Reply To: would nuclear energy really be accessible to all?

[zapkitty]

Aeronaut wrote:
And it’s going to be online forever if we do it in such a way as to embarrass ourselves in the longer sweeps of history- say a year or ten, when the spill’s memory in the public’s collective memory is about the same as the Exxon Valdez incident.

Leaving aside the wisdom of trying to ride the coattails of this monumental disaster without even achieving a waste-free net power device first, there is a serious misunderstanding of the scale of events in the Gulf implied in your phrasing.

A slighting reference to “Exxon Valdez”? No. There are businesses which are still impacted by that spill every day… even after all these years.

And this flood of oil into the Gulf is already much worse than Exxon Valdez and is guaranteed to get worse each day every day for months on end.

If you can attempt to equate this cataclysm to the Exxon Valdez then you do not understand what is happening.

As for the secondary role of oil in lubricants, solvents, plastics, asphalt, pharmaceuticals etc etc…. that does not amount to so very much compared to the oligarch’s insistence that we burn coal and oil to power our civilization.

Without needing to throw away (burn) those insane amounts of oil the petroleum needs of the world would contract greatly and, in the U.S. at least, even what domestic production we have now would need to contract in turn.