It shouls be intrinsically safe. The water has a massive heat capacity and is an excellent shield for radioactivity. Also, recovery, if that's what we want, is much easier, as we are recovering a solid material, rather than containing spreading sheen of tens of thousands of barrels of oil.
Nuclear reactors on land have real, demonstrated liabilities, but, in my opinion, the story would be very different over water.
Briefly, water is how we store hot radioactive waste right now. In fact, Randal Munroe of XKCD fame has a great video on spent fuel storage in pools on YouTube here.
Personally, I find difference in safety is so great in favor of the nuclear reactor that I cannot even draw a meaningful comparison. Would I rather drink water from from a spent fuel storage pool or one contaminated with fuel oil? Spent fuel every time. Would I rather live with an off-shore sunk nuclear reactor or an off-shore oil spill? Sunk nuclear reactor, 100%. Which would I rather be in charge of clean-up? Yup: Sunk reactor.
Is there a compelling alternative perspective here?
You're right, being at an 8.5 in anxiety when you think a 4 would be appropriate does not seem great to me. However, knowing this may make for a better target than no anxiety, particularly given the circumstances.
If you are open to it, you might consider the Feeling Good App. Although I have not personally used it, a close and trusted friend was involved with the development of the app. Also, the methods used have been very helpful to me and have also allowed me to help others.
If you try it and like it, perhaps you can let me know. I know that my friend would enjoy knowing that he was part of something that helped someone.
I'd like to say that your choice is praiseworthy. Despite your difficult circumstances, you would rather experience this very painful condition than disregard the people in your life that matter to you.
What if you could have the best of both worlds? What if you could experience the anxiety that has helped you be aware of dangers in an uncertain environment, but not experience such a high level of anxiety that it interferes with your work and sleep?
If so, try figuring out where that more desireable level of anxiety is. This would be two questions: first, on a scale of 1 - 10, where would you rate your current anxiety? (I think we know the answer to that one) second, what do you think would be the appropriate amount of anxiety for someone in your situation?
If you can answer those, perhaps there can be a way to reduce your anxiety without losing the good things about yourself that the anxiety denotes.
You are not alone.
It seems to me that you are having a very reasonable reaction to a difficult situation. If I was in your position, I would also feel extreme anxiety. I know nothing about you, but, from what you have shared, I would like to commend you for your anxiety. It is evidently clear from what you write that you take your responsibilities to your employer and your family very seriously. A nonchalant attitude in the face of a life-changing event like the one you are facing would belie a lack of concern for the people closest to you, who depend on you and whom you care for.
These appear to be serious matters and you are taking them seriously, even to the extent that it causes you some extreme discomfort. This is a commendable commitment to duty and to the welfare of others.
Suppose there were a magic button that could make the anxiety disappear, however it would also cause the motivation for that anxiety - say, love, duty, commitment to excellence - it would make these also disappear. You would no longer be bothered by your precarious position, but you would also become someone unconcerned with their own wellbeing and the wellbeing of those around them.
If you had such a button, would you push it?
I'd also like to point out that the underlying model may well be unsustainable in the way that it is offered at the start. Who benefits when a for-profit company operates at a loss? We, the customers, do. We get low prices and customer-friendly practices that are genuinely enjoyable. That business can't operate in that way indefinitely, as the early investors are not funding it as an act of charity.
Eventually, the bill comes due. The shareholders have funded the company on the premise that, after losing lots of money on customer acquisition, it can restructure and monetize those customers and recoup their investment, hopefully with a lucrative return when they decide to capitalize their holdings and find a new company with which to repeat the process.
There is absolutely no reason not to enjoy the perks of the early stage of the customer acquisition process; the shareholders are subsidizing your product at no cost to you. But we shouldn't be surprised when the shareholders stop subsidizing and start squeezing their formerly pampered customers in the hopes of getting their money back (and more, of course).
This doesn't excuse unethical or abusive practices, but it does mean that, even without them, the experience of those early days probably wasn't going to last forever.
You make a good point. If there were no potential solution, trees (i.e. sustainable agriculture) would be the best solution. It would take a few hundred years but we would get back to pre-industrial levels at zero emissions.
The potential solution is direct air capture. Although there are many forms, I am fond of the method proposed by Klaus Lackner. By making a large number of CO₂ scrubbers, as opposed to a few very large ones (like Climeworks), the economics of carbon removal get very easy, very fast.
