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Nuclear Power - The Only Hope for Humanity to Survive the Next 1000 years
" ... Renewable energy 'simply WON'T WORK': Top Google engineers
Windmills, solar, tidal - all a 'false hope', say Stanford PhDs
Unfortunately the two men don't know what that is, or if they do they aren't saying. James Hansen does, though: it's nuclear power.
As applied at the moment, of course, nuclear power isn't cheap enough to provide a strong economic rationale. That's because its costs have been forced enormously higher than they would otherwise be by the imposition of cripplingly high health and safety standards (in its three "disasters" so far - Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima - the scientifically verified death tolls from all causes have been and will be zero, 56 and zero: a record which other power industries including renewables can only envy*).
Nuclear costs have also been artificially driven up by the non-issue of "waste". In the UK for instance, all "higher activity nuclear waste" must be kept expensively stored in a secure specialist facility and can only ever - perhaps - be finally disposed of in a wildly expensive geological vault. No less than 99.7 per cent of this "waste" is actually intermediate-level, meaning that it basically isn't radioactive at all: you could theoretically make half a tonne of ordinary dirt into such "intermediate level nuclear waste" by burying a completely legal luminous wristwatch in it. (If you did that inside the boundaries of a licensed nuclear facility, the dirt really would then become ridiculously costly "waste".)
The remaining 0.003 of "nuclear waste" actually is dangerous, but it can almost all be reprocessed into fuel and used again. So waste really doesn't need to be an issue at all.
There can't be any doubt that if nuclear power had been allowed to be as dangerous per unit of energy generated as, say, the gas industry* - let alone the terribly dangerous coal business - it truly would be too cheap to meter and Messrs Koningstein and Fork's problem would have been solved for them decades ago: by now, nobody with access to uranium would be bothering with fossil fuels except for specialist purposes - and there's no reason why nations "of concern" couldn't be kept safely supplied. Would we run out of uranium? Not until the year 5000AD.
Cheap power solves a lot more problems than just carbon emissions, too. If power is cheap, so is fresh water (the fact is we're really at that point already, though a lot of people refuse to admit it and prefer to treat fresh water as some sort of scarce and finite resource). If fresh water is cheap, an awful lot more of the planet is habitable and/or arable than is the case if it's expensive: and that is truly game-changing stuff for the human race. ... "
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