Ban nuclear technology on Earth & subsidize its use in space.
Spend billions to put nukes in space, save the Earth, and send humanity to the stars.
Crazy Idea Alert: let’s ban the use of nuclear technology on Earth, and subsidize its use outside of our biosphere, in space.
Fukushima, Chernobyl, and numerous “Broken Arrow” incidents prove that the risks of nuclear technology outweigh their benefits. Fission energy, when improperly handled, can cause immense human suffering, untold billions in economic damage, and environmental damage lasting for, literally, millennia.
Nuclear technology is, however, too useful to completely abandon. Nuclear power is the only proven, scalable way to generate enormous amounts of baseload electrical energy without carbon emissions. The developing world probably can’t have a developed world standard of living, and not destroy the environment, without building fission power plants. Additionally, nuclear weapons have provided an effective strategic deterrent for decades. “Peace through strength”, as nuts as it sounds, actually does work.
Nuclear technology is too dangerous to keep and too useful to abandon. The solution? Put it all in space.
Nuclear technology is too dangerous to keep and too useful to abandon. The solution? Ban its use on the surface of the Earth, inside our atmosphere, and subsidize the development of space-based nuclear weapons and power plants.
The technological development of space-based nuclear weapons is pretty straightforward. Nuclear warheads are already encased in reentry capsules. Instead of putting the missiles in silos or submarines, they will be permanently placed in satellites orbiting Earth. This sounds completely distasteful and terrifying - and it is - but no less terrifying than having thousands of nukes on a hair trigger in terrestrial deployment mechanisms. At least in this manner the chance of a nuclear weapons accident affecting people and the environment is minimized. Requiring all nuclear weapons be deployed in space may also increase their cost, thereby (hopefully) reducing their number.
Deploying nuclear power plants in space will be far more difficult. It will require a new, vast industrial infrastructure and at least one major technological development: wireless power transmission (WPT). Happily, the U.S. DoD, the Chinese, and now the U.K. are making significant investments in WPT. It may someday be used to transmit the huge amounts of power generated by orbital fission power plants down to the Earth without using wires.
What about that new vast industrial infrastructure glossed over in the previous paragraph? Yes, building and fueling nuclear power plants in space will be very expensive and very difficult. It will probably require an enormous lunar base to extract and refine the fuel (putting nuclear fuel on Earth-to-orbit launch vehicles is a terrible idea).
Nuke plants in space will require a new, expensive, vast industrial base. This is a feature, not a bug.
But this is a feature, not a bug. Humanity needs the resources of space to bring the developing world out of poverty and into the twenty-first century, and save the biosphere in the mean time. Spending tens of billions to build up a nuclear power infrastructure in space, while eliminating the risk of another Chernobyl, will be money well spent. It will have benefits on Earth lasting for decades - potentially millennia - and will literally lay the groundwork for a future human community on the Moon, and beyond.