A 1 m² area that gets an average 2 m/s breeze through it sees about a gram of CO₂ pass through every second. This is about 100 kg of CO₂ per day. So let's make a machine that catches CO₂ from a 2 × 5 m area and catch 1 t per day, or 300 t per year. For this machine to pay off its carbon debt, it's going to need to be around for a while, say 10 years. What happened during those 10 years? 3 kt went out of the atmosphere for good. If you liquefied the CO₂, this would fill 3 McMansions.
Lackner seems to think we can build this machine for $100k. Now we have a price of $30/t of CO₂ captured. As it stands, we need to get about 1,000 Gt of CO₂ out of the atmosphere to stabilize the climate, so we need to build $30T worth of these machines. How could we possibly afford that? Well, we would spend ~$1T on this per year for about 30 years.
Where would that kind of money come from? Sacrifices would be needed, it's true. I think the biggest would be giving up on war. Global defense budgets add up to this scale of funding, and if the nations of the world decided to put an end to war, we could use the peace dividend to pay for the restoration of the climate. Perhaps there wouldn't be any other sacrifices needed at all.
If this seems unrealistic to you, that's ok too. We can still keep war and do things the slow way or (more likely) not do them at all. I suppose a decade-long nuclear winter would also do wonders for global cooling and emission reductions. Personally, though, I would prefer world peace and direct air capture to stabilize the climate.
I think, from your post, you would agree. If we are going to fight, we should fight climate change, not each other, no?
Of course, trees should be planted, but the notion that they are an expedient way of decarbonizing the atmosphere is plainly wrong. Had nature optimized plant life to remove carbon from the atmosphere, there would be no CO2, no plants, and the planet would be a snowball instead of the vibrant, warm (too warm) climate we have today. Nature maintains stasis - and therefore life - by avoiding carbon sequestration.
You may have seen the Keeling Curve, the "graph of the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere based on continuous measurements taken at the Mauna Loa Observatory on the island of Hawaii from 1958 to the present day." Notice that it goes up and then down in Seasonal Variation. This is because, during the summer months in the Northern hemisphere, all the plant life decarbonized the air to form new leaves and greenery. Then, in the winter, all the leaves fell back to the ground where they were consumed by fungi and detrivores and converted back to CO2.
Suppose we stopped producing fossil fuels tomorrow. The Keeling Curve would still have seasonal variation, but it would be against a constant mean, rather than the current rising one. If we then just planted more trees, the seasonal variation would increase, perhaps, but the mean would remain more or less constant. While beneficial, none of the planting would make more than a dent in the hundreds of billions of tons of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere. The potential for soil sequestration is on the order of 1 Gt/year.[source] That doesn't mean we shouldn't practice sustainable agriculture and forestry, rather we should, but it won't reduce our carbon debt or start to reverse climate change. Believing that it will is just magical thinking, coincidentally an inadvertent implication of the meme.
Given that nature is (almost) perfectly inefficient at long-term carbon sequestration, it would seem that effective, long-term decarbonization of the atmosphere on any scale short of millennia has to include mechanical means, no matter how inefficient such means may appear.
As a preliminary test, you might look at a "sleep apnea adjustable mouthpiece" for sale online. I don't know how well these work, but my custom sleep apnea dental device has been amazing for me. It may be that the boil-and-bite varieties also work well. If so, you might get relief without having to interact with the healthcare system.
You might find more information here.
As for the sleep test, many factors are important, but you could learn a lot from monitoring your pulse oxygen while you sleep. A casual search turned up several very affordable fingertip pulse oximeters that connect via Bluetooth. This would let you create a record of your pulse oxygen levels while you sleep. If you are dropping below 92% while you sleep (link), then you might be sleeping poorly because of sleep apnea.
In fact, you could record your SPO2 levels with and without the sleep apnea device to rule its use in or out without spending a ton of money on doctors visits and the like.
I hope things get better for you.
Some friends of ours strapped down their roof for Hurricane Georges. They lived in a wood frame house on a hill and knew better than to just trust that everything would be ok.
Anyway, they still had a roof after the hurricane, but the winds were still strong enough to lift the roof up, damaging the joints between the rafters and the main posts holding the roof up. This damage I saw with my own eyes.
Wind shear can be remarkably strong at 140 mph, blowing across a roof like that. It would be a shame to lose the house because you didn't take two hours to put some straps over it.