tailor-made for opportunistic terrorism, should anyone wish to seriously mount it.
● It produces more consistent baseload than PV or wind, though can’t be turned up or down easily, so “variability” vs. demand is still (much) inferior vis-à-vis natural gas plants. Nuclear is, thus, best-suited to very- large-scale facilities and large-scale population centers. If a reactor does go offline, the attached grid needs a bunch of energy to be available from somewhere else in a hurry.
● There are other possibilities than uranium fission, such as thorium, but these are still in the prototype stage; utilities do not consider them ready for mass commercialization.
● To make a dent in humanity’s CO 2 emissions, we would have to embark on a massive project of building thousands of fission plants immediately while closing coal plants. There’s not even a hint of that happening, and it takes a long time to build such plants.
TaaL: There’s nothing inherently dangerous about fission power; only fission power used by humans. It represents... how should I put this... an unfortunate confluence of long- term externalities you’re time -blind to, and a mismatch for your beliefs about a wealthier future in which your grandkids will deal with stuff like nuclear waste. It’s ir onic that you can design modern fission plants to be nearly idiot-proof, with safe failure modes and 3-foot-thick concrete containment domes, but then stick the irradiated fuel rods right outside in swimming pools, under assurances by your economists that the grid power to keep them from catching fire and spreading plumes of highly radioactive smoke downwind, won’t ever go down. Would nuclear power be better than coal power for your biosphere? Almost certainly, but that “almost” is where the contemporary h uman wildcards reside. Fusion bombs, for instance, are not good for the biosphere, and you already have far too many nations that have them. So it’s not a question of whether fission could play a useful role (it could), so much as whether you humans would actually get it together to do it in a sane way, or default to being guided by your many delusions, biases, and whacky stories about the future.
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