Adptation demands reduction and limits

The Integral Fast Breeder Reactor has the
potential to ease our climate change
difficulties and could be a major
tool in our adaptation.

Any adaptation to climate change will only work if the world can reduce and limit its current consumption of fossil fuels.

The move to a Four-Hour Work Day is just a step in slowing down our consumption for there will be, if instituted with a fairness unapparent in the existing market-based capitalistic system, an equity of income throughout society.

Being forced by a change in income, we will consume less and so use far less energy, most of is produced by fossil-fuel powered energy generating plants.

There are alternatives to our traditional power plants and they use a source of fuel to generate electricity that has a variety of titles, including renewable and sustainable, such as solar, wind, geothermal and wave.

All have a role to play, but even a cursory examination of their individual and combined contributions suggest they would be unable to met base-load demands.

There is however, a fossil fuel alternative, but it demands that all of us to re-examine our values and clearly put facts and realities ahead of emotional and ill-informed responses. That alternative is nuclear.

The conversation could easily become distorted for a devastating picture has been painted about the safety and seemingly endless complications of nuclear power, but any reaction should be tempered by an understanding of facts and realities of accepted and traditional energy sources and then the huge, and significant advances, made in the design and building of the new generation of nuclear power plants.

Look at without bias and analytically, coal power plants have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, far more than the miniscule number of people lost to nuclear-fired power plants.

The new generation of nuclear power plants – the Integral Fast-Breeder Reactor – were virtually ready to go in the late 1990s when the U.S. Department of Energy had built a prototype, but the IFR project was canceled by the US Congress in 1994 three years before completion.

Mysterious cancellation of the IFR project stopped in it tracks something that had it been implemented, then we would have been facing a whole different scenario.

The IFR does not require nuclear fuel that could be diverted to nuclear weapons; they will consume most of the world’s present stockpile of nuclear waste; they produce little waste of their own and what they do is stabilized at a much lower level of radio activity and so becomes vastly less dangerous in a few centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years; their design is fundamentally safe as should there be any difficulty, they automatically shut down and in the way they operate they would simple not explode.

IFRs have the potential to provide the world with it base-load of electricity, but the challenge for each of us is to mentally get beyond the “scare-factor” that emerges immediately the word “nuclear” enters the conversation.

The IFR will resolve energy needs (it is argued that we have sufficient uranium to power the world for as long as the sun exists), but our quality of life produced by a civil society which will only prosper if we have more time to be reflective people who invest that time and energy, both intellectual and physical, into our communities, communities that bond around and build a Four-Hour Work Day.