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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, @08:38PM
Coal is obsolete. The number of jobs in coal, already small, continues to diminish.
Trump's mentioning coal jobs shows what a complete fool he is.
Anyone who mentions fossil fuels in this context is a fool or a shill for old-style energy.
Mentioning burning crap to make electricity in the 21st Century is a complete red herring.
...meanwhile, 42 percent of registered USAian voters didn't vote in 2016.
If those folks had turned off their TeeVees (or at least tuned away from the corporate channels), unsubscribed from their Reactionary rag newspapers, and gotten USEFUL information from alternate media about the candidates stands on actual issues (ALL of the candidates), we might now be talking about President Jill Stein and her Green New Deal, which would have gotten fracking outlawed (ending artificially cheap natural gas) and moved us on to (new-jobs-intensive) renewable energy.
...and nuclear remains the most expensive way ever devised to boil water.
As hemocyanin already noted, if it wasn't for the subsidies and free passes given by government (and I'll add weapons building here), nuclear would never have been a thing.
Toshiba bought Westinghouse, which builds nukes, and they damned near went broke because of that.
In-progress nukes in USA have been canceled.
...meanwhile, renewables keep becoming a bigger and bigger part of the energy picture.
Some places around the globe have essentially skipped over the fossil fuel/nuke era.
California produces so much electricity that we have to effectively give away the excess to Arizona.
Why the nukes at Diablo Canyon (sited on the confluence of several earthquake faults) are still in operation is a huge mystery to me.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]