Okay I got into an argument with someone the other night over the idea that it's our turn to cause an ecological disaster to benefit our time on the planet to make our lives better and easier and let someone else worry about cleaning up the mess later.
My argument was this, we should be allowed to do whatever we want with nuclear power generation and not care about the waste or byproducts of the power generation so that we can transition off fossil fuels.
Thier counter was we can't be reckless assholes with nuclear power generation and that it's not the same as oil extraction or fossil fuel power plants because of the radioactive stuff.
I thought this was an incredibly short sighted view on the impact of fossil fuel extraction and fossil fuel power generation has had and how destructive it has been.
While I do agree there are some really bad issues with nuclear. Do we create a big waste problem for people after us? sure. Is it probably going to kill people in the future? sure. Could it cause ecological disasters? sure.
I dunno I get that power generation is only a part of the issue with climate but feels like we are just being bullied by old boomer hippies to not use all the things we have available to us.
Perhaps I have in my mind already convinced myself that we are bleeding out and that while nuclear power won't save our leg it could be the tourniquet to push us over the hump into cleaner power generation from wind/solar/water etc.
So shouldn't we be allowed to kick the can down the road like the last generations did?
The ash from coal plants literally spew radioactive material into the atmosphere.
Solving the problem of nuclear waste is 1000x easier than solving the problem of excess carbon/greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Sure it will take a very long time, but you can put all the waste in a few spots and avoid them. There is no safe zone for climate apocalypse.
And electric vehicles. Electrifying transport is going to be an ecological disaster and when you consider total embodied carbon of the entire lifecycle of the things, they’re only a little bit better than combustion engines but combustion engines don’t require massive quantities of rare earths and incomprehensible quantities of copper.
Every technology that promises to solve climate change actually makes things worse.
Good luck Zoomers! Buy arctic property.
IDK, the amount of exclusion zones we'd make doing what you suggest would only be a few. We'd have to get a lot more reckless to compete with the boomers.
EDIT: I propose instead we go full
and solve climate change by building solar power plants in geosynchronous orbits. How will we launch the materials up there? With a couple hundred super rockets propelled by nuclear bomb blasts. 
How about we make our ecological catastrophe NAWPA but dug out with atomic weapons?
A nuclear rocket powered space elevator I like it.
Are there any actual plans for space mirrors cuz that sounds like a great way to burn everything on accident.
It's not a space elevator!
They're just very efficient rockets because nuclear explosions have high thrust. Chemical boosters launch the rocket up a bit, and then small nuclear bombs are released to push the rocket. Here is a short CGI demonstration.Russia has indeed put mirrors in low Earth orbit. Znamya was a 20 meter diameter satellite that created a 5 kilometer diameter bright spot on the Earth. You could use this technology to get rid of long Arctic nights I guess but you'd have to place the satellite into a higher orbit so it's geostationary. Likewise, a solar shade could be made. If placed in the L1 point between the Earth and Sun, it would allow us to dim the sun slightly. I think it's a better idea than aerosol injection.
However, neither orbital mirrors nor solar shades are useful for power generation! The idea behind space-based solar is you would send a couple dozen large power plants into geosynchronous orbit and beam power down to Earth. Without an atmosphere, you receive more sunlight. And by being in GEO, the satellites only go dark for a short time once a year. The power would probably be generated with photovoltaics and beamed down using microwaves. A large rectenna on Earth would receive the power, and an exclusion zone would be cordoned off. Still, the extra heat would be pretty minor. Interestingly, the microwave power transmission uses the same frequency as Wi-Fi. Lasers do not penetrate the atmosphere well, although they probably make sense for beaming power from Mercury's orbit to the rest of the solar system.
There are many reasons why space based solar power does not currently exist and probably won't for some time. It requires a superheavy launch vehicle capable of regular missions and competence in manufacturing in space. It would probably be a trillion dollar investment, and America was more interested in building 1000 nuclear reactors instead (which it also didn't do. lmao). Cost is clearly an issue. These solar power plants make more sense when solar panels are extremely efficient or payload costs are very low. Getting payload costs low is taking a very long time unfortunately, and once solar panels become very efficient you may as well put them on Earth. That's what we are currently doing. Also these plants only last like 20-30 years for some reason before they have to be replaced. Pretty disappointing!
If you wanted to rain death upon your enemies from orbit, you should instead look at the this militarized proposal for Project Orion. A few of these ships could be put in orbit around Earth and each carry a gigaton of nuclear missiles and a few hundred nuclear shaped charges. The Kennedy admin found this was overkill tho.
OOH okay I get it now.
I love the idea of setting up microwave exclusion zones.
I wonder if ITER dreams are more viable then microwave solar from geosats.
ITER dreams are just as unviable sadly. That is to say, it will eventually be useful but not soon.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2017.0444
Yet, if these 10 Gen1 fusion plants will be offered to the market, which according to the present roadmap could be in 2070 or so, together they will be good for an average electric power comparable to that of wind in 2000.
