Quote:
Originally Posted by photon
And it'll have an impact on the public opinion too, rightly or wrongly. Decisions about future reactors could be impacted based on fear, rather than a good evaluation of these reactors vs. planned reactors.
I still think nuclear is the only option we have right now.
And part of the problem too is it's so easy to fall into the nirvana fallacy. Yes these accidents are terrible, but when people say "no nuclear", people rarely mean "no nuclear instead of x", they just mean no nuclear vs some imaginary world where the electricity will still be there, without considering how many people die from coal, how much radioactive waste and toxic materials are released into the atmosphere burning coal and the impact of that, or forgetting about oil accidents, etc.
Every form of energy will have an impact, every industrial enterprise will cost lives, everything has waste byproducts. The question isn't how good something is compared to no impact, it's how good is it compared to the alternatives.
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We have lots of options. If you want to stick on strictly business as usual, status quo development path that closely mirrors the socio-econ-technological makeup of our current society then yes, mass nuclear deployment with hydrogen production for transportation fuel is really the only option if you want a decarbonized energy system.
But there are deep efficiency gains that we can also make that would not require near the scale of nuclear and could possibly run entirely on renewables with some type of backup energy storage.