Gammerz
I appreciate the point, but we are to a degree caught between a rock and a hard place. There are three (effectively)means we can generate the power we need on a national scale - fossil fuels, nuclear, renewables.
One of those - fossil fuels - we now know will eventually kill every living thing on this planet if we continue using them the way we have. One of them - renewables - we know is safe, but we don’t yet have the technology to use it to meet all of our needs. We will get there, but maybe not for a couple of decades. That leaves nuclear. We already have it. But we know it is vastly dangerous but with actually relatively low risk; basically the chance of a meltdown is vanishingly small with modern designs, but the damage should that tiny risk come true would be catastrophic.
(Note : i’m Ignoring fusion for now - we will have that too at some point, but IMO not before renewables get to ‘power grid generation’ stage)
So what must we do? There is no obvious safe answer. Nuclear power kills people, we know this. It could kill millions but the risk is small.Fossil fuels kill people. We know this. They will kill millions, no doubt at all, and within decades. Renewable power cannot solve this problem, yet. Power outages kill people in a variety of ways.
ideally, we’d put trillions into renewables and battery research and getting fusion working at scale. But there’s not the vision to do that in the people we elect as leaders. Nuclear power is (paradoxically) the ‘safe option’ politically, because it’s a known quantity with definitely understood results and known, quite small risks. So it’s the easy choice. But it is passing the buck on to future generations to clear it all up. But then, it seems to me passing the buck to future generations is something most politicians are very happy to do, and we all don’t hold them to account for doing it.
Sorry, rambling. At first glance, you’d just say ‘jesus, why are we messing with this epically toxic crap, just get renewables sorted!’. But in the real world where renewables can’t quite do the job yet and any power outage could mean babies dying in incubators, it’s not so obvious a decision.
