10 States That Produce the Most Renewable Energy

[thucythucy]

13. Thank you for the reference.

So three and a quarter trillion world wide over sixteen years.

Just to be clear, you're proposing what? Crash programs to bring how many reactors on line and how fast? This presumably would decrease our reliance on coal and natural gas for heat and power, but would do nothing about automobile emissions and green house gas produced by a myriad of manufacturing processes.

And what "anti-nuke bullshit" are you referencing?

I'm not opposed to nuclear power on principle, but I do have concerns I'd like to see addressed--concerns that could have and should have been addressed by now, assuming fixes are possible.

The main concern--and it's substantial--is what to do with the waste products? My understanding is that we already are sitting on an enormous stockpile of highly toxic byproducts of nuclear power generation. These are substances which will have to be isolated for decades, perhaps--or so I've read--centuries. What this means is that not only do we need a solution that works in the short term, but that any such fix will require maintenance and supervision for the foreseeable future. Given the chaos that seems inherent in our politics around the world, I wonder if such a fix is at all possible.

We're now seeing a full scale war in Ukraine. Evidently there are fears that the stations located in the area might be vulnerable. Certainly Russian behavior around Chernobyl isn't reassuring on that score. What happens if a year or three or fifty or a hundred years from now there's a major war during which nukes are attacked--deliberately or not--or facilities storing toxic materials are targeted?

You maintain that raising the instance of Chernobyl is somehow disingenuous. That the deaths or other health effects of that disaster have been exaggerated. That's how I read your posts anyway, or that no matter what the health aftereffects these pale in comparison to the damage done by other pollutants. But I look at Chernobyl and see it as a major factor that brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union. That area--in Ukraine and Belarus--is still contaminated, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Three or four or ten such disasters, even spread out over decades, would be enormously destabilizing, and the proliferation of nuclear plants around the world would make such instances more likely.

Obviously I'm not as cynical about the opposition to nuclear power as you are. I think its critics are as likely to be concerned about climate change as anyone else.

Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima certainly heightened concerns about nuclear power plants. The last two are especially troubling. Chernobyl was largely the fault of cutting corners around cost compounded by human error, and Fukushima the result of a natural disaster. Neither of these will go away any time soon, if ever. So when I think of hundreds more nukes, some of them inevitably located in either future war zones or in areas vulnerable to natural disaster, yes, I have concerns. Knock down a thousand windmills and there will be environmental costs, for sure. Compromise safety at, say, ten nukes over the course of a decade and it's a world altering problem.

Some of this could be alleviated by an increased ability to transmit power across greater distances. It might be not as necessary then to construct plants over earthquake faults or in regions of great political instability. Then again, one aspect of political instability is how unpredictable it can be. Imagine if there had been a nuclear power station in Sarajevo in the early 1990s.

Like I say, I'm not anti-nuke on principle. But nuclear technology is such that it needs to be foolproof in ways that other technologies don't. That to me is the major issue--how to get to a point where major accidents are essentially impossible. And even if the technology and infrastructure are foolproof, there's always human error, human malevolence, and natural disaster.

In retrospect three trillion some odd dollars over sixteen years world wide is rather pathetic. During that time one nation alone--the United States--spent more than 100 trillion dollars on "defense." Had we been at all serious about climate change we should have been spending that sort of money on a variety of fixes, including the massive development of renewables, serious progress on reducing auto emissions--for instance by massive investment in mass transit--on cutting other sources of emissions, and perhaps also developing a foolproof nuclear technology as an additional resource. Instead we've spent our time and treasure on war making and increasing the personal wealth of a tiny sliver of our population.

As a civilization it does appear to me that we've screwed ourselves big time. Future historians--assuming they will even exist--will not be kind to this era of human history.