There is no way to dress it up.  The indication of self limiting psychopaths is bad, real bad.   Since they breed faster than non psychopaths, they will grow in numbers until their host society can no longer support them.   The corruption is to great and the civilized specializing empathic humans simply fold their arms and stop participating.

In the past this worked like a charm.  The psychopaths were more easily spotted in small local societies, and cast out and shunned.  After a while, numbers would dwindle and a new economy would rise up.

Before 1945 the resulting economic collapse would usually be local to a country or region.  But after 1945 two things changed.

• Society has become completely global
• The globe has hundreds of nuclear power plants.

Before this realization, that economic collapse is inevitable, I supported nuclear power.  But as if in some brutal, global teachable moment Fukushima happened.

Now I know that nuclear power plants will quickly melt down without constant attention to the spent rods which are almost always kept within walking distance of the active reactor.  Attention must include physical maintenance of equipment, a constant supply of liquid fuel or electricity, security, and supervision.  All of these things are very difficult to do without stable money and a very large economy of scale to build parts, train specialists, generate and deliver electricity, etc.

Surely economic collapse means intermittent power grids.  And as we know from the Soviet Union’s collapse, some nuclear stock piles went unguarded.  People who can’t protect or feed their families don’t go to work.

If we do nothing a handful of the hundreds of nuclear power plants could meltdown, the rest will likely follow.  The globe will be contaminated for tens of thousands of years (not months or years like nuclear weapons.)  It will certainly mean the end of civilization.  If  humanity is lucky and survives somehow, it will be as people having children at ten years old and dying of cancer at twenty.   I don’t any 10 or 20 year olds capable of cleaning up a nuclear accident, do you?  Think of the Eloi, from H.G. Wells ‘Time Machine.’

The good news is, if we approach this problem from this perspective it is solvable.   Hands off fuel rod maintenance is possible to set up everywhere.  And we will be rewarded with non linear economic prosperity if we do rout out corruption at it’s psychopathic source.  It’s time to stop thumbing our noses at history and treat nuclear power as it really is.  Needing to be resilient against meltdown in the face of long term neglect and isolation!