I had thought to address the ongoing problem of the health issues connected to the mRNA Covid vaccines, but I couldn’t wrap my head around it as it kept drifting back to a post I read on Instapundit about nuclear power and how it is one way to ‘save the planet’.
To be honest, I didn’t read the linked article as it was the comments to Glenn Reynolds post that were more telling.
There were almost 100 comments with most of them in favor of reviving the nuclear power industry. As often happens, there were also a couple of trolls trying to throw a monkey wrench into the discussion. (Fortunately they were well known trolls so pretty much everyone ignored them.)
One of the common threads in the comments dealt with the use of small modular reactors (SMRs) rather than returning to the One Big Reactor paradigm. There was also a lot of discussion about using Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs) and Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTRs) which have a number of advantages, particularly when it comes to safety and their ability to ‘burn’ nuclear waste from existing Generation I and Generation II nuclear power plants as fuel, reducing the amount of high-level nuclear waste in the process. (This is a short 5 minute tutorial on LFTRs.)
One of the upsides to SMRs is that they aren’t built like ‘traditional’ nuclear reactors. Instead they are factory built, trucked to the power plant site, then offloaded and installed. SMRs can be clustered together to provide a lot of generating capacity at a single site or installed in a number of different sites, creating a distributed power generation system. Such a system wouldn’t require nearly as much in the way of high capacity transmission lines as needed in the traditional One Big Power Station model.
The great thing is that nuclear provides carbon-free, dispatchable, weather/time-of-day independent, and reliable base load power. The argument will be made by the Greens and Watermelon Environmentalists that nuclear isn’t carbon-free due to the construction required, but the same argument can be made for wind and solar. All of them will generate CO2 during construction, maintenance, repair, and decommissioning, but the argument can be made that nuclear generates a lot less CO2 throughout its service life and generates a lot more power than the two favorite renewables of the Greens.
That modern nuclear power won’t generate the high-level waste that present nuclear power plants generate, a big plus. That it can also be used to ‘burn’ existing nuclear waste is another big plus. Another plus – between the spent fuel (the high-level nuclear waste) and the amount of thorium available, we would have enough fuel to last for a thousand years or more. And maybe by the time we run out of fuel, fusion will have been perfected!
It’s time to turn our attention back to nuclear power if we want to be able to keep living a modern life, one of abundant clean energy and a 21st Century way of life rather than being forced back to an early 18th existence so many of the Greens and Watermelon Environmentalists want for us.
