The meltdown over nuclear power

It's started. I received the following in an email at work:

Friend,

We are at an energy crossroads. We could continue rushing blindly down a road strewn with nuclear meltdowns, oil spills, and toxic emissions until we realize too late that we have altered our world’s ability to nourish its inhabitants. Or we could step boldly onto a new road to a time and place where energy is abundant, affordable, and safe for people and our planet. The choice is clear. But as long as the government keeps propping up toxic energy with taxpayer dollars, the roadblocks to a clean energy future are insurmountable.

... help build grassroots momentum for a future free of nuclear emergencies: Forward this message to everyone you know who supports a transition to a clean and safe energy future.

I'm all for ending the government prop-up of energy creation. All it does is distort the price of certain, favored policies, over others. And I'm for cheap, clean power. But the reality is that this just doesn't exist in the way Public Citizen - the author of this letter - hopes. "Clean and safe" pretty much defines nuclear power. We've had what, two accidents, in the entire U.S. No injuries. Compare that to coal and oil, and for fun let's put aside the environmental problems from their burning. You still have oil rig explosions, mine collapses, resulting pollution from obtaining the materials, etc.

Public Citizen's letter is suspiciously quiet about which clean, safe and abundant power source it favors. My guess is wind or solar. But of the two of them, only wind produces a smaller carbon footprint than nuclear. Solar's carbon footprint is actually twice as large. Not to mention the best place for windfarms - which come with their own set of problems outside of having the actual, visible windmills - is in ecologically sensative deserts. And consider the amount of space wind requires to produce 1,000-megawatts over that of nuclear. Geothermal is nice, but requires enough space that it probably isn't an option for cities.

Could God have created a radioactive-free world?

Those who believe him omnipotent would certainly say so. And those who don't believe him to exist would certainly say that he had nothing to do with it. Regardless of my own personal stance, there is room for both beliefs, I think.

This article touches on religion and nuclear power (sorta) and so it touches on two topics of endless interest to me. As a disclaimer, I generally like Slate.com, question the existence of God in a Buddhist "we can't know" kind of way, and support nuclear power. I believe there there are certainly good questions about God. This is not one of them:

Those who believe that suffering and evil can be explained, even justified, by the fact that man has free will and thus the ability to choose evil (the "blame-it-on-the victim" school of theodicy) and argue that courage and goodness would not mean anything if mankind did not have that free choice, still have to answer the question: Is this really the best of all possible worlds? Couldn't God have made it a little better? A little less suffering, fewer of those earthquakes, say, a slightly smaller number of childhood cancers, a little less heartlessness, a little more humanity in human nature? Whenever I hear people echo Voltaire's mocking (in Candide) of Leibniz's assertion this is "the best of all possible worlds," I hear Leibniz with a different, sardonic, anti-Candide questioning tone: "This, THIS is the best of all possible worlds?" This is the
best you could do, God, Mr. Big Shot burning-bush guy?

Asking questions like "couldn't God have made it a little better" begs the question. And while we are at it, couldn't he have made it a little worse? It's a juvenile argument, as far as I'm concerned. It really adds nothing to the conversation. If you think God is silly (as the author appears to), you should consider how silly discussing whether or not he could have created a "little better" world is really dumb. Even allowing that the author concedes the existence of God for this discussion, the discussion itself is entirely myth-based and unknowable.

"Could God have created a "little better" world by not including radioactivity" strikes me as a smoke-filled dorm-room/freshman philosophy question.

How we learned to hate the Nuke and ruined (?) our own environment along the way

This is a bit late, but I didn't want to step on the feet of my UnChristmas Story, nor Christmas itself.

The answer to the titular question is: 1970s environmentalism. At one point in the 1970s, it was hoped that 200 "breeder" reactors would be online by 2000, which would have reduced our carbon output by 1/3.

Sadly, President Carter, aided no doubt by a 1973 lawsuit by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Scientists Institute for Public Information, killed the plan.

Of course, back then nuclear was the Devil, the environment was the Endangered One. Now, carbon is the Devil, and the environment is the Even More Endangered One. Sadly, if we had only chosen the proper course 30 years ago, we might have been able to knock a prefix and suffix off of endangered (that's a beginning and an ending; for those of you who might not get it - that means we'd be left with simply Danger.)

Choices choices. And of course their consquences, people.

Here's the reason link from pre-Christmas week.