LimaUniformNovemberAlpha wrote:
When we invented fossil fuel technology, we set the groundwork for a whole framework of unintended side-effects. We couldn't have known what would happen then. But if someone prevented the development of fossil fuel technology in the first place we could have avoided all of this. Nuclear is recently showing signs of the same, and that's only the ones we found out about; who knows how many got covered up, like the fossil fuel industry tried to do with theirs?
The lesson is clear; anything other than the simplest (eg. solar collectors) of technologies has both immense potential to go severely wrong in light of human nature's tendency to cover it up instead of actually fixing it. At least a solar collector that breaks will give people time to jump out of the way regardless of any coverup on its owner's part. In light of that, what's shocking isn't the correlation between anti-nuclear types and climate change activists, but that there are some who can be one and not the other.
Derived from a tangent in the other thread.
The nuclear industry has a history of attempting to cover up problems (eg. the problems with Fukushima) yet we refuse to entertain the possibility that there are further problems that have been more successfully hidden.
The human species has a history of screwing up attempts at technology (eg. cellphones that blow up, cars that wind up crashed into each other) and I don't see why nuclear technology in particular is any different.
So that leaves the question, is the human species cut out for nuclear technology? If not, what are the alternatives?
Me, I think thermal!solar is a no-brainer. Even solar panels can be fragile enough that it'd be a wasted investment if someone drops them, but solar collectors are a concept so simple even a literal middle schooler can understand them: Sun rays hit reflective surface. Sun rays bounce off reflective surface. Sun rays hit absorptive surface. Absorptive surface boils water instead of sun heat being wasted on the ground.
Think of how much time and money we could've saved, if instead of wasting it on "safe" nuclear power plant designs that then blow up anyway, we went back to basics that only go wrong if the boiling water container breaks. Which is a problem relatively better contained to the immediate vicinity than nuclear explosions anyway. Think of how much aluminum could've been cleaned and used for such projects instead of being thrown away if we had gotten on this years ago.
EDIT: Why isn't the image displaying here? It was displaying just fine in the other thread. Speaking of flawed technology...