In a message dated 03/15/2000 4:47:49 AM Eastern Standard Time,
charlie@antipope.org writes:
> Or natural gas. In the UK, coal plants are being shut down and switched
> to methane-burning turbined at remarkable speed. Meanwhile, the nuclear
> industry is moribund. The real exceptions are France and Japan, which
> for reasons of state policy are building potloads of nuclear reactors.
> By 2020, a much higher proportion of the UK's electricity will be nuclear
> than is the case today -- and it will be imported from France.
Bingo for Charlie on this one. Journalists and scientists and politicians
were for 30 years pimping the idea of nuclear energy. As Freeman Dyson had
pointed out, had the slow route been taken, there would have likely, been a
slow, incremental, development towards robust fission reactions and power
sources. This may never have lead to military apps; that is, principally,
bombs and radiological weapons. The Boiling Water Reactors and the
Pressurized Water reactors are and were not the apotheosis of nuclear
technology's potential. That failure has, as Charlie pointed out, the use of
natural gas powered turbines to fill the gap in electricity use world-wide Oh
well.
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