By Jeff McMahon
Climate change is the one phenomenon that could overcome public opposition and economic obstacles to nuclear power, a former director of Argonne National Laboratory said Friday.
“In principle I don’t think there’s a real obstacle to” building a new fleet of reactors, said Robert Rosner, a theoretical physicist who directed Argonne from 2005-09 and founded its Advanced Reactor Technologies program. ”The obstacle—because there’s money and risk—is the will, and the will isn’t there.
“The only thing that could sway it the other way is… at some point it’s going to penetrate to people that climate change actually is occurring, and there is something going on, and it’s going to be very costly to fix. In some cases it will be impossible to fix.”
Rosner cited a 2015 New Yorker article that describes South Florida’s plight: the land rests on porous limestone that invites the rising sea in from below, undeterred by dams or levees…
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