It's certainly the case that the big problems with steam explosions and meltdown do not exist with many more modern reactor designs. Likewise, the intolerable expense and long lead time of building out nuclear power, as the French example proves, are not inherent in the technology. Furthermore, the quantity and period of great danger of nuclear waste can be reduced to a) very small amounts of waste, and b) a need for protection from waste on the order of a few hundred, rather than thousands, of years--arguably feasible for human civilization. The plutonium present in present-day nuclear-power waste, for example, is not used in the manufacture of nuclear weapons and could be "burned" as fuel in eg a thorium molten salt reactor (MSR).
The problems introduced by a) nuclear medicinal and b) nuclear weapons manufacture (Hanford)--which, BTW, is not in practice connected with the nuclear waste produced by commercial reactors generating electricity, since the plutonium generated thereby is AFAIK not used in the manufacture of nuclear weapons--are different enough in degree from the problems of nuclear waste created in the generation of electricity to require separate treatment as related, rather than being lumped under one big nuclear heading with no subdivisions. So why oppose nuclear power? Where to begin? What about eg the problems of corrosion and potential gamma-ray release with the thorium MSR? What will happen if, as more than one advocacy group suggests, tiny reactors or medium-sized reactors can be cranked out on assembly lines like so many Liberty ships (Bill Gates, ThorCon). What happens when the glorious Freedom of neoliberalism is applied to rich pricks and corporations setting these things up wherever Gaw-Duh moves them to do so, sissified regulations be damned!! Imagine some Texas billionaire living off bitcoin on a huge ranch entirely fueled by small nuclear reactors, even thorium ones. What crap! How inevitable that such a thing will arise and fail disastrously for the 99% under the rule of the capitalist jesters who are leading us all down the merry road with bells on? This decadent authoritarian anarchist libertarian Trumpian wet dream is an immediate political enemy of any energy solution in the US whatever the technical possibilities of safer nuclear power generation from fission. (Fusion is now, as it has been for half a century, perpetually twenty years in the future.) The capitalists are all too stupid or perverse to be trusted even with investigating with such a thing. It therefore IMO is impossible for political reasons to implement "safer" nuclear power on a large scale in the United States without some kind of nuclear disaster whatever the basic technical problems or potential solutions may be. If large-scale human society can solve the larger ecological issues facing us today with any blend of technologies, this can only be done under socialism. Unless of course we want to follow John Zerzan and Ted Kaczinski down the blood-soaked road of neoprimitivism. The colonial-settler model of technological advance--More worlds to conquer! New markets!!!--is no longer tolerable in any form. Whether Marxists like it or not, there are limits. Does this mean there can be no more "progress?" I don't think so, but that is another question. BTW: "Authoritarian anarchist libertarian"--is this possible? I say it is. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#5112): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/5112 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/79359028/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
