Every individual and group on the planet has in their heads a set of parameters built by the personal experiences they have had, and those that are passed on by the parents, grandparents, all antecedents, and their social circles.
The formulation of strategy intersects with these stories, beliefs, and biases, which greatly influences our behaviour in the future.
Throughout our history, great advances have been made by those few brave enough to call out the metaphorical emperors clothes when they (don’t) see them.
Like many, I am of the view that we face an existential crisis caused by the human emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Demonstrably, the planets climate has changed many times over geological history, remaking itself at the expense of what has gone before, but never at anything like the pace that is happening currently. For perspective, the origin of homo sapiens is around 300,000 years, or .007% of geological time. If the geological life of the planet was a 24-hour clock, we have been around for only tiny fractions of a second of the available 24 hours.
As we seek answers, nuclear power is, at least in this country, off the table. The fact that it is not off the table in other countries makes Australia’s position somewhat ridiculous, as we are all part of the same planet.
However, it is off the table here due to the political problems of waste, and risks of disaster exemplified by 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. Somewhat irrationally, we are nevertheless prepared to sell the raw material to power these plants to ‘approved’ buyers, recognising the commercial reality that if we do not, someone else will.
I know absolutely nothing about nuclear technology beyond the stuff I had shoved down my throat 50 years ago at school. However, I do know that like every other branch of technology, nuclear has undergone incredible and compounding advances since the first demonstration of its power in the New Mexican desert in 1945. As the father of the theoretical science that led to that explosion, Albert Einstein noted, ‘Compounding is the most powerful force in the universe’. Our knowledge of atomic science has grown at a compounding rate since that first explosion, and the subsequent opening of the first power plant in Obninsk, 100 k’s from Moscow in 1954, and should not be discarded.
If we are to stop the self-induced implosion of our world, we should not rule out any potential solution by kow-towing to our collective prejudices and emotional response to technology 70 years old. Rather, we should seek out the truth, understand the developments in nuclear technology that have evolved, are likely to evolve, do reality checks, and ramp up investment in rapidly evolving understanding of the physics surrounding ‘science fiction’ ideas like Fusion. We must know if the general perception of the risks of nuclear are still valid, or if they are just the projection of our fears of a 70 year old technology.
Are our collective heads stuck in the sand, or can we have a rational debate that recognises the sceintific developments over the last 70 years?