In other words, Gen1 fusion requires an upfront investment of hundreds of billions of Euros, which is coupled to a large technological risk, in order to bring a product to the market that is not competitive in performance or price, at a scale that is meaningless in terms of energy generation
Chinese fusion research will probably bump the time frame a bit closer to present but don't expect fusion or powersats to provide any meaningful amount of energy this century. They'll be useful in the 22nd century for expanding energy production without making considerable sacrifices to the environment though.
Nuclear energy will not save us from the climate catastrophe. That has many reasons, the country which incorporates it in a sensible manner is China. France on the other hand is not able to keep its nuclear power plants going in summer, as they don't have enough water to cool them and neither the state nor the companies are willing to switch to more expensive cooling techniques. Which do exist, would mean quite costly re drafts and make nuclear energy more expensive than solar or wind including battery storage.
The LCOE aren't making a clear case anymore for nuclear fission energy. Nuclear fusion on the other hand has not even got a commercial viable facility. While there are some projects that might be neat, they will kick in at earliest when significant climate crisis tipping points are already past us. So we can keep current research going, but lets not think ITER or alike will be a hail marry.
Instead of Nuclear we need to say Niet more. Niet to cars, niet to sub urbs, niet to low density urban areas, niet to single family homes, niet to animal agriculture, niet to plane travel (air ships/sea vessels might make a come back), niet to fossil focused sea container ships. Most importantly niet, to bosses, niet to capitalists and reactionaries.
France was the victim of its own success. They created a model of reactor that was relatively cheap and easy to replicate, so they built out everywhere. Now they've got a ton of nuclear reactors all based on one design and - after looking at how the Americans are physically incapable of designing a next-gen design - are effectively frozen in time for fear of being stuck with another Vogtle 3/4 boondoggle.
Instead of Nuclear we need to say Niet more.
Very difficult to say Niet to municipal infrastructure. Its not like I can just take a train that doesn't exist in place of a highway that does. I can't buy a house outside the suburbs when anything near my office is well outside my budget. Etc. Etc.
Yeah I for sure don't expect ITER or other tokamak designs to save us but I didn't realize the French plants were like that, that's nuts.
Yes at ITER development rates, commercial fusion will be a thing around 2100.
Regarding France's nuclear reactor cooling issue, I believe China purposefully held off on inland reactors until they developed reactors that don't use water as a coolant. China clearly sees a reason to develop them, but their end-goal electrical mix is still to be dominated with renewables. Just less so than like, Germany.
If we switch to used fuel rods, we won't need nearly as many car batteries to charge the eels.
I think nuclear power is easier to do correctly than fossil fuels. In a well ordered economy, nuclear power plants would be well built and well maintained, and nuclear waste would be safely placed in some Yucca mountain type of facility. So there wouldn't be very much risk to future generations. Of course, they might get a hold of the nuclear waste somehow, or nuclear accidents might happen, but it's still a lot different than screwing over our children by burning every bit of hydrocarbon we can find and dumping the carbon into the atmosphere.
Sure, but wouldn't multiply Chernobyls be better for our future than more fossil fuels? At least with Chernobyl people only had to relocate a shortish distance.
yes, unironically nuclear disasters are less bad for the biosphere than global warming is
Chernobyl also gave us the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series and that good sniper mission from Call of Duty. Personally, I'm okay with that exchange.
while it for sure was more then just relocation for those affected, I agree that perhaps the impact of fossil fuels has been much worse then this or Fukushima.
rare earth mining, e-waste and microplastics. sure, the influencers could broadcast sponsored make-up demonstration videos on TikTok and it's successor, FitFart, around the world in 8K with Dolby Atmos 4.2, but there was a hidden cost. and it ended up being everything.
[ j/k, nothing is going to beat climate destabilization due to the disruption of the carbon cycle via widespread combustion of fossil stockpiles. whatever survives will have this seared into cultural memory in a way nothing has ever been before or will be since. except maybe aliens showing up everywhere and inviting us to some intergalactic civilization/exterminating us.]
those people should make one of those "X-free" subreddits, so we can see all the very rational reasons to not build nuclear reactors. I'm sure they are all very smart scientific types who have been educated by an fair and unbiased society literally built entirely on fossil fuels and their products.
Is there even enough easily minable Uranium on the planet to transition to nuclear?
200 years left at current consumption levels, 600 years I think with better processing, and an additional 30,000 years with all breeder reactors I believe. If we could process seawater efficiently, we'd be set for even longer. But realistically we just need enough to transition to space-based solar and nuclear fusion in a couple centuries.
Edit: For context, nuclear produces 7% of the world's primary energy. We also need to increase primary energy production for electrification and economic development. Without switching to breeder reactors (Oh shoot, I forgot about thorium. That would help too obviously), there's not enough to have a predominantly fission-based grid.
That's what unregulated trading AI like Renaissance Technologies,
the major briber of Trump 
and Clinton's #3 
, is for. It's already done. Baked in by Cold War obsessed billionaires.Oh noes my Forbes list infinite money glitch ran into a peace celing. Might as well start WW3 and profit off the chaos.
