Re:Nuclear power is too slow
by bottlepalm on Friday December 16, 2022 @04:17PM
(#34020523)
You could argue if it weren’t war we wouldn’t have nuclear power or have landed in the moon, and many other things. There are many technologies out there completely obtainable, but without the investment of billions it won’t happen.
Commercialization is the commoditization of an established technology. Many technological leaps are far beyond what any company is capable due to the amount of investment and risk required.
Biotech for example is so far behind compared to our advancements in computers.
Plenty of countries without nuclear weapons have extensive nuclear power industries: Belgium, Slovakia, Sweden, Korea.
Sweden had a nuclear weapons program, it was moth balled in the seventies but only tore it down just now.
Co-opted?
This is a weird history of nuclear fission.
The Manhattan project developed nuclear fission to make bombs
The weapons programs were extended to generate power
I didn't understand how true this was until someone in the pebble reactor camp pointed out that these ideas were already known before the Manhattan project, and that there was a moment where the direction of investment was still up in the air and the war hawks won. I figured that was something someone discovered in the 80's and took a while to popularize. Nope.
Only now are we going back and looking at solutions that don't create ingredients for fission and fission-fusion warheads, and the lack of progress there means that countries who we don't want to join the nuclear arm's race are in a prickly position because the nuclear plants they can build leave them with ingredients the UN doesn't really want to proliferate.