Leah I really admire the way you normally make a point. You use a lot of tact and grace which I tend to lack. That said your latest arguement has me a bit baffled. It sounds like you are saying that since something already exists there is no point in disliking it. Perhaps I'm not reading it correctly but your arguement sounds like pure "Tokyo Rose" logic: "American GI you have already lost so you might as well quit fighting."

Please correct me if I'm totally not getting your point. I mean no disrespect.

 

I think think Leah has described the reality of 'unscrambling an egg' or 'dismounting from a tiger.' We can not undo nuclear so it is better to address the reality and mitigate the worst aspects.

Bob Wilson

 

I disagree. If time permits, I'll run some simple estimates for the kind of additional electrical power that would be necessary to run large fleet of EVs (say 90% of the cars on the road). I believe even a very approximate number will be shocking (pun intended). Getting thousands (or tens of thousands) of gigawatts from the renewable energy sources available today will be difficult, if not impossible. Enter nuclear energy.

Once everyone gets over the fear factor, they will accept the inevitable. I'm actually surprised that 70% of the people here are already open minded to that necessity.

 

Agreed and understood. Sarcasm can be so misread.

Likewise, please limit your chastising to PMs.

 

lakedude: Bob's summary is just what I was getting at, though I might have used the expression 'can't put the genie back in the bottle,' which is something I hear people saying about nuclear energy sometimes.

In many ways, snax's position- that even a 1x10^-20 chance of something catastrophic happening is an unacceptable level of risk- leads nowhere. To achieve results that would be within his comfort zone, we would need to have no nuclear anything anywhere in the world. Maybe if you're ethnocentrically focused, you might argue, -at least nowhere in the country. As I think I already explained pretty well, that isn't going to happen. So making an argument that we need to try to get to that kind of result, or to achieve a situation that is 100% risk-free, is rather specious.

 

Nuclear energy's problem is that while it's safe and clean when it's running right, even a disaster every couple of hundred years is enough to cause widespread damage.

So it's hard to say. I don't think human beings are yet fit to use nuclear power...we're like 5 year olds with an AK47. We don't yet have the maturity, real know-how, nor the appreciation of what nuclear energy/power/waste/issues have in store for us. Most people can't even relate the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs and how devastating they were...yet they want reactors built in their back yards.

I'm not saying nuclear isn't the way to go, I just don't think we're ready for it yet.

 

Actually I can predict with 100 percent certainty that it will happen, in the long term. As I've already mentioned fisionable material is dug up out of the ground and we will run out of it someday.

My question is why not look to the future and start working on completely renewable energy now?

Also: Of course you can put the genie back it the bottle. Take Greek Fire as an example. The formula for Greek Fire was lost so they accidently put the Greek Fire "genie" back in the bottle.

What I'd like to see are some reasons for leaving the genie out of the bottle. For example one could argue that M.A.D. has saved lives by functioning as a deterrent (maybe it has?), or perhaps that current nuke plants are safe for reasons xyz. I'd love to be convinced that nuclear power is safe.

 

Read this in the latest issue of Mental Floss Magazine, regarding nuclear contamination and John Wayne.

"Turns out much of the filming of "The Conqueror" starring John Wayne was done in Utah's Snow Canyon about 150 miles downwind from a US nuclear testing facility. ...The stars and cast and crew members lived in the shadow of this fallout for 3 months.....although the Duke's passing was popularly attributed to his years of smoking, people magazine later muckraked records showing that no fewer than 91 of the 220 people who worked on "The Conqueror" had contracted cancer - and more than half of those had died"

How those cancer/death figures would compare to people not on the set is unknown, it could be typical for that age makeup. Or it could be way higher than normal, which could point to the fallout.

 

That's not a very good argument. Saying that nuclear power shouldn't be used because people can die from nuclear fallout (as the result of a WEAPON test) is a lot like saying surgeons should be denied access to scalpels because people have been known to die from being stabbed with daggers.

 

While citing the cast of The Conqueror may not be conclusive in itself, there was more cancer reported in Kanosh, Utah and other towns near atmospheric nuclear tests.

There are hazards that don't exactly match the potential ones of a nuclear power plant mishap.