Harry thanks for your article, though it went in an unexpected direction from the title, in my opinion.
I thought you were about to launch into a critique of capitalism, but instead you are promoting nuclear power :)
Can I open youir eyes to the economics here, I am not sure, but will try.
To start with, the business case for nuclear is not that great, and the end result is more pollution, of the kind that won't affect anyone for generations, but when it hits, it will be catastrophic.
By that I mean it is never, ever, decommissioned safely, because every cent spent on decommissioing, is reduction of the return of investment, if any, after about 30 years. There is no such thing as a safely decommissoned nuclear plant. All of the waste that isn't any use for explicit weapons of mass death, is buried, or even in some cases, left in water. At some point, the contents, active for thousands of years, will outlive their confinement. Much earlier if disturbed by Earthquakes or whatever.
Nuclear is boomer technology, with a boomer outcome. We boomers are to blame for fucking things for following generations — you surely don’t want to do the same.
The more immediate fundamental point, which is actually harder to describe, is that nuclear would be a continuation of conventional capitalist extraction economy.
You might appreciate that the technology now exists, to configure commercially available equipments witn a solar farm, which on one hand generate valuable cryptocurrency tokens like Bitsoin, and on the other, generates hydrogen fuel, with no generation of pollution, and no labour input after installation, and the fuel replaces fossil fuels in function, whilst producing no pollution from combustion.
These things already exist, and are in use to some extent.
However, financial and other authorities do not like the technology, because it adds to what they have always treated as the base of all capital.
In other words, since this equipment was put into ues, in the past ten years or so, there has been an increasing amount of effectively donated capital, added to the capital base.
So it is no longer capital.
This is mathematically provable physics, I am an Engineer, and have provided several numerical analyses in my stories in Medium.
The end result is that the economics now does not reflect the physical reality of the presence of solar power.
It is being denied, because most users of it choose to do it offline, to stay under the tax radars of governments.
But when we analyse the possibilities, we see this as something very big, and getting bigger all the time.
As an Engineer I can only describe it like this: There is a pressure of energy building up in the system, from solar energy at the input which is not being released by the economy.
The only way of releasing it is by issue of money, per the Austrian Economics ideal of money issued being balanced by produce. The produce is building up, but there is no issue of money.
The effect of that on the dollar is loss of value, as seen by markets.
To put it right, there has to be an energy value put on all money, in terms of Joules per token, to enable the fair monetisation, and rewarding of solar power, because all produce from it is donated, additional to the existing base of capital.
Hopefully it should be clear to you that this has very far reaching implications on everything in the title of your story, and is a different, much cleaner, much better animal than nuclear.
Nuclear fixes nothing, just prolongs the same old problems of capitalism.
For more info if you are interested, the "Bitcoin as a Kardashev Hiinge" story, "The money-fuel Tree", and "Energyism" stories can all be found by Medium search
