Nuclear power has some nice properties (and a whole bunch of terrible ones), is technologically interesting, and has been the premier low-CO₂ energy source for a while. That gets it some brownie points although I agree that it shouldn’t be sacrosanct.
I personally am mainly interested in using breeder reactors to breed high-level waste that needs to be kept safe for 100,000 years into even higher-level waste that only needs to be kept safe for 200 years. That’s expensive and dangerous but it doesn’t require unknown future technology in other to achieve safe storage for an order of magnitude longer than recorded history.
There’s a whole bunch of very good questions you can ask about that approach (such as how to handle the proliferation risk) but the idea of turning nuclear waste disposal into a feasibly solvable problem just appeals to me.
Of course I expect an extreme amount of oversight and no tolerance for fucking up. That may be crazy expensive but we’re talking about large-scale breeder deployment. It’s justified.
Nuclear power has some nice properties (and a whole bunch of terrible ones), is technologically interesting, and has been the premier low-CO₂ energy source for a while. That gets it some brownie points although I agree that it shouldn’t be sacrosanct.
I personally am mainly interested in using breeder reactors to breed high-level waste that needs to be kept safe for 100,000 years into even higher-level waste that only needs to be kept safe for 200 years. That’s expensive and dangerous but it doesn’t require unknown future technology in other to achieve safe storage for an order of magnitude longer than recorded history.
There’s a whole bunch of very good questions you can ask about that approach (such as how to handle the proliferation risk) but the idea of turning nuclear waste disposal into a feasibly solvable problem just appeals to me.
Of course I expect an extreme amount of oversight and no tolerance for fucking up. That may be crazy expensive but we’re talking about large-scale breeder deployment. It’s justified.