Ah, I see - fair enough.
I suppose I didn't get the tone of your reply, so I apologise.
The key is, as always, balance, I guess. Different sources of power have different merits, and are suitable for different use cases. In this sense, the
"let's just use fossils because they're cool" camp is equally wrong as the
"everybody should go battery electric" camp, or the
"nuclear = bad" camp, in my opinion. What's good for me isn't necessarily good for you. Fun fact, that with all the famous incidents of the past,
nuclear is still one of the safest and environmentally friendliest sources of power when handled right. This is why I'm just as excited about fusion power as I am about hydrogen-powered cars.
Absolutely, and that is why I am so disgusted with the so-called "environmentalists" that blocked nuclear "on principle". If we'd built more nuclear and thus used less fossil fuels, the climate crisis probably wouldn't be a crisis, and we'd also have been in a much better place to address it via the simple act of
building even more nuclear.
Even today, with nuclear power mostly being accepted by true environmentalists, there is still the idiotic NIMBY'ing over where to store the waste that is preventing the construction of more nuclear plants. Meanwhile the current plants are forced to store spent fuel on-site basically forever, which is a massive and unnecessary cost increase and a far greater risk than just storing it all in a single, secured, centralised location.
It never ceases to blow my mind how South Africa, the third-world country I was born in,
has a nuclear waste storage program that has been working without issue for literally decades - yet the USA, the so-called greatest nation in the world, the one that literally invented nuclear power, simply cannot agree on selecting one of hundreds of thousands of disused deep mines shafts for the same. It boggles my mind.
Now, I will not disagree that there are problems with nuclear (and I do not consider spent fuel storage one of them) - in particular, the people in charge of running nuclear power stations have shown dangerous levels of incompetence (Three Mile Island and Fukishima - I'm purposefully ignoring the Soviet levels of incompetence at Chernobyl, because those levels of incompetence are something you can't really design against). This is something that can and should be addressed by wholly independent nuclear regulation agencies that have the budget and manpower to perform random inspections on a regular basis. Further, as the state of the art in terms of construction and safety around nuclear evolves, this same regulatory body should include scientists and engineers who are empowered to quite literally go into any NPP and force it to be shut down immediately because it is no longer safe according to new information (e.g. the wall height vs tsunami wave height at Fukushima). If we'd been building more nuclear plants, this wouldn't have an effect on the grid because we'd have more than enough of them for redundancy!
I appreciate it, although I wasn't being flippant, nor was I theorising around conspiracies. My point was (meant to be) similar to yours, even if I didn't communicate it right: if fusion is the way forward (which I believe it is), then governments will and should find ways to convince (or silence) the anti-mob. As you said (or at least implied), people are anti-everything by nature, even in cases where change is measurably positive.
Ah, then I doubly apologise for my offence towards you. And I think fusion is going to be very different to nuclear in this regard, because not only is it inherently fail-safe, the people involved in it have been very careful to control the media narrative to prevent any sort of anti-fusion hysteria from getting a grip. I'm sure you'll find that sort of FUD in the fringe publications, and I'm sure it'll start to leak into the mainstream once the first commercial fusion plants come online, but I think the marketing around fusion has been a lot better than fission was.
