Controlling the Future

The dialogue on my Oil Drum post was far more civil and to the point than previous discussions on nuclear power. I credit Gail the Actuary for running a tight ship. She made sure that discussion participants including me stayed in line. Since I wanted to educate, I greatly preferred a rational discussion to the craziness of some past arguments on nuclear power that I have been involved in. The critics of the LFTR were more circumspect, more willing to listen than past nuclear critics on the Oil Drum. I tried to separate the LFTR from other forms of nuclear power, and in the main I succeeded. I also appear to have solved the "we are running out of uranium" argument by presenting with evidence of the abundance of thorium. There were a few underhanded arguments, and tried to respond to them by letting the guys know that I was on to their game. One of the most striking aspects of the anti-nuclear side was the extent to which they consider giving people energy to be bad, and to have bad consequences.

It seems that a lot of people on the anti-nuclear side believe that it is inevitable that energy will be misused to cause human misery, and environmental degradation. The critics of the LFTR also used the "we are running out of resources" argument. We were told that the depletion of resources was a absolute certainty. Now it is clear that world supply of some resources - for example mercury - does not meet potential demand, so we see substitutions being made. (When was the last time you saw a Mercury thermometer?) We are probably going to start running out of oil soon, and that will be a big an painful fix, but the limitation of the oil supply has been known for over 50 years, and its remedy, has been known for just as long and is unacceptable too many people.

What struck me as the critics unpacked their argument was that most of them mistrusted the future, mistrusted the judgment of future people and their leaders. I would characterize the perspective as misanthropic. In this view human misery is caused by poor human judgment, technology, the availability of energy, and the impossibility of substituting common resources for scarce resources. The view is that people in the future will not have choices and indeed should not have choices because they will make wrong ones. Thus it was argued that if we develop the LFTR some future national leader will sell it to the wrong people, and the ability to make nuclear weapons will fall into the wrong hands. Then terrible things will happen, as if a future without reliable and inexpensive energy would be a good thing.

My view is quite different. I would like to leave to the people of the future the ability to make their their own decisions. Aside from that I wish them an unprecedented level of prosperity, which will open up to them far more opportunities than are available today in even advanced countries. People in the future will most likely make mistakes, but it is just possible that they will do fewer things wrong than right. That their judgment will prove correct more often than now. Above all else, I wish them the opportunity to make their own mistakes.