Huh? No nuclear plant incident has even come close to this level of impact; this number is at least four orders of magnitude too large, and quite possibly more.
someone who spent 35 years in the nuclear industry
I didn't say all his arguments weren't cogent, just the particular argument he made about "releasing radiation".
there's not enough fissible material to run nukes for more than a few decades
Sure there is, if you reprocess the spent fuel (spent fuel actually still has a fairly large fraction of fissile material in it) and/or run breeders (sure, you have to keep control of the nuclear material, but that's a lot cheaper than the alternative of making us all poor because we don't have enough energy).
I was surprised to see the Chinese that pessimistic about the time scale for thorium reactors; I haven't had time to dig into the details to see what the roadblock is. They're not the only ones working on those, either.
oil provides fuel for transport, while nuclear doesn't.
But oil provides fuel for other things besides transport as well. If it only had to provide fuel for transport, that would change things significantly.
(Also, battery technology is a lot better now than when Rickover made his speech; electric cars can now actually have decent range for things like commuting.)
Rickover actually addressed aspects of this in a 1956 speech
Yes, I've read it. One thing that struck me was that he came right out and said that energy == standard of living, which is true, but it's an inconvenient truth. Of course, he wasn't a politician.
Huh? No nuclear plant incident has even come close to this level of impact; this number is at least four orders of magnitude too large, and quite possibly more.
someone who spent 35 years in the nuclear industry
I didn't say all his arguments weren't cogent, just the particular argument he made about "releasing radiation".
there's not enough fissible material to run nukes for more than a few decades
Sure there is, if you reprocess the spent fuel (spent fuel actually still has a fairly large fraction of fissile material in it) and/or run breeders (sure, you have to keep control of the nuclear material, but that's a lot cheaper than the alternative of making us all poor because we don't have enough energy).
I was surprised to see the Chinese that pessimistic about the time scale for thorium reactors; I haven't had time to dig into the details to see what the roadblock is. They're not the only ones working on those, either.
oil provides fuel for transport, while nuclear doesn't.
But oil provides fuel for other things besides transport as well. If it only had to provide fuel for transport, that would change things significantly.
(Also, battery technology is a lot better now than when Rickover made his speech; electric cars can now actually have decent range for things like commuting.)
Rickover actually addressed aspects of this in a 1956 speech
Yes, I've read it. One thing that struck me was that he came right out and said that energy == standard of living, which is true, but it's an inconvenient truth. Of course, he wasn't a politician.