[andness]

I agree with you that I don't think we can make nuclear safe. But if the choice seems to be between millions of deaths from global warming or thousands of deaths from nuclear, isn't the latter vastly preferable? Shouldn't we set out and build out nuclear to steer us away from the edge, and then worry about better solutions once we're safe?

I suspect the reason people don't buy this argument is that they don't truly believe global warming is as bad as they say. We have a history of solving problems in the past, so we'll solve this one too. There's no need to panic.

[michaelmrose]

Can you provide a timeline and justification on "millions of deaths from global warming".

Why can't be invest the money in better alternatives and save the same "millions of lives" with actually sustainable tech that doesn't produce what you are describing as "thousands of deaths"

[DennisP]

The book Six Degrees by Mark Lynas is a good start. It has extensive references to peer-reviewed papers on the effects of climate change.

We've already had thousands of deaths from heat waves that probably wouldn't have happened in the absence of global warming. By three degrees warming we'll have massive food shortages and hundreds of millions of climate refugees.

I find a lot of anti-nuclear renewables advocates really underestimate the scale of the problem we're facing. This book is a great start to seeing what we're really up against.

[theshrike79]

How much money and time would it take to research battery technology that could put coal and nuclear plants out of business?

We know how to build nuclear NOW. Let's do it. We can turn all the plants of the second someone finds out to store terawatts of power produced by renewable means in a cost-effective manner that doesn't rely on some geological anomalies.

[v_lisivka]

I bet, we will develop that technology in much much shorter time than we need to store nuclear waste.

[jki275]

There’s little need to store nuclear waste. Reprocess it and use the remaining fuel.

[pfdietz]

This does nothing to the fission products. And reprocessing only lets you destroy the actinides if you burn them in a fast reactor. Fast reactors have, so far, been even more expensive than thermal reactors.

[jki275]

That's only because the US stopped all R&D on them under Carter.

Again, the only reason we're not all nuclear today is because of politics.