Thanks for your post, sorry I am so late seeing it. I am surprised it has not had more attention. It is valuable to know how you think about this, as an insider of the nuclear industry.
My own exposure to nuclear is not direct, I spent some time in the earlier part of my career as a hardware engineer working on electrical metering equipment for the commercial electrical utilities market, around 1998. The company I worked for had several well known longstanding high profile nuclear business folks amongst the executives, and it was a small company so we all got to know one another pretty well. The company soon was bought out and all the executives safely retired with their relative fortunes. The managing director had a seven-acre stately home in rural Devon countryside that he used to delight in showing everyone around.
Since then I have been a Multidiciplinary Systems Engineer working on all kinds of systems and projects, sometimes involving nuclear. sometimes in permanent roles, sometimes as consultant.
Recently since working on a metaverse related PhD around 2017, a few things became apparent to me, beginning with the realisation that certain things were preventing truly whole-humanity benefiting projects coming to fruition.
Namely the business of profit / capitalism - by definition it can only ever benefit small sections of people, not all people, so things like successful vaccines, metaverses, and truly clean, sustainable, safe, world energy consumption can't happen until we rid ourselves of the profit driven business model.
So I find myself analysing things like the true source of energy, where we need to get it from, and the relative effects of using it / not using it, and coming to the conclusion there is no such thing as renewable energy, only solar energy, and there is no such thing as recyclable waste, only waste, it is never truly recyclable, unless it was created from something we created ourselves from the energy of sunlight, and therefore are able to completely de-create it again.
Personally I think nuclear was a bad idea, no long term good has ever really come of it, a lot of money might well have been made by those involved in the implmentation of it, but that money came from a lot of others, and the net result of nuclear phyisics so far is death and destruction from the weapons side of it, which I am not surprised you carefully avoided talking about.
The ability of folk involved in things like nuclear, to somehow partition it in their minds, so that they seemingly can't see the bad sides of it intrigues me. If we could know how that works, we might be able to more quickly fix some of the problems that have arisen from it. Obviously the more invested in it we are, in terms of time spent, as well as financially, the more profound and intricate the visor is, that we have constructed for ourselves.
Your article communicates to me that you have such a visor. I mean that wihout any intention to blame, we all have a similar visor.
You visor enables you to not question why any individual, or group of individuals, should be able to make decisions on, and carry out work, which burdens literally generations upon generations of the whole of humanity, and all of life afterwards.
How does that burden not feature in the profit/loss financial calculations made, justifying whether or not nuclear is viable?
There is only one power source of Earth, it is the sun, and all we need to do to plug into it, is to start valuing the Joules per second coming from there, rather than the Joules tied up in the capital of Earth.
We should notice that work done using the power of the sun is additive to Earth, like the work done by all of nature, whereas work done with all the other "Sources" we humans normally use is subtractive, hence pollution is unavoidably produced.
That has big implications on economy, as well as environment.
We might notice when we use that source, it is much more difficult to create pollution. We can even make hydrogen fuel which functionally replaces fossil fuels with none of the pollution, and with even none of the labor. The idea that we have no practical backup for solar is not true, we have commercially available reversible fuel cell technology which not only replace batteries, but generate green hydrogen when overcharged.
The reason we don't use it, is that despite it being a never ending source of valuable product as Joules, it features nowhere in our economy, otherwise we would see issue of continuous stimulus, reflecting it.
Figuring out how to get us to use that, is what I find myself fully engaged with lately.
Anyone interested can find a quick precis in my "Money-Fuel Tree" story.
I hope you might be interested, your appraisal of it would be much appreciated.
