path towards collapse or backslide due to climate change. If we entered a period of catabolic collapse and governments around the world no longer had the money or infrastructure to manage the upkeep of these facilities what would happen. You can’t just flip a switch and turn the whole thing off. I’m not someone who thinks the world is going to end in a day but look how quickly things have deteriorated in Pakistan recently. Would governments have plans in place to deal with reactors if their economy suddenly collapsed? Honestly the biggest thing to me though is that nuclear is greedy. We’re trying to find cheat codes to avoid conservation and continue consuming copious amounts of electricity. It would be vastly more cost-effective and far less time consuming to dump all that money into energy reduction measures but that would disrupt capitalism and America’s addiction to endless consumption. Residential energy usage in the U.S is higher than commercial usage. Imagine if we banned cars in cities tomorrow, dumped money into public transit and high speed rail, banned meat, built sustainable urban housing, forced tech companies to do away with planned obsolescence, stopped flying unnecessarily, and so on. We could solve climate change in a decade through conservation but that would destroy the profits of those in power. Nuclear might sound great on paper but it’s the planetary equivalence of taking tums instead of putting down the Costco hotdog.
What's more concerning, a corrupt or incompetent government mishandling one ton of nuclear fuel, or the same corrupt/incompetent government mishandling the one million tons of coal that would be needed to replace it? (which by the way, would have approximately the same amount of radioactive potential due to the natural radioactive contaminants that will get concentrated as you use it)
My entire point was that we should strive for neither. We could half per-capita energy consumption in the US and still consume twice as much as Brazil. If everyone in rich countries stopped being greedy we could easily meet global demands with renewables alone.
I don't see why we need to stop thinking about improving the environmental friendliness of our energy sources in order to start thinking about reducing overall consumption. And I'm not sure you have really justified why reducing our consumption should even be seen as a good thing given the possibility of more environmentally friendly energy sources.
Halving per-capita energy consumption has an economic cost in terms of reduced production, consumption and thus employment. Which will have a political cost in follow-up elections.
