Agreed, it's just that it's going to take some time for the economy to restructure to a new energy pardigm, but switching power generation to nuclear is something we *could* do pretty fast if we put a mind to it, and it would cut down CO2 emisions right away while letting everything hanging off "the grid" carry on more or less as-is while things get retooled for something different.

That would be the window. Upon conversion to nuclear, people would have to be told, "Okay, the uranium and thorium are going to last this long, at which point we *have* to be totally solar, wind and water, so get to it, because that's how long we've got.

I mean, look at what France did. They made a hard decision one day and set a strict limit on how much they would spend on fossil fuel, so they bought a so-so design from Westinghouse, and set to building the things.

At its peak, they were lighting up a new planet every six weeks, and they were training the guys to operate the things as fast as they were being built, but they did it, and now they're one of those few industrial nation's that's just not fretting about issues around fossil fuel consumption, plus they get to snub their noses with French arrogance at those struggling with CO2 emisions.

I mean, I'm not crazy about the design. Using liquid sodium as the nutron moderator kinda gives me the creeps, but hey, it works, and they haven't had any accidents. If North America, with all it's uranium reserves and better designs put its mind to it, the same could be achieved in just as little time, if not less, with lots of jobs for contruction and straitforward retraining of plant operators from coal to fission... it's silly not to.

I remember reading once that if the whole planet were to somehow convert to fission power generation tomorrow, then there'd be enough proven uranium reserves to keep everthing going world-wide pole-to-pole for about 30 years, so that's the minimal amount of time there would be (and I don't remember it including thorium, so it should be longer).

That stops all non-transportation CO2 generation right there, and it buys a few decades to do a wholescale restructureing to a solar, wind, and water energy economy.

It's *not* that huge of an overhaul compared to some of the other mega socioeconomic restructuring humankind have done before. It just takes a few good leaders, some *real* good managers, and a lot of collective will.

Good leaders can be found. Truly good managers can be found. All we gotta work on is the collective will.

Very true. I think if you do real risk analysis on it, you also find that the real damage/death that coal currently causes (including people simply dying earlier from breathing the pollution) is far greater than even worst-case scenario nuclear. Not to say that fear of nuclear energy is entirely irrational and the Chernobyl incident is probably the scariest industrial accident ever to occur on the planet. It gives me creeps just thinking about the footage we saw with the helicopter pilots running in load after load of concrete in to the core, knowing for certain they were going to die from radiation in the most gruesome and painful way possible in a few days. I guess the best we can say is that nuclear isn't any worse than coal as far as death and danger is concerned, which isn't really saying much I suppose!

Indeed. It's just that we can make a human decision and do it now, and hope to save the climate from a runaway greenhouse effect from too much CO2 in the atmosphere, or we can wait for the "invisible hand" of the marketplace to force it after we've burned up all the fossil fuels, but at that point we'll probably have cranked so much CO2 from burning the last of the fossil fuels that it will have set off a runaway greenhouse effect, making global warming irreversable.