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Comment by wazoox | Hacker News Reader

> we'll be able to ramp up nuclear power over a few decades.

Maybe if thorium comes on the radar.

> we've been pretty good at discovering and harvesting 'magic ponies' of all shapes and sizes.

Well, not that much. By the end of the roman republic, most of what made the industrial revolution possible was available, but it didn't happen until 18 centuries later.

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The ancient Greeks even had an initial stream engine, but never put it to practical use, relegating it to parlor/temple game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile

That's what I mean : they had the ability to go to industrial age, they lacked the will, the impulse.

Also, they had slavery.

While Thorium reactors are cool and all, they aren't necessary. It's not like we're about to run out of uranium any time soon. Hell, you can take your basic 1970's uranium reactor, incorporate everything we've learned about nuclear safety over the past 40 years, throw in some generic improvements to basic turbine technology and have a fully functional power plant that will do a splendid job for decades to come.

And still no proper way to manage nuclear waste.

Here are some options. Forgive my brevity, but I'm tired of people simply asserting that there's no way of managing nuclear waste.

* Throw it away. Deep-sea subduction zones work nicely for this. Tremendously wasteful, though; that "waste" is valuable fuel.

* Recycle the waste to decrease its volume. This isn't a full solution, but it makes the waste cheaper to store for a while.

* Store the waste for a while, and later we can use it in breeder reactors or fusion/fission hybrids. There's so much useful U-238 in that slightly-used fuel. After this, the waste is pretty much dead.

I'm tired of this toon and particularly of the general political atmosphere on HN (technology will solve all problems! yay!).

If it's so easy to get rid of nuclear waste, why didn't we do it yet?

GP just said. Because getting rid of it would be stupid - the current approach is building long-term storage.

So far, technology has solved all problems. What else is there?

I know! We can vaporize it and spew it into the air, like the coal industry already does with their radioactive waste!

Except about 200 years of science and math starting from the end of the Renaissance Period.

The Antikythera mechanism (2 century BC) basically reset what we believed of science, mechanics and mathematical knowledge during antiquity. That, and some other things : Hero's Eolipyle, Nero's emerald monocle, Provence "industrial" mills... They had the ability, they lacked the will.

They lacked metallurgy, banking, agricultural technology... The Industrial Revolution was built on hundreds of years of slow progress and access to tons of natural resources. The Aeliopile was a toy that opened doors; it wasn't going to power any steamships.

There's a strange parallel to the evolution of life on Earth. Took about a billion years before the simplest single-celled organism developed all the basic mechanisms/components, and then a few hundred million years from complex multicelled organisms, and finally a huge explosion in diversity in the last hundred million years. I wonder if evolution and technological progress plotted on the same relative logarithmic scale would overlay each other?

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