Nuclear Power Can Save the World

Joshua Goldstein, Staffan Qvist, and Steven Pinker believe nuclear power should replace fossil fuels, and serve as the backup that makes renewable energy sources viable. They make a good case in this interesting article on The New York Times, and I even found a few gems in the comments section — one of which pointed me to a piece on Bloomberg. Gerard Mourou, a winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics, has a novel idea to solve the problem of nuclear waste disposal.

These advocates, and the scientists behind them, have many barriers to overcome before their proposal becomes a reality. As they point out in The New York Times’ piece, though, it comes down to using a scary solution to avoid the guaranteed disaster that lies at the end of the path we walk today. If the science works out, we will have to choose between the devil we know, and the imagined one we have built up in our minds over the last half century. I’ll keep my finger’s crossed that we make the right choice.