The anti-nuclear cause wouldn’t have nearly been bolstered as much if the Three Mile Island incident hadn’t occurred.
The level of ignorance in the general population is astounding.
In 1979? Years before the Internet? Yes, people were ignorant.
Don't get me wrong, I'm the last person to defend ignorance in the general population, but you're speaking from hindsight.
For the sake of discussion, let's grant your point: Jane Fonda and co. delayed clean nuclear energy by four or five decades.
So what? What do we do about it today? How does that help convince the holdovers that we can actually make and run clean nuclear power plants?
(Just to be clear, I'm not against nuclear energy. Especially, I'm really hopeful about molten salt reactors and (eventually) fusion power.)
Use the same cloud they used to scuttle the tech to revive and invigorate the technology.
They should also stress people to seek facts by themselves and to not rely on mouthpieces and emotive arguments when making decisions and choices. To be critical and seek your own information.
Source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fus...
That was as true 30 years ago.
A Tokamak fusion plant would cost at least 10x fission, and fission is already far from competitive. So, absent aneutronic, fusion has no prospect ever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
Dr. Robert Bussard (RIP): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhL5VO2NStU He claimed that it would only take about $200M of engineering development to become viable.
There is a split between thermal-equilibrium designs, like Tokamak, and those relying on non-linear plasma fluid effects to achieve much greater compression in selected places and/or times where fusion should happen. Plasma fluid dynamics is tricky. Plasma fluid radiology is harder.
I'm not equipped to evaluate it either, just hopeful. :)
It could have been earlier had there been more effort put into it in the past. Just look at that chart- even if the projections were wildly optimistic, it still seems like there was no political will to even try.
So, money spent on fusion is welfare for the military contractors who build the test articles, and for hot-neutron physicists who might be needed for weapons work.
It is good that a few plasma fluid dynamics physicists and their grad students get the odd bone or two, because it is a too-neglected field. It would be better to give them the whole budget.
It was and is a speculative technology, but what is the harm in reallocating funding from say, fossil fuel subsidies, into fusion R&D? Even as a purely scientific endeavor, who knows what kinds of useful knowledge and applicable by-products might be found along the way. If fusion is such a dead end, why have there actually been new discoveries made over the past several years, even if they might be hyped? Do you believe MIT/CFS, TAE, JET, or ASIPP are just burning money or something? Who are you to claim that a technology is impossible? Skepticism in fission does not have to convert to the dismissal of fusion.
I also do not back orbital, beamed solar power. That, too, could work. But it, also, would cost more.
Things that cost more displace less CO2 emission, per dollar spent. We have a need to maximize displacing CO2 emission.
In particular, its very large "venting" of radioactive krypton gas that ran down to the river and spread out in neighborhoods on the riverbanks is never counted among its impacts.