It's been 57 years since the first commercial-scale nuclear power station opened, and automation has come on a long, long way in that time.
Computers don't know the meaning of boredom. When it comes to staring at dials all day every day to make sure a nuclear power station doesn't go foom, they will soon be able to beat humans, even if they can't already. At some point public acceptance of robotics will become strong enough that they'd rather see a computer running their nuclear power station than a person.
At that point, I fully agree that sticking more nuclear power stations all around Chernobyl would make a lot of sense.
Sooner or later, of course, we'll have nuclear power stations at the top of every space elevator, scavenging surplus CO2 from the atmosphere, replacing it with oxygen and sending coal down to earth. Or, if not that, some similar way of getting power to the planet from space.
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Date: 2013-04-05 03:20 pm (UTC)Computers don't know the meaning of boredom. When it comes to staring at dials all day every day to make sure a nuclear power station doesn't go foom, they will soon be able to beat humans, even if they can't already. At some point public acceptance of robotics will become strong enough that they'd rather see a computer running their nuclear power station than a person.
At that point, I fully agree that sticking more nuclear power stations all around Chernobyl would make a lot of sense.
Sooner or later, of course, we'll have nuclear power stations at the top of every space elevator, scavenging surplus CO2 from the atmosphere, replacing it with oxygen and sending coal down to earth. Or, if not that, some similar way of getting power to the planet from space.