After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform

32.72 / 0.074 ~= 442

What you consider as a consensus forms, in fact, a debate.

This is not "some researchers publish, are criticized by the book, then the scientific community condemns the book, forming a consensus".

Nope.

It is in fact "some researchers publish, are criticized by the book, then the criticized researchers try to debunk the book, then the authors of the book answer to them".

One of the critics is Monty Charles. His own work, done for the UNSCEAR (a pro-nuke UN agency) in 2006, is heavily criticized in the book. He then criticized this book.

Proof: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/245759797_United_Na...

Another critic was published by Mona Dreicer, who worked for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) (another UN pro-nuke agency) and the book criticized her work.

Proof: https://www.iaea.org/bulletin/38-3

Another one is M. Balonov, long-time contributor of reports published by UN-agencies, and the book criticizes his work.

Proof: https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/

S. Jargin, another author of a negative review, sees flaws in each and every publication criticizing a powerful industry. For example asbestos is in his opinion not a concern and its use unduly prohibited.

Proof: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321527973_Asbestos_...

Here is another sample of his research (is it necessary to further comment?) : https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sergei_Jargin/publicati...

His 'debate' with Rosamund Katz and Janette Sherman is surrealistic. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278732482_Who_Is_Af...

The book authors' credentials seems pretty clear to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...

Sure. But if we keep exponentially increasing energy usage, at some point we'll boil the oceans. And long before that we would have wrecked the earths ecosystem. So I'm assuming that the exponential increase in energy usage will stop at some point.

The 120000 year figure I arrived at in my previous post included a factor of 100 increase over current usage. Even if we add another factor of 100 increase (a total of a factor of 10000 increase over current usage!), we'd still have fuel for 1200 years, surely more than enough to get fusion working.

> When coal was first becoming a mainstream fuel in the US, reserves were estimated as sufficient for 1 million years. Current estimates are for about 100-250 years (latter from BP's Annual Statistical Review for 2019). Demand increased somewhat, and consequences emerged. Now 150 years into the million we're phasing out coal as quickly as possible.

Sure, but ~200 years ago our understanding of geology was quite rudimentary compared to today. And yes, starting from more or less zero we did exponentially increase usage for a couple of centuries. I don't think it's realistic to continue at the same exponential rate for several centuries more, regardless of where the energy comes from (maybe in the far future if humanity starts to look at interstellar travel we would have a usage for such truly stupendous amounts of energy).

Furthermore, we're not phasing out coal because we're running out of it, but due to climate/pollution/economics. From a climate perspective, it unfortunately seems we have more than enough coal left to wreck the climate if we would burn all of it.

> Breeders, thorium (a breeder fuel), and uranium seawater extraction are possible but have proved challenging or limited to date.

The main reason is economics. Uranium is currently just so cheap that it doesn't make economic sense to deploy breeder reactors and reprocessing yet. And without volume deployment, they remain expensive and underdeveloped compared to the current once-through cycle. However, there is no question whether the technology works. It does.

Earlier in the nuclear age (say 1950-1970 or so), uranium was believed to be scarce, isotope enrichment by gas diffusion was very expensive and energy consuming, and we believed the world would soon be powered by atomic energy. So a lot of effort was made to develop breeder reactor and reprocessing technology. However, all of this turned out to be incorrect. Uranium turned out to be quite plentiful, centrifuges made enrichment a lot cheaper, and nuclear power expansion ground to a standstill.

But the earlier R&D showed that the technology is viable, so if uranium prices would start to drastically increase, the option to deploy breeders at scale still exists.

I'm good with "criticality incident", "core damage incident", or any other descriptive term that makes it clear that it's a deviation from normal behavior. Using a negative term for a non-critical incident is just stacking the deck against the technology.