no one seriously imagines terrorists trying to steal the blades off your wind turbines to make WMD. stealing weapons-grade uranium or plutonium, however, is quite imaginable -- security experts lie awake nights worrying about this sort of thing. maybe they could be doing better things with their lives.
You're actually conceding that the only way to deal with terrorists is either not do anything remotely dangerous or allow secrecy and erosion of civil rights.
There are a lot of technologies that have "dual uses". If there are no swords people will kill each other with plowshares. Also, you can't steal weapons-grade uranium or plutonium from a civilian power reactor, can you? Because you don't need weapons-grade fuel to run a reactor in the first place. So the problem is the military application, and the technology does not necessitate the military application. Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
So, the problem is terrorists?
The problem with the nuclear power industry is that it is staffed by a pack of liars. They lie by omission. They lie by commission. They give out little lies that they then cover with other lies that they cover with a big lie that they then, finally, admit were lies. They have lied in the past. They have lied in the present. No doubt they will lie in the future as well.
The nuclear power industry are murders. They killed tens, if not hundreds, of people in the Four Corners area in the 1940-1950s directly from uranium mining and indirectly from the dust cause by uranium mining. They have also killed a whistle blower in the US by putting radioactive material under her driver's seat.
The nuclear power industry are incompetents, e.g., they build nuclear power plants meters away from the San Andreas Fault. And, when this was pointed-out, claimed it was perfectly safe. (A twofer!)
The technical papers and reports - even the science - behind the nuclear power industry are irrelevant to the this discussion. Saying some nuclear power plants and some groups of nuclear power plants are run by truth-telling competents brings us into the Existential which, by definition, precludes Categorical analysis. So general statements regarding the operation of nuclear power plants has no necessary application, or bearing, on the nuclear power plant down the road.
Speaking of which, the nuclear power plant down the road has 4 reactors. The advertising prior to construction was that they wanted to build 4 to keep 3 running while doing repairs, and so forth, on 1. Since the plant came on-line they've kept all 4 running all the time.
This is true in other industries too, of course. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
