Friedman on Nuclear Power

David Friedman finally says something I can agree with: Ideas: Nuclear Power and Global Warming

Nuclear power is completely within human control to do correctly, causes no damage to the atmosphere and could be done completely safely. There is no good scientific reason not to go nuclear. From an environmental perspective, the damage done by a handful of power plants going up (the worst possible scenario), is trivial compared to the possible damage to the atmosphere of using fossil fuels for the next five or six centuries.I'm not generally a fan of David's, I think his posts tend to simplify complex things and in doing so, remove most of the problems. It generally doesn't mean the problems aren't there, but it's a lot more work than I would want to go through to add them back in. (BTW, he does this later in his thread on global warming on sea temperatures, conflating the minor energy going to mechanical movement of winds with the huge energy transport to the poles, which he ignores. There's a great example on Jupiter of why this is not the right way to look at this where storms get trapped at the poles and mechanical dispersion is the major energy-loss mode so the storms last for centuries).

That said, I agree with him here.

While I think the evidence for human caused global warming is indicative but not conclusive, I can see why people jump to that conclusion. If global warming is human caused, goes the logic, then it must be within our grasp to stop it. Not likely, but it gives folks a sense of control over the environment, and the ability to "do something". Understandable, but probably wrong.