Sadly, nuclear fission power that works at scale - both on the technology and social sides - seems to be mostly beyond the capabilities of current human societies.
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No it isn't. It's worked for decades and the new forms of it are even more effective. Other countries are doing it with great success.
If even fission is too hard, wouldn't fusion have just the same problem but 10x harder?
Fusion's problems are very different from fission's problems.
Fission arguably went from the first serious attempt at a reactor (U of Chicago, Dec. 1942, successful self-sustaining reaction) to powering a large, high-performance naval vessel (USS Nautilus, Jan. 1955, in service for ~25 years) in 12 years. Its technological and social problems are very complex, but pretty well-known.
Fusion experts have yet to achieve any self-sustaining reaction - in spite of numerous, well-funded attempts going back ~60 years. Roughly speaking, there seems to be no plausible prospect for fusion being a viable power source for anything outside of a lab. So its technological problems amount to "not actually possible", and its social problems amount to "very cool waste of money".
> Sadly, nuclear fission power that works at scale - both on the technology and social sides - seems to be mostly beyond the capabilities of current human societies.
Well yes, because people who benefit from climate change do their utmost to ensure this is the case.
Which explains why grid-scale hydropower, solar power, wind power, etc. have all failed, new construction has all but ceased, and existing installations are being closed down...?
> Which explains why grid-scale hydropower, solar power, wind power, etc. have all failed, new construction has all but ceased, and existing installations are being closed down...?
This is news to me, this is not the case where I am, but sucks for you, just goes to show that people don't want to solve the problem. Where I am hydro power works well and most of our power comes from that, but that does not change the fact that many people fight as hard as they can to stop new hydro from being constructed.