Last fall my class and I went through an exercise to help the students understand how the world might address the climate crisis. Several things surprised the students. One was that nuclear power doesn't help.
But many people think nuclear energy is going to be the climate solution. President Obama included federal loan guarantees for nuclear power in his energy plan, in the hopes of jump-starting construction and gain Republican support. (It did neither.) If I post something even faintly skeptical about nuclear power on Twitter, its advocates come out in force, accusing me of being a conservative, or worse.
What is it about nuclear energy that makes its advocates so determined in the face of what should be discouraging facts? After all, unlike futuristic, untried technologies, we have plenty of facts about this one, and most of them are discouraging. The first American civilian nuclear power plant broke ground in Pennsylvania in 1954, around the same time that physicist John von Neumann predicted that, within a few decades, nuclear power would be so efficient as to make energy "free--just like the unmetered air." That didn't happen. Today nuclear power remains the most expensive form of electricity generation in the U.S. --typically costing twice as much as a fossil-fuel-based plant.
Why then do so many people keep coming back to it? I think it's the same reason people turn to geoengineering( 气候工程) and nuclear fusion( 聚变) (which has been "just around the corner" since 1943): the promise of technological progress. For the past century or more, humans have been accustomed to technological breakthroughs that made life easier, more comfortable and more entertaining. But climate change throws future advancement into doubt. It breaks the promise of progress. No matter what we do, we are going to be paying for the costs of our historical and current use of fossil fuels.
So we turn to technofideism-- the faith that technology will save us. Perhaps it will. But perhaps it won't, and our long-standing patterns of behavior will have to change along with our technology. And that's a hard pill to swallow.
