...and uneducated, I once subscribed - like many other things, hydrogen fantasies, battery fantasies, reactionary so called "renewable energy" fantasies were nothing more than sophisticated efforts to entrench the use of fossil fuels, at which all of the above have been spectacularly successful. We are now more dependent on fossil fuels than we have ever been, and certainly the bullshit about energy storage being "green" is making things worse, faster, since the energy "stored" is generally primary energy generated from fossil fuels with exergy destruction.
I have convinced myself, through oodles of study, that nuclear energy is the only sustainable form of primary energy that is capable at providing clean carbon free energy at a scale of many hundreds of Exajoules per year.
This said, I do believe that there needs to be serious efforts to minimize the risks of nuclear weapons, particularly because in modern times, insane people, notably the orange thing infecting the White House, Vlad the Puppeteer, and possibly others can gain control over these weapons.
It is technically feasible to minimize the risk, the probability of nuclear war by using nuclear energy, a subtle but widely discussed technology involving the control of plutonium isotopic vectors. However, nuclear war cannot be made impossible, because uranium exists. Humanity has no technology capable of consuming all of the Earth's uranium.
The first nuclear weapon ever used in war did not require access to nuclear reactors. It was made from naturally occurring materials by the use of powerful electromagnets. The first nuclear weapon detonated, the famous Trinity test, did require the use of a nuclear reactor, one operated in a way that would not be economically viable in a power reactor scenario. It was a very challenging device to build, and the people who built it felt it needed to be tested to prove that it would work. The first nuclear weapon used in war, the 235U bomb used on Hiroshima was far simpler to build (in that time), and the people who built it were so confident that it would work that they did not even bother to test it. They delivered it to a city untested, and it worked exactly as designed.
I explored these issues of proliferation minimization in a guest post on another website, over a decade ago, this post: On Plutonium, Nuclear War, and Nuclear Peace
It is notable that the only path to nuclear weapons disarmament in a technical sense, goes through nuclear reactors. Tiny progress toward such a goal was achieved by Al Gore as VP, working with the Yeltsin era Russian government. For years, the fuel for American nuclear reactors contained 235U from dismantled Soviet era nuclear weapons, weapons once aimed at American heads, diluted with so called "depleted uranium."
The path to eliminating much of the need for energy mining of all types, goes through depleted uranium in fast plutonium (or neptunium or americium) fueled reactors, along with mine tailings from lanthanide ores, which contain significant quantities of thorium. We have mined enough uranium and thorium, via transmutation into 233U and 238U into mixed plutonium isotopes, to supply all of humanities energy needs for centuries.
Fear of radiation was whipped up to ban nuclear testing, which was a positive result of employing questionable science, the "LNT" hypothesis that may well have involved scientific fraud, the absurd belief that there is "no safe level of radiation." That is clearly nonsense, since life is impossible without mildly radioactive potassium, and all living things also contain the congener rubidium, which is also radioactive. In the case of radiation, as in many other non-nuclear chemical cases, the dose makes the poison.
There is some evidence, still unproved to my mind, but actively studied in the era of advanced molecular biology, that small amounts of radiation may actually be beneficial via a mechanism of stimulating certain cellular repair and immunological mechanisms. Obviously genetic damage takes place spontaneously or by chemical insults; cancer was a known disease throughout human history well before nuclear reactions, and even chemical reactions or the periodic table, were even dreamed about. This area is called "radiation hormesis." Again, I am not educated enough to assert that hormesis is positively true, but it is a serious avenue of research of which I've done some monitoring.
Thanks for your comment.
= new reply since forum marked as read