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In 1979, there was a partial meltdown at a nuclear plant on Three Mile Island, in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. I was a young newspaper editor at the time, and I was caught up in coverage of the resulting debate about whether nuclear power could ever be safe. I have long forgotten the details of that episode, except for one troubling thought that occurred to me in the middle of it: The experts we relied on to tell us whether a given design was safe, or indeed whether nuclear power generally was safe, were people with advanced degrees in nuclear engineering and experience running nuclear plants. That is, we were relying on people who made their living from nuclear power to tell us if nuclear power was safe. If they started saying out loud that anything about the nuclear enterprise was iffy, they risked putting themselves out of business.
I mention this not because I think the engineers lied to the public. I don't. Nor do I think nuclear power is so dangerous it should be rejected as an energy source. I mention it because it shows how hard it can be to make sense of information from experts.
Trust in institutions and expertise has taken a lot of knocks in the last decade. Can society recover it? Are we all called to a higher effort to vet the information we are given, or is there another, better remedy?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 29 2017, @07:05PM (1 child)
When was the last year that windmills or solar panels produced uninterrupted power? An occasional nuclear meltdown (once every few decades) seems sort of acceptable. The land can go back to nature, and people can settle somewhere else. If you believe the global warming projections, a lot more land will be lost from CO2-induced sea level rise.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday August 29 2017, @07:41PM
Not solar panels, but here's a molten salt plant that can operate for 10 hours without sunlight: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-concentrating-solar-tower-is-worth-its-salt-with-24-7-power/ [scientificamerican.com]
Or imagine if we had 70 years of refinement behind this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemasolar_Thermosolar_Plant [wikipedia.org]
All that on 480 acres of land. Fukushima sits on 840 acres: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Power_Plant. [wikipedia.org] A time plot of energy per acre, including the time Fukushima will be uninhabitable, would certainly favor molten salt.