See, now this is why I and all right-thinking people advocate for
immediately slitting the throats of any entity who would dare split,
merge, collide, fracture, coerce, seduce, subduct, interossitize or
otherwise violate the holy sanctity of an atom. Or two atoms. Or more.
Especially more atoms. Especially more throats. Especially more entities.

Yes, we can completely screw up the planet and destroy this ecology,
including ourselves, with our present power to much about in the nuclear
realm.

That class of threat is only going to increase as knowledge and
technology inevitably progress deeper into the sub-nuclear, quantum,
string, brane, whatever strata which lie beneath. It's hard to get too
terribly bent out of shape about a planet-killing Fukushima-scale
disaster while the potential awaits us for a /Schild's Ladder/ (Greg
Egan) earthoentity-triggered cosmological mis-event destroying our
friendly false vacuum via a trivial simplification.

"Do away with X" is oftentimes a recipe for nothing more than fostering
ignorance among the greater number of earthoentities and thereby less
caution among those who will always, always, always tinker at the
fragile, friable and fractal fringes of reality.

The threat you point you point to is extremely real, but attempting to
bury people's heads in sands or to make them beholden to new stone
tablets' commandments is not a viable survival strategy. We cannot put
the nuclear genie back in its bottle while teenagers construct breeder
reactors in their parents' garages, and especially not when all of that
is soon to become trivial when the next generation of potentially awful
but omg-its-amazing tech hits.

Bathtub quark-gluon mixmeisters? Chemlab brane colliders? False-vacuum
brinksmanship? No frickin' idea.

On 11/03/2013 03:26 AM, Harish Shah wrote:
> Whether for safety or environmental reasons, it is [of] utmost human
> interest to begin doing away with both nuclear power and nuclear weapons.