Your dream of finding a safe, cheap, non-polluting nuclear energy source
(”Let`s get on with a second nuclear age”-March 6), reminded me of the futile effort to perfect a ”clean” hydrogen bomb in the 1950s.
The first H-bombs were awesome devices, but they generated so much radioactive fallout that they were virtually unusable as military weapons. Our best scientists were assigned the task of designing a ”clean” or non-polluting bomb. They failed.
A nuclear energy reactor may eventually be made smaller and cheaper-perhaps even safer-but it will always produce hazardous nuclear waste. And safe disposal of nuclear waste-despite your ready assurance-has yet to be demonstrated.
A few prescient scientists warned, early on, that a source of energy
”too cheap to meter” could one day prove to be a Faustian bargain. Having experienced Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and exponentially growing piles of radioactive garbage, will we now be so foolish as to enter into a ”second nuclear age” and a second Faustian bargain?
