Reddit reviews Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear ... and Geoeng ineering Are Necessary

PM me if you want to go over anything in particular.

Overview:

http://pandoraspromise.com/

Whole Earth Discipline

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Price:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

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Safety:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country

Your opponents will likely have the following arguments against nuclear power: "Three Mile Island! Fukushima Daiichi! Chernobyl!!!!1". Smacking them down will be pretty straightforward:

Three Mile Island:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4#t=5113.5

Chernobyl:

http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html

Fukushima Daiichi:

There were zero direct deaths from the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown.
The United Nations Science Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation project zero additional cancer deaths over time due to escaped radioactive materials:
http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/fukushima.html
Summary available here:
http://www.unscear.org/docs/GAreports/A-68-46_e_V1385727.pdf
Excerpts:

>No radiation-related deaths or acute diseases have been observed among the workers and general public exposed to radiation from the accident.
The doses to the general public, both those incurred during the first year and estimated for their lifetimes, are generally low or very low. No discernible increased incidence of radiation-related health effects are expected among exposed members of the public or their descendants.

(emphasis mine)

Notably, The Fukushima Daini plant down the coast from Daiichi was hit by the same earthquake+tsunami, and it shut down as designed. You've probably never heard of it though, because it worked just fine. That's the problem with nuclear power. People remember the events that the news freaks out about. The media obviously doesn't talk about the fifty years of power plants quietly humming along providing inexpensive, reliable, safe, emissions-free energy to billions of people.

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Give your audience a sense of the scale of nuclear power's energy density:

https://xkcd.com/1162/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leG8frtW5Wk

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Climate Change:

http://talknuclear.ca/2014/09/nuclear-is-the-no-3-contributor-to-climate-change-mitigation-the-economist/

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If your opponent is a coal or nat gas advocate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4#t=5230

Here are a few books which kind of explain my pessimistic position:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BDPLS9J/?coliid=I1OBW25CORT2FC&colid=3NEMW8OZR5QG&psc=0&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

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https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07C1R89ZX/?coliid=I2FBYNTNC6QF5Y&colid=3NEMW8OZR5QG&psc=0&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

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https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0044KLPJC/?coliid=I2OSOIW7NP3MJ5&colid=3NEMW8OZR5QG&psc=0&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

I read a bunch of books on this stuff before seeing the movie. As far as I can tell it's completely accurate.

The first one I read was Prescription for the Planet, by Tom Blees. Blees was the first to publicize the story of the Integral Fast Reactor shown in the movie. (I was lucky enough to spend a couple days with him at a conference, great guy.)

James Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren also talks about the IFR. Hansen thinks advanced nuclear is our only hope for avoiding catastrophic climate change.

If you really want to get into detail, Plentiful Energy is a recent book by two of the lead scientists on the IFR project. It's written for laymen, and is really pretty interesting.

Richard Muller, a physicist at Berkeley, wrote a great book called Energy for Future Presidents that, among other things, talks about nuclear. It pretty much validates other claims of the movie. His section on nuclear waste was especially eye-opening for me.

Some of the people in the movie have written their own books. Mark Lynas' The God Species and Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Discipline are both quite good. I've read part of Gwyneth Cravens' Power to Save the World, which was also excellent. She started as an anti-nuclear environmentalist, and started interviewing people in the industry and touring facilities. Her description of how modern uranium mining works was really interesting.

The other side of things is, can we do it without nuclear? A good source on what it would really take to run everything on renewables is Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air by David MacKay. It's also online. There's also good stuff at Do the Math, a blog by physics professor Tom Murphy. Look for his earlier entries. His entry A Nation-Size Battery will make you rethink the renewables storage problem. Murphy is committed to a "conserve and scale down" philosophy that makes him discount his own conclusions on advanced nuclear, but there's still a lot of interesting stuff here.

If you have any specific questions I'd be glad to answer as best I can.