america
Can’t be. Nuclear power is actually incredibly safe and used throughout America, just has a bad reputation.
If this was coal it’d be different though.
Nuclear is safe, efficient, and worth investing in long term but it has a bad rap. Still not sure why.
Because wjhen there’s a fuck up, it’s a really bad fuck up.
Or how what it results in is toxic with a half-life of thousands of years
i mean yes but if nasa had a decent budget we could just chuck it into the sun
If the world went full nuclear, at current consumption levels, it’d be less than a century before we used up all the safely fissionable material in all known mines.
It’s a stopgap at best, not a solution.Now fusion, fusion would last a lot longer–but why bother when the biggest fusion reactor in the Solar System is hanging right over our heads, just dumping power on us in a constant stream?
Nuclear is a compliment, not a replacement.
this confused me for a second because i am extremely tired and stressed and stupid right now, so i was trying to figure out how nuclear is a compliment in the sense of something nice you say about someone, lol
Also are you considering thorium in your equation? Thorium is known to be pretty cheap, and you can breed it pretty easily into U-233 inside the reactor itself, so the fissionable material is never refined outside of the reactor itself. That’s not to say that moving on from the strip-mine isn’t preferable, but we might be able to run on thorium for quite a while.
I’m still holding out for a Dyson sphere. It’d be hard but once we harnessed the full energy output of the sun we would be post-scarcity in no time.
If we had the materials and tech to build a Dyson sphere, we’d already BE post-scarcity.
Also Dyson spheres are highly unstable, nudge them even a little bit off-center and they will continue drifting off center until eventually one end hits the sun.
(The original design got around this by not being one big sphere, but a swarm of little spheres making up a shell around the sun, but that takes EVEN MORE material.)
Frankly just making better use of the energy the sun already dumps on the planet would be enough. Higher efficiency, not more power, is the path to getting beyond scarcity.