Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
> Carlos Moreno wrote:
>
>>Well, the trick is that for every trillion of terawatts
>>that you generate with nuclear energy, you generate less
>>ashes than when generating a gigawatt by burning petroleum,
>>or equivalently, cause less damage to the environment than
>>hydro-electric energy (which BTW is too limited anyway --
>>it's not accessible everywhere, as thermo-electric
>>potentially is, and nuclear could be)
>
>
> If you are talking about fission then the ashes simply cannot
> be brushed off so lightly. Yes, the ashes of burning fossil
> fuels are harmful to the envirnoment and far larger in volume
> that for nuclear fission.
>
> However, how do you propose to safely store fission byproducts
> which are highly toxic to all life and need to be safely stored
> for tens of thousands of years or more.
>
> Nuclear fission is a really good short term solution that
> completely ignores long term consequences.
>
> If we knew in the 1850s what we know now about the burning of
> fossil fuels, we may have been a bit smarter about their use.
> Simply dropping fossil fuels in favour of nuclear fission
> considering that we have no guaranteed method of storing the
> waste would be nuts.

Unfortunately, yours is the only sensible position. It is also
unfortunate that since the 1960s, fusion power had been 20 years away.

I doubt that knowledge of the harm fossil fuels could do would have
restrained the people of 1850. There were few enough of them so that it
didn't matter as much. Compare world-wide energy demand then and now.

Jerry
--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
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