Solar Rules! Nuclear Drools.

The sun is earth's dominant energy source.
Nothing else comes close.
It drives our weather, grows our food, it gives us light to see what there is to see.
And it's big, very big.
Far, far bigger than nuclear power will ever be.

I enjoyed building nuclear plants.
It was fascinating.
It was incredibly complex.
It was rooted in simple, perfectly logical physical realities - just lots of them.
All or at least most of them interrelated.
It is an incredible tribute to the creative intelligence of the human mind that it has learned to make bombs and draw electricity from the process of nuclear fission.

But what a waste!
Sure, maybe someday we'll blow up the alien mothership with a nuke as in "Independence Day".
Or maybe divert an asteriod with a well placed H-Bomb (though you could probably do it with well- timed bag of high speed concrete).
But face it, both bomb and fission in general is of little use on the surface of the earth, it makes such a mess!

There is no way to avoid creating radioactive 'fission products' either when exploding a bomb or operating a commercial power reactor.
It is in the nature of the beast.
Containment of these wastes is key.
If only we could contain them, we'd be home free.
We might over look that in the alien mothership case, but not really anywhere else.

Analyzing and addressing design flaws in nuclear containment systems was the most interesting thing I did in nuclear.
It taught me that things in nature are interrelated.
Wacked-out, stoned hippies figured this out as well - without taking fluid dynamics or differertial equations.

Do I feel cheated?
No.
I'm happy to have done what I did.
Because I did as well as I could.
When I stopped doing better.
I stopped altogether.

OoH! A rhyme!

So what's my point?

I need a point?
Can't make your own point?
After all these idealets?

Yeah. It's tough.