Radiation's spewing out of that Japanese nuclear plant. Insult upon injury as Japan's death toll just keeps going up and up after the quake and tsunami combo.
Meanwhile, folks are apparently using this incident as an excuse to protest in Germany and other places over the use of nuclear power.
I honestly have no idea where I sit on this issue. I mean, how often does one really expect a disaster along the lines of a 9.0 earthquake to hit a nuclear power plant? I expect it to be far more likely I'm going to get squashed crossing the street today.
[Knocks on wood to hope I'm not suddenly prophetic. Moving on.]
A lot of our technology is simply dangerous. The San Bruno explosion reminded us that gas can also be dangerous. Sure, it's looking like PG&E screwed up and that resulted in the obliteration of a neighborhood and many deaths, but it could just have easily been the result of an accident or earthquake.
I'm not a nuclear engineer (or any kind of engineer). For all I know, everything runs on dilithium crystals and spinning things powered by space monkeys. I have no idea if there's ways of making our power sources safer that we're not actually doing.
I'm moderately confident our technology isn't capable of staving off the damage from something truly catastrophic, like a 9.0 quake, a comet or asteroid impact, or human incompetence, stupidity, and evil.
Our world society needs power. It's got to come from somewhere. Hydroelectric works well enough, but dams cause problems with local ecosystems. Solar power is very friendly, but it's not currently up to the challenges posed by demand (and probably not all that useful on a rainy day... just sayin'). Wind power has its own problems with birds getting caught in the rotors and the like. Coal burning is just bad across the board.
So that leaves nuclear power plants, unless I'm missing something. I can't say I'm entirely comfortable with the idea of being anywhere near a nuclear power plant, but the technology has been useful.
Modern life is awfully complicated.
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2 comments:
You forgot fuel cells. An example, one of the best, would be the Bloom Box, http://www.bloomenergy.com/.
Another coming down the pipes is a combination of a cheap solar panels/water/carbon dioxide to generate hydrogen to store energy for later (basically artificial photosynthesis). Nate Lewis is heading up this research. Here is a little snippet http://nsl.caltech.edu/nslewis
I didn't forget them. They're not in a position to supply the sorts of energy demands that hydroelectric and nuclear plans can handle... at least so far.
It'll be wonderful when all this is up-and-running but until then our society has needs.
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