:-)

Yeah, I was a nuclear engineer during the early 1980s, right around the time of Three Mile Island. I got to see how the industry manages nuclear fuel. They managed it well, but not well enough. And power plants of that time were inherently unstable, so it was inevitable that we would end up with disasters, and a nuclear disaster can be really, really big — just look at Fukushima. It is mostly a result of choices made in the technology. There were reactor designs that were inherently stable and safe, but companies did not build those.

As someone trained in nuclear physics, I also realized just how dangerous nuclear materials can be. I decided to leave the industry, and I became anti-nuclear — with respect to its use for commercial power. I was not even that concerned about the waste: the volume is just so low that it does not matter much. I was much more concerned about nuclear terrorism, and about accidents. And I also think that we don’t need nuclear power generation for most purposes: solar is safer and simpler and can be local.

I am a big fan of nuclear energy for spacecraft though, because that is an application domain in which you really need concentrated energy. But we need to be very thoughtful about our choices of technology, and there needs to be oversight. There is also great promise in fusion for propulsion and even for power generation — and fusion does not have the risks of fission. There have been recent breakthroughs and the trend slow but is definitely leading somewhere. For propulsion this is particularly interesting: https://www.psatellite.com/technology/fusion/