ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the morality of nuclear energy development as it concerns future people, especially the creation of highly toxic nuclear wastes requiring long-term storage. The area in which these philosophical problems arise is that of the distant future, that is, the future with which people alive today will make no direct contact; the immediate future provides comparatively few problems for moral theories. An argument closely related to the uncertainty arguments is based on the non-existence and indeterminacy of the future. The case of nuclear waste storage, and of uncertainty of the effects of it on future people, seems to be of the latter sort. The argument is essentially that without nuclear power, without the continued level of material wealth it alone is assumed to make possible, the lights of our civilization will go out. Another argument for the qualified position, which avoids the objections from cases of certain damage, comes from probability considerations.
