Comment 44852

By Undustrial (registered) - website | Posted August 04, 2010 at 19:25:45

Excellent point Kiely, I should have worded that differently. Still, the point holds - nuclear power gave nuclear weapons to Pakistan, India and China (with a fair bit of help from AECL and Canadian Taxpayers). And if any of them decide to go at it (and there was that decade where it looked like Pakistan and India would go off at any minute) then North Korea and Iran will be nothing but collateral damage.

Thorium does hold promise, as it's a lot harder to weaponize (once upon a time the idea of a uranium bomb was ridiculous too - kinda like making gunpowder out of lead). Still, virtually every other "alternative" energy source (if you can call it one) holds many advantages that just aren't possible with nuclear - decentralized local-scale generation. Even coal has more potential for it (would have been how it was always done if Edison Electric hadn't figured they could make more money with massive power plants). As ludicrous as clean coal programs are, they're still worlds more plausible than any nuclear waste storage systems I've yet heard of. Carbon capture sites might leak, but they aren't endothermic (how do you store something hot for a millennia without cracking?) or radioactive.

We in the first world, especially North America, use an unbelievable amount of energy. We don't need to replace it, we just need to stop. Us environmentalists have been proposing very simple ways to cut massive, cumulative percentages for decades, most of which would save us money. As power companies have known for a decade or two now - it's almost always cheaper to get people to cut back consumption than to build new capacity. Witness virtually every other article on this site right now (the stadium debate) to see how little energy consumption factors into city planning decisions.

"Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century." — Lewis Mumford

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