Marilynne Robinson: uncertainty

Transcript context

…That a lot of European nations, due to the Russian energy price shock, have reconsidered nuclear. Those that stuck with it, such as Sweden and France, seem to be glad they stuck with it and now possibly want to expand it. There are better and worse ways of doing nuclear. Britain seems to have done a worse way, but aren’t there better ways that some countries have done and were happy they did them? I don’t know. There’s a great deal of secrecy, shall we say, that surrounds these things. I know that France built most of its reactors a very long time ago when Giscard d’Estaing was in power. Reactors don’t have a very long life — 30 years, 40 years. They’re past that. It would be incredibly expensive to replace them or to demolish them, whatever, decommission them. I don’t think we’re going to know. The prestige of any country — for example, Russia — depends on the kind of information that we have about it. Frankly, you don’t have to look far in many cases — for example, in Russia — to find that things are extremely problematic and that they are problematic as a consequence of nuclear power. The idea that somehow or other there’s something that can be done with these materials that were never meant to exist on Earth, it’s a polite fiction. It’s not true. Do you watch movies much?…

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