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5. Easy Nuclear Energy

"You will remember this day, kids. You will look back and tell your grandkids about the day everything changed."

- My 8th grade science teacher, March 23, 1989

I grew up with "establishment" physics, as I mentioned. Norris Bradbury was a family friend. Classmates of mine teach particle physics at Berkeley, Irvine and somewhere in Italy - my Facebook feed gets esoteric. And no matter how much i wish it were different, break-even fusion is a bitch… unless you don't need to contain it.

Bill McKibben does a pretty good breakdown of modern nuclear energy in Eaarth. Despite being a dyed-in-the-wool hippie, his argument against nuclear power is that it's not cost-effective without subsidy… and then goes into a number of examples illustrating why new reactors have been rare of late for purely financial reasons.

Obviously, the externalities of any large-scale power production schema are non-negligible, and the peculiar externalities of nuclear waste are their own thing. But the bottom line on thorium reactors or cold fusion or whatever the flavor-of-the-month is pencils out pretty quickly when you recognize that some of the smartest people on earth have yet to figure out a better way to do it.

We used to do really stupid shit with reactors. nuclear bombers. Nuclear ramjets.. Hell, my grandfather was intimately involved with Project Plowshare. These are smart people - hella smarter than me and I'm reasonably quick. And if they haven't figured out a way to do it better, Captain Crazypants from Unknown University had better have documented his triple point energy pretty extensively.