Agree with that. I am not a leftist, and I don’t consider it to be worth the Risk. In my mind an old fashioned conservative would not be for nuclear power because of the risk. They would rather conserve than to put their children and the whole of God’s world at such huge risk. I used to think of conservatives as sensibly spiritual people. But it seems that many of them have turned. They even seem to love Bankers like Goldman Sachs after what they have done. Instead of demanding justice, they are first to want to protect them.
Risk?
Chernobyl, which was a stone-age design with no containment managed by incompetent bureaucrats, is estimated to have produced 17,000 excess cancer deaths above the expected 123 million deaths in the affected population, and wildlife is thriving in the exclusion zone.
Civilized life comes with risk. When you are in a non-totalitarian society, you can take steps to minimize that risk such as designing reactors that produce less and less heat the hotter they get.
In the wake of the Chicago Fire of 1871, would it have been argued that using fire wasn’t worth the risk? Probably. But instead they took steps to correct the problems, and Chicago’s electrical and fire codes are some of the most stringent in the world.
Far more deadly and disastrous incidents than this reactor pepper the annals of history - in Bhopal thousands of people died for the sake of rubber, glue, or pesticides. People are sickening and dying right now in China from the toxic waste products from solar panel production, and millions are being displaced, their homed destroyed, for the sake of hydro power. But no one is yet reported to have died at this reactor from nuclear effects, as far as I know.
The uranium and thorium in fly ash left over from burning coal contains more energy potential than the coal that was burned to produce it.
If our human civilization is to prosper for the next 100,000 years or more; if we are to feed, clothe, and shelter all of humanity, then the virtually unlimited energy available from splitting atoms will continue to be a part of our civilization, just as fire has been for hundreds of thousands of years.
I agree with you. Basic and universal religious principles teach sobriety, care, realizing that everything belongs to God and should be used appropriately with care. Humans aren’t the lords of all they survey, and a rapacious attitude of greed and exploitation and hedonism is far from conservative.