a useful stopgap¶

I've been touting nuclear as a useful stopgap on the way to solar and wind, but unsustainable in the long-term due to it relying on a limited resource.

Turns out we have enough nuclear fuel to power our society for billions of years. My assumption that we would reach "peak uranium" was based on thermodynamics: even if we could recycle some spent nuclear material into usable fuel, there's no way that could ever produce more energy than was available to begin with. What I hadn't realized was that nuclear fission only realizes a tiiiiny percentage of the available energy, and we have the technology to keep going over and over and release wayyyy more of that energy. So much so that, even with the current rate of expansion of our energy use, we could literally run out of sun before we run out of nuclear fuel.