BPSCG said:
I posted this on the book club forum, under Michael Scheuer's Imperial Hubris, but thought it was worth a discussion on its own merits. You need not have read the book to have something to contribute to this.
Scheuer maintains that if we want to win the global jihad, one of the things we need to do is become energy-independent. That way, we would no longer have to be in bed with corrupt, repressive, Muslim oil tyrannies, and ObL would have less reason to want to kill us.
Scheuer proposes, among other things, a return to building nuclear power plants.
My question was, where does the tree-hugger contingent stand on this issue? Is national security a good enough reason to abandon their opposition to nuclear power? Is it a good enough reason to abandon their opposition to drilling in the ANWR?
I love the way you reduce the whole issue to "tree-hugging." It's so . . . charming.
What is alarming about nuclear fission as a power source is that it's a very messy and expensive way to boil water. You can get a whole herd of technical experts in here to ramble on and on about efficiencies and reduced risks, but at the end of the day if a nuclear power plant goes up in smoke, we know for a fact that a
significant swath of land will be rendered almost permanently uninhabitable.
I have to explain things to people in terms of risk and reward all the time, as I work with large computer networks. With 13,000 variables, sometimes it's not possible to predict exactly what the outcome of an action will be, so I have to draw a picture of the risk vs. the reward. If you spend the time that the link above demands thinking about the risk, you can then evaluate where that risk stands in relation to the reward.
Sure, you can argue Chernobyl was run by a bunch of communist-state boobies -- a state that was infamous for building one block of apartments with balconies, and a neighboring block with balcony
doors, but looking at the
recent safety record of our own free-market, private-owned chemical refineries (which seem to be igniting with increasing frequency) it's hard to say that I feel safer with the "magic of the market" at the controls of nuclear power plants. I was 9 years old when Three Mile Island went up, and along with it the entire U.S. nuclear industry. My skepticism about the nuclear industry isn't so much based around any environmentalist tendancies -- it's just a simple distrust that people with little more than the bottom line on their minds will think of things like the safety of the community in which they are situated.
Add this to the fact that the entire known supply of fissionable material could power the world for a mere 25 years, I think, and I don't see nuclear fission power as a worthy investment in infrastructure.
I was heartened by recent reports that a nuclear
fusion reactor was being attempted. The report mentioned that it would likely be 50 years before fusion was viable economically, but I'm willing to bet that the only reason the time period is so long is that our society lacks the will to commit the resources. If we needed fusion in 10 years, we could probably have it.
Nuclear fission is just a stopgap on the path to renewable, sustainable energy. It's a messy side road at that, and the reward for taking that road seems miniscule and entirely out of proportion to the tremendous risk of depopulating a huge area of our country. Nuclear plants will be likely located near the cities they serve, and the economic catastrophe of having to evacuate, for example, Los Angeles or New York or Chicago for the next 600-1000 years due to some screw-up by a Homer Simpson is quite beyond contemplation in my opinion.
I do not have a link handy.
