Perfect Storm: Energy, Finance, and the End of Growth
tullettprebonresearch.com
tullettprebonresearch.com
Without fission, the Malthusian doomers are, well, they are right. And that's going to make for an unpleasant world to live in.
Isn't that a bit of a stretch? These long-scale predictions are always wrong.
We're on the very leading edge of many areas of energy research, any of which could dramatically alter the energy landscape. With materials science, genetic engineering, and nanotech all reaching some level of sophistication, the chances of a 'big' success are increasing daily.
Additionally, the big breakthroughs in the past were largely discovered by the ~5% of the globe who had access to the best universities and labs. The democratization of knowledge to literally billions of people has given earth the potential to collaborate on big projects on a scale the never before seen.
Obviously, nuclear power is the lowest-hanging fruit if you aim to achieve carbon-neutral energy security, but this pessimism about human ingenuity is probably misplaced.
This isn't about knowledge. We simply cannot indefinitely grow our economy/energy usage. And no, we're not going to find a workaround for the laws of thermodynamics. They are the most certain knowledge we have.
Well, in the long term, sure, you are right. (in the long term, we are all dead.) But that's a long way off. In the short term? it is about knowledge, partly, but more about what technologies we use.
Do we power our cities with hydrocarbons? or with nuclear power?
Realistically, that's the choice.
The thing is? we already are involved in resource wars over oil. We are already suffering due to not having as much energy as we'd like, and apparently we're altering the composition of our atmosphere with our waste gases. This is a problem right now, not a billion years from now.
Fission isn't perfect; it has problems, it kills people sometimes, yeah, but it kills fewer people, it has fewer problems than coal, which is the only realistic medium-term alternative.
I do think, in the medium term, it is reasonable to expect that science can bring us plenty to the point where we don't have resource wars.
Yeah... but the democratization of energy use has been similarly radical.
The problem I think that fission can solve is the near-term one; we are running out of easy to exploit fossil fuels (and bumping against the long-term consequences of burning said fuels) right at a time when, well, the rest of the world is reaching an economic level where they want to start consuming energy the way we have been for some time. It's hard to tell them "No, you can't burn fossil fuels" when they aren't any worse than we were when we were at that stage of development.
My point is just that we have good nuclear power technology that can be brought online to meet much of that need now, and that the resistance to that technology is largely political (and, I think, irrational and destructive to human life.) Sure, we will eventually come up with something better, but meanwhile, those on the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder are dying and the rest of us are somewhat uncomfortable because we are continuing to use the ancient solution rather than the merely old solution to the energy problem.
I see several other problems, especially speaking as an American, well, if China has cheap nuclear power while we are still stuck in a largely fossil-fuel based economy, well, that's going to do things to the balance of power that I, as an American, won't like one bit.
And even that problem? I think an ascendant China is better than a humanity plunged into a new dark age by irrational energy rationing.
So yeah, we have another problem here caused by our political resistance to nuclear power. Why would you start researching another energy source if all evidence points to the fact that it will be rejected, even if it's safer than what is currently being used?
That's the thing, large amounts of energy are inherently dangerous by themselves. Every new technology is going to have downsides. If "the people" don't like fission, why do you think they will accept fusion or whatever new technology you come up with?