Moreover, the amoeba continues to grow. What if you embark on a crash program of building nukes, and then ALSO keep using coal, continuing the “growth” religion of maximizing brain rewards rather than cutting emissions? These are questions that will be faced in your lifetime, young human, which is why I keep harping on the “sapience” thing. Your mind is greatly n eeded to steer where this goes. The Bottom Line: Fission power could be part of a low-carbon energy future, but it brings a lot of baggage with it. To do so, reactor construction would have to be done on a crash basis. Nothing like this is happening, and n uclear engineers don’t like the word “crash” .
Renewables: Fusion?
Summary: Nuclear “fusion” is often projected as humanity’s “destiny” fuel that will someday soon provide us nearly unlimited energy, nearly free, essentially forever. Indeed, numerous billionaires have recently joined forces to invest in what they hope will be ‘the birth of a star on Earth.’ 199 Humans have, in our cleverness, figured out how to do the fusion trick on Earth to release vast amounts of energy in a fraction of a second; you know them as thermonuclear bombs. We currently build a lot of them and use them to threaten one another, since their only purpose is to destroy stuff with heat and radiation.
There is great hope among the techno-optimists that humanity will find a way of making fusion energy useful in an analogous way to fission, which
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