Fair enough - but not caring about this will leave you unable to fix serious problems, and incurably unhappy with the state of the world. Every problem, every issue, every project of non-trivial size is critically dependent upon politics of some stripe or other. History is riddled with excellent ideas that failed because they didn't consider politics (and for that matter, terrible ideas that succeeded because they did).
I agree with you that the public revulsion over nuclear power is unwarranted - but that battle is lost. No reasoned argument can hope to win over emotive shots of Chernobyl and Fukushima. We have to look forward.
Engineering is about achieving goals within constraints. Good engineering takes political constraints into account as well as technical and budgetary ones.
Addendum
Whoever is downvoting this guy, STOP. You might disagree with him, but he is promoting a debate in a civilised manner, and that's how we move forward.
You are right. But we still need to keep in mind that what's happening makes no sense. We need to know what the real, un-politic, solution is, otherwise we don't even know how and where to compromise. More public spending is not ground for compromises. We are gambling with our future packing debt on debt with silly ideas (like this one that throwing money at pig farmers to raise wind towers is going to save our energy-hungry asses). That's not going to happen and we will pay for this bad decision making in the future.
Fair enough - but not caring about this will leave you unable to fix serious problems, and incurably unhappy with the state of the world. Every problem, every issue, every project of non-trivial size is critically dependent upon politics of some stripe or other. History is riddled with excellent ideas that failed because they didn't consider politics (and for that matter, terrible ideas that succeeded because they did).
I agree with you that the public revulsion over nuclear power is unwarranted - but that battle is lost. No reasoned argument can hope to win over emotive shots of Chernobyl and Fukushima. We have to look forward.
Engineering is about achieving goals within constraints. Good engineering takes political constraints into account as well as technical and budgetary ones.
Addendum
Whoever is downvoting this guy, STOP. You might disagree with him, but he is promoting a debate in a civilised manner, and that's how we move forward.