energy futures
so why haven't we been building newer safer better nuclear power plants? it's easy to point the finger at the anti-nuclear crowd. but the truth is, it's money. nuclear power plants are expensive. they require large numbers of high salary employees. believe me, if someone could make a profit running a nuclear power plant, someone would. but they can't compete with the cheapness of coal oil and gas. the prices of oil and gas are rising. never to fall again. because the cheap good stuff is gone. and what's left is the expensive crappy stuff. coal is still cheap. and will be forever for all practical purposes. the problem is, it's dirty. and there's no political will to force coal based power to internalize the cost of the damage it's doing to society. wind is good. we should build wind farms for the same reason we build hydroelectric dams. they're cheap. but there just isn't enough of it. solar is interesting. very interesting. it's still really goram expensive. like 3x more than nuclear. but it's on an intersting curve. so my rosy picture of the post peak oil future looks like this: coal becomes valuable as a raw material for making plastics and fertilizer. it becomes too expensive to burn to make electricity. and we use solar and nuclear instead. my fear is we burn everything in reach and render the world fairly uninhabitable.