There are some technologies which are inherently riskier than others. A solar meltdown or wind fuel spill isn't going to risk tens of thousands to hundreds of millions as a nuke plant incident could.
[Rickover's] arguments on such grounds are not cogent.
Y'know, blithely saying that of someone who spent 35 years in the nuclear industry, pretty much creating it, shows ... a certain hubris. I'm unpersuaded by your argument.
Your nuclear alternative universe omits the one glaring limitation of conventional nuclear: there's not enough fissible material to run nukes for more than a few decades, and much less than that if the fraction of energy produced from nuclear is increased. The alternatives are breeders (weapons, proliferation, and processing risks) or thorium MSR (MOX designs don't achieve the fuel utilization rates necessary to achieve a long-term sustainable energy source status). Thorium MSR suffers from the slight limitation that some 40 years after initial and very preliminary exploration, it's still at least 25 years from commercial deployment -- by the assessment of the usually optimistic Chinese: http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uy239/energy_c...
I'll omit the other glaring omission: that oil provides fuel for transport, while nuclear doesn't. Synthesis of transportation fuels is a challenge of engineering, complexity, and scale.
Rickover actually addressed aspects of this in a 1956 speech:
I'd recommend reading it in full (he articulates and builds his argument well), but:
For it is an unpleasant fact that according to our best estimates, total fossil fuel reserves recoverable at not over twice today's unit cost, are likely to run out at some time between the years 2000 and 2050, if present standards of living and population growth rates are taken into account. Oil and natural gas will disappear first, coal last. There will be coal left in the earth, of course. But it will be so difficult to mine that energy costs would rise to economically intolerable heights, so that it would then become necessary either to discover new energy sources or to lower standards of living drastically.
Huh? No nuclear plant incident has even come close to this level of impact; this number is at least four orders of magnitude too large, and quite possibly more.
someone who spent 35 years in the nuclear industry
I didn't say all his arguments weren't cogent, just the particular argument he made about "releasing radiation".
there's not enough fissible material to run nukes for more than a few decades
Sure there is, if you reprocess the spent fuel (spent fuel actually still has a fairly large fraction of fissile material in it) and/or run breeders (sure, you have to keep control of the nuclear material, but that's a lot cheaper than the alternative of making us all poor because we don't have enough energy).
I was surprised to see the Chinese that pessimistic about the time scale for thorium reactors; I haven't had time to dig into the details to see what the roadblock is. They're not the only ones working on those, either.
oil provides fuel for transport, while nuclear doesn't.
But oil provides fuel for other things besides transport as well. If it only had to provide fuel for transport, that would change things significantly.
(Also, battery technology is a lot better now than when Rickover made his speech; electric cars can now actually have decent range for things like commuting.)
Rickover actually addressed aspects of this in a 1956 speech
Yes, I've read it. One thing that struck me was that he came right out and said that energy == standard of living, which is true, but it's an inconvenient truth. Of course, he wasn't a politician.
Self-followup: Global Warming was in fact a thing by 1956. In fact, noted as early as 1932 (with earlier work on CO2 as a greenhouse gas dating to the 19th century):
There are some technologies which are inherently riskier than others. A solar meltdown or wind fuel spill isn't going to risk tens of thousands to hundreds of millions as a nuke plant incident could.
[Rickover's] arguments on such grounds are not cogent.
Y'know, blithely saying that of someone who spent 35 years in the nuclear industry, pretty much creating it, shows ... a certain hubris. I'm unpersuaded by your argument.
Your nuclear alternative universe omits the one glaring limitation of conventional nuclear: there's not enough fissible material to run nukes for more than a few decades, and much less than that if the fraction of energy produced from nuclear is increased. The alternatives are breeders (weapons, proliferation, and processing risks) or thorium MSR (MOX designs don't achieve the fuel utilization rates necessary to achieve a long-term sustainable energy source status). Thorium MSR suffers from the slight limitation that some 40 years after initial and very preliminary exploration, it's still at least 25 years from commercial deployment -- by the assessment of the usually optimistic Chinese: http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uy239/energy_c...
I'll omit the other glaring omission: that oil provides fuel for transport, while nuclear doesn't. Synthesis of transportation fuels is a challenge of engineering, complexity, and scale.
Rickover actually addressed aspects of this in a 1956 speech:
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2006-12-02/energy-resource...
I'd recommend reading it in full (he articulates and builds his argument well), but:
For it is an unpleasant fact that according to our best estimates, total fossil fuel reserves recoverable at not over twice today's unit cost, are likely to run out at some time between the years 2000 and 2050, if present standards of living and population growth rates are taken into account. Oil and natural gas will disappear first, coal last. There will be coal left in the earth, of course. But it will be so difficult to mine that energy costs would rise to economically intolerable heights, so that it would then become necessary either to discover new energy sources or to lower standards of living drastically.
(Global Warming wasn't yet a thing in 1956).