I’ve been reading “Going Nuclear” by Tim Gregory on the recommendation of my brother having seen him give a talk on it.
To be clear it’s written for not just a general science audience, but a completely general lay audience – even explaining units of measure and metric prefixes of scales of measure, as well as the basic physics. So, as an engineer in the capital facilities industry, including power of all kinds – as well as non-power nuclear applications – I’m not really his audience. In fact my two-before-last professional job was at the very same facility where Tim still works, Sellafield.
My agenda is a couple of levels more abstract than Tim’s – he’s focussing on the balance of psychology and scientific fact that have led to decades of failing to invest in the safest-and-longest-sustainable source of energy available to humanity – specifically nuclear power. My focus is the inadequate world-model we hold to be able to address the meta-crisis underlying the whole gamut of existential poly-crises requiring our individual and collective decision-making. The Psybernetics of individuals and organisations living in free-democratic societies seen as Complex Adaptive Systems – a deeper, wider, longer story. (Coincidentally, Sellafield was the facility where I first recognised “complexity” as a project systems discipline in its own right, alongside all the other specific technical expertise, another long story.)
Short story here is as I say, that nuclear power (fusion now plus fission later) is simply the safest-and-longest-sustainable source of energy available to humanity. Anyone who doesn’t recognise that needs to read Tim’s book. It’s not just the economic consequences of wasted opportunity. In terms of human and environmental, risks and emissions it really is as benign as renewable sources like wind and solar. We suffer far greater (yet practically harmless) radiation exposure from the environment and air-travel say, than from the workings of nuclear power – indeed the infamous linear-non-threshold basis for assessing exposure risk associated with the nuclear industry is given a thorough treatment. In terms of human health and fatalities, fossil fuel emissions were / are clearly far worse, but population-scale evacuations (like lockdowns, incidentally, but specifically Chernobyl and Fukujima say) have far greater human risks than any original source of potential danger in unplanned accidents and the like. Nuclear in particular suffers a shared paranoia in mis-understanding relative risks, which is why this is for me an example of the wider psychology-more-than-science nature of our meta-crises and political decision-making generally.
Short-termism is only the half of it. Tim also goes on to cover very long-term small-scale nuclear power applications such as those enabling greater space exploration and population – the final frontier. For us Brits, Sellafield is of course sitting on an enormous resource of both fissile and fertile nuclear fuel. The many different fuel / reactor combinations viable and the state-of-the-art as well as the history of these are also covered. As an engineer, rather than a lay reader, probably the only criticism I would raise is that early on – he explains that he’s using the simple term “radiation” throughout, without distinguishing between ionising and non-ionising forms – for simplicity for his target audience – but I wonder if his arguments might actually be clearer in later sections looking at overall exposures, including solar?
But for now, if you or your friends don’t believe that:
Nuclear power really is the safest-and-longest-sustainable source of energy available to humanity and that in terms of human and environmental, risks and emissions it really is as benign as renewables.
You need to be reading and sharing “Going Nuclear” by Tim Gregory.
I shall be passing my copy along to the local pub book club 🙂
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