Nuclear Power is Not a Mature Technology

NOTE: I apologize if this post rambles or is a bit disjointed.  This is a collection of thoughts and ideas that have been mulling around my head for a while and I wanted to get them out.  I hope that it is not too confusing to understand what I am trying to say.

One argument I hear from people who oppose nuclear power is that all government subsidies supporting nuclear power should be dropped, because, like coal and oil, nuclear power is a mature technology.  The bulk of the research and development into nuclear energy has been done already, and all we are doing now is propping up an industry, that in their mind, is too expensive and risky to succeed on its own.  If it were not for the nuclear, oil, and coal power subsidies the US government gives power plants, we would be running on all renewables today and live in a cleaner world, at least as far as the anti-nuclear crowd is concerned.  It is only the evil lobbyists of "Big Oil," "Big Coal," and "Big Nuclear" that are keeping these plants from closing down.

Nuclear Power is Still in its Infancy

I hate this argument, because for one thing, power plants of all types are owned and operated by electric utilities who have a diverse portfolio of plants and energy sources.  They, smartly, don't put all their eggs in one basket, and thus do not have a stake in one particular energy source.  Sure, there are industry lobbyists for all three major energy sources, but the same could be said for solar and wind.  Lobbying isn't reserved for the "evil" energy sources.  It is silly to put renewable energy on a pedestal while chastising fossil fuels and nuclear for trying to fight for their industry.

What really bothers me, though, is that nuclear is actually the most immature energy source we use currently, and that includes wind and solar.  We have harnessed the power of the wind and the sun for millennia in one form or another, and combustion for thousands of years as well.  Meanwhile, nuclear power has only been known to exist for less than one hundred years, and we have only harnessed its power for the past seventy.  We are at the inventing fire stage of nuclear power development.  Imagine if our ancestors had stopped developing uses for combustion at creating a campfire.  The entirety of society would not exist, because it was decided fire was too costly and too dangerous to develop further.  We should not be cutting back funding, we should be ramping it up.

I am not exaggerating either.  Life has always relied, to one degree or another, on the energy of the sun to exist.  All natural sources of energy, solar, wind, hydro, are all due to the sun.  When early hominids started walking the Earth, it was not too long (on an evolutionary timescale) before they harnessed fire for heat and cooking.  Over the course of tens of thousands of years, they refined this skill, finding more and more uses for fire, and more materials to burn.  Later on, man figured out how to harness the power of nature to help them do things fire could not (at the time), including power a boat (sail) and run a mill (watermill).  Then that was it.  At least in terms of a basic source of energy, mankind relied on combustion and the sun for everything for thousands of years.  In that time technology was refined considerably, allowing us to create steel mills, cars, and airplanes, but the basic source of energy remained unchanged.

Nuclear Power is the Most Significant Discovery Since Fire

Then came nuclear power and everything changed.  The first major application of it was infamously the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it has been applied peacefully in both civilian and naval reactors for the past sixty plus years as well.  This is the first time since the advent of fire that man has discovered and harnessed a totally new source of energy.  Just think about what that means.  Think about how much our ability to control fire shaped our physical and societal evolution.  We are at the beginning of a brand new journey in our development as a species.  Mankind has yearned to travel to the stars for probably as long as there has been a sky over our heads, but for the first time ever we are technically able to actually go there.  Sure, we have used chemical rockets to get to our very near neighbors, but as our eyes look ever farther out towards the stars and our missions grow longer, we are turning increasingly towards nuclear power to get us there.

The same goes for generating energy here on this planet.  I am not trying to say nuclear power is the be all, end all, energy source for us all, but the trajectory of energy consumption is moving ever higher, and the amount of fossil fuels available to burn is becoming less and less, leaving nuclear and renewables left to power our world.  We can and should rely on renewables whenever we can, but there will always be a need for on-demand, high density energy that can only be met by an energy source as mind-bogglingly dense as nuclear power.  Does this mean that today's style of nuclear power plant is what will continue to power the future?  Most likely no.  But nuclear power in some form will be needed to maintain and surpass our current level of comfort.

I guess what I am trying to get at is that nuclear power is not an energy source.  The concept of nuclear reactions is equivalent to the concept of chemical reactions.  It is a very basic idea that should not be looked at like an energy source.  We would not say that coal power is too dirty so we should stop all development of technologies that rely on combustion.  If you think this sounds silly, it is because it is silly.  But that is exactly what is being said when someone argues nuclear power research and subsidies should be halted.  Feel free to argue the pluses and minuses of Uranium-235 thermal neutron power plants (the vast majority of the kind in operation today), or the flaws of a particular plant design, but do not try to apply this to nuclear power in general.  Whale blubber went out as a viable source of energy when others came along that were better, cheaper, and safer.  Likewise, Uranium-235 will probably be replaced in the future with a better source of energy too, but getting there will take time and research.