Plutonium is Forever

"# Human society has demonstrated no stability, sociologically, technologically, nor otherwise, approaching even vaguely the time frames required to safely utilize this technology."

This is the key observation, imo, addressing this issue and a broad set of other hot and timely topics, most fundamentally 'globalization' and the utopian yearning for a unified planetary governance (being quite generous and assuming idealism is mixed with the obvious hunger for global power among the promoters and actors).

Many things make sense on paper. Applying them to human society, at its current level of progress, is not a given and we need to exercise caution.

The main issue with nuclear technology is that it is not fail-safe. That by itself is not an indictment (as many have pointed out nearly everything we rely on is not fail-safe). So clearly we need to focus on recovery from catastrophe as an input to our decision making process. An airplane may indeed crash and kill N human beings. But it is a relatively scoped and finite event. People, generally, do not continue to die because an airplane crashed x years ago in their vicinity. Ditto trains, cars, etc.

Nuclear technology disfigures nature as we know it. That is the key issue. This disfigurement is non-reversible (per our technological reach). This lack of room from recovery from error, regardless of the probabilities involved, is what is fundamentally "evil" about nuclear technology as practiced by the human species as of now.

I'm not particularly in favor of nuclear energy.

But it seems the danger of plutonium in particular may be exaggerated. I've mostly read the wikipedia article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Toxicity

Several populations of people who have been exposed to plutonium dust (e.g. people living down-wind of Nevada test sites, Hiroshima survivors, nuclear facility workers, and "terminally ill" patients injected with Pu in 1945–46 to study Pu metabolism) have been carefully followed and analyzed.

These studies generally do not show especially high plutonium toxicity or plutonium-induced cancer results.[89] "There were about 25 workers from Los Alamos National Laboratory who inhaled a considerable amount of plutonium dust during the 1940's; according to the hot-particle theory, each of them has a 99.5% chance of being dead from lung cancer by now, but there has not been a single lung cancer among them."[95][96] (etc, it's not something you'd want to ingest mind you).

Any counter-references are welcome.

Sigh, its not 'one of the most challenging technologies' its actually rather simple which is why it was developed in the 1940's, a 'challenging' technology would be genetically engineered life forms, only recently managed [1]. Not only are synthetic life forms more technologically challenging, if they escape from the lab the planet is designed to provide them with an environment that allows them to replace all existing lifeforms if they adapt better.

Public concerns, are just that, concerns. While its extremely important to have an open and informed public conversation around complex policy issues, they don't actually inform the policy they inform the public. If the national energy policy is to have 30% of our power provided by nuclear sources, we will have 30% of our power provided by nuclear sources.

Human society ... yeah collectively we've been unable to keep a stable form of government for more than about 300 years (I realize that both the Chinese and Egyptians would dispute this given their emperor pasts but I don't accept that a series of emperors represents a 'continuous' government in the same way that a constitutional (or institutional) government exists with people merely filling rolls in the institutions)

Nuclear resources on this planet are limited ... Uh no. You see the two most often discussed forms of nuclear processes for energy generation are fission and fusion. There using simply U235 and D3 we've got plenty. Successful implementation in space craft would extend that basically forever [2]

You know how when you see Doctors in an operating room on TV you might think to yourself "Wow, that is very realistic" and then when you see them using a computer you say "That is so lame! You can't zoom in 2000x on a traffic camera photograph no matter how good your image processing software is." Basically we tend to give credence to things we aren't personally aware of the details of, and we instantly recognize the flaws in the the things we know intimately. However, everything has those same flaws, and if you happen to be sitting next to a surgeon they could tell you all the silly things wrong about the OR in a House episode and you could tell them about all the silly computer things they claim to do in a CSI episode.

ABC news ran a story on coal ash [3] where they talked about cancer and asthma. I'm surprised they didn't run a radiation counter on the coal dust, if they had they would probably have found it to be more radioactive then the area outside the Fukushima plant. What is worse, the mercury and arsenic they were worried about are stable, which means that unlike plutonium they never go away ever. And if you ingest mercury? it kills you way faster than plutonium.

ABC News could have taken a moment to talk about how if instead of the coal fired plants that had been built in Oklahoma they had instead built a single nuclear plant, statistics say that nobody in the town would have cancer due to the power plants. As it is, ABC News makes it look like everybody in the town has cancer. Not rational.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-s...

[2] The sun will eventually go red-giant and that will be the end of the planet so 'forever' in this context is the period of time between now and when the Sun causes the planet to be uninhabitable (more than a billion years)

[3] http://abcnews.go.com/US/oklahoma-town-fears-cancer-asthma-l...

Please, let's keep the fear mongering down. This is the first incident of this kind in 40 years and the number of casualties will probably not exceed a few hundreds.

Coal alone killed over 100,000 people over the past century.