PS – I lived under 10 miles from the nuclear plant I worked at for 8 years, up until I moved to be with the woman I married this year. I wouldn’t have a particular problem with living close to a nuke plant – well, I wouldn’t care to live close enough to hear the plant PA system or the trucks driving in and out of the site. Wouldn’t want to live next door to a Walmart distribution center for the same reason, the noise. Radiation? Not a huge concern, based on my knowledge of the industry. But then, I didn’t get MY information about the nuclear industry from watching “The Simpsons”.

“…Nuclear which gives terrorists another target which will take out multiple states with one hit…” – Seriously? You ARE aware that the containment domes all commercial nuclear power reactors are built inside of can withstand a direct hit from pretty much anything a terrorist can get their hands on, right? You can crash a loaded 747 into it and you’ll spall some concrete off the 4.5 FOOT thick reinforced wall (and, probably, trip the reactor into automatic shutdown due to seismic vibrations from the impact, or loss of secondary equipment depending on where the impact was). Each piece of REBAR is thicker than my arm – and there are multiple layers of it inside all that concrete. They MIGHT be able to take out auxiliary equipment, and sure they could force a plant shutdown. More than that? Well, sure it’s POSSIBLE – in the same sense that damn near ANYTHING is statistically “possible”. If you let that sort of possibility keep you up at night, well, that sort of continual sleep deprivation CAN’T be good for you. Might be scientifically-useful, I suppose…

A coal plant is MORE radioactive than a nuke plant, in terms of radionuclides released to the environment. Not to mention all the other stuff it puts out.

Chernobyl *COULD NOT HAPPEN IN THE US*. Period. PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE, given the reactor designs approved by NRC. Could people screw things up here? Sure – if they worked hard at it, they could even cause a pretty minor offsite release. Blow up the reactor and scatter highly-radioactive vessel internals all over the site? Mmmmm, no. Not to mention the far-higher levels of screening and training which every operator has to go through now, in part BECAUSE of Chernobyl and TMI.

Solar? Great for trickle-charge or incidental use. You SERIOUSLY think it’s going to provide even a useful fraction of what modern society needs, on a regular basis, without going to something like massive solar farms fed by collected beamed power from space? That’s almost as laughable as WIND being proposed as a valid (reliable) baseload source.

Nuclear shouldn’t be on the table, as far as you’re concerned? Fine – you and everyone who thinks like you can open the main breakers in your homes, and not make use of power anywhere ELSE either, NOW. Fridge, AC, lights, computer? Get rid of ‘em. Don’t hit the supermarket for your food, or a doctor’s office (let alone the hospital!) for illness or injury; get around using animal transport or foot, not cars or anything else manufactured by machine. That ought to get the rest of us to where we can get by without that much power.

Foolish comments like “Nuclear reactors AREN’T safe, OMG!!!1!1one!”, or proposals that we do without such a clean and abundant source of electrical power, make me wonder sometimes if everyone not connected to the nuclear industry gets their information on nukes from the frakking Simpsons. Get rid of nukes? Hell, we ought to build big nuke plants to satisfy baseload requirements ALL OVER THE COUNTRY – and supplement with little pebble-bed modular jobs on an area-by-area basis to supplement that as necessary! And nuclear waste? The incredibly-small amounts we have so far (considering we have over 100 plants which have been operating upwards of 50 years) are potentially INCREDIBLY useful – even if we continue to ignore the usefulness of spent-fuel reprocessing here in the US, the reason these fuel rods are still so “dangerous” is because they’re STILL GIVING OFF ENERGY. Something that, if we can’t make use of it right this second, still is something we might want 50 years down the road.

Yucca Mountain? Yeah, it’d be nice if .gov got off it’s butt and satisfied the legal requirements of the contract made with the power companies REQUIRING storage of spent fuel. After all, they’re only ten years overdue…

Yes, the no-nuke nuts are a hot-button issue for me – but then, I’ve WORKED in the field for 14 years, prior to my move and marriage; the only reason I’m not STILL in the field is that there are no plants close enough to work at, requiring me to take a different job to be with the woman I married. My total cumulative occupational exposure in those 14 years is something slightly more than what you get from ONE chest x-ray. Not exactly Blinky-the-three-eyed-fish levels, here.

He was also from a class of people over a hundred years ago. Different standards.

John McCain served aboard the USS Forrestal, The USS Forrestal (I may have misspelled that) is a diesel powered carrier, i.e. no nuklear reactor to cause his face cancer.

(Worked as a Reactor Operator in the Navy for 6 years and in civilian nuclear power for 8 more – total COMBINED occupational exposure for those 14 years was slightly more than you get from ONE CHEST X-RAY. Glow-in-the-dark? Not so much…)

“OMG NUKLEUR IS BAD IN MOUVEEZ, SO IZ BAD IN REEL LYF 2!”

idiots

And I’d do all three. But not at the same time…I lack the stamina for that.

Also, nuclear doesn’t have peak and off peak, it just produces energy, and the excess can be used to produce hydrogen, which could replace gasoline as a fuel for our cars. Oh, and both nuclear and hydrogen are zero-emission fuel options.

Nuclear is a hot-button issue because it’s so dangerous. Period. We’ve blown stuff up with dynamite too and it’s still used in mining and construction with no public outcry whatsoever. But dynamite is pretty straightforward. You get blown up and that’s the end of it. People can still live within fifty miles of where you died without any adverse health effects.

You only need one accident to wreak a hell of a lot of havoc and destroy one hell of a lot of lives. Stop thinking in terms of estimated numbers and start wondering how you’d feel if it was you. Or your family.

At least if a solar panel fails it just becomes an expensive roof tile.

It doesn’t matter how big the amount is. Go stand near a tablespoon of unprotected nuclear waste and come back and tell us how healthy you are.

Nobody wants to use coal plants anymore if they know what’s good for them. But nuclear is not our only alternative, and certainly not the best one.

I don’t understand the pro-nukes. We can agree that just about any other form of energy has certain levels of unsafeness. Even a wood fire can burn you. And coal is slightly radioactive on top of the pollution it puts off. We can agree about all these other things but let’s trot out how unsafe nuclear is and all of a sudden that’s a lie. Why? Ask the people who used to live near Chernobyl just how “safe” that crap is.

Not to mention OMFG the taxpayer boondoggle. Nuke reactors have to be heavily subsidized by the government because otherwise they are too expensive to build.

We should have started putting solar on people’s roofs thirty years ago. It wouldn’t have covered all our power needs but would have seriously cut them back. It’s not too late, either.

And yes, I know nuclear powered ships are safe.

In terms of nuclear power, (and I know a lot about it because I am from Australia, and we export uranium ) people are concerned about 2 things. The first is meltdown, which is increadibly rare, but when it does happen it is catastrophic.

The second is storage of waste. For storage, it doen’t matter if there are only a small amount for the energy, but that you have to keep it stored, undisturbed and away from everything (including groundwater) for thousands of years. We haven’t been storing nuclear waste for more than 60 years, and so far there has not been a single undisturbed and isolated storage system. If we can’t keep it for 60 years, how are we going to manage 100 000?

Invented by Stan Ovshinski (sp?) and largely ignored by the technical community here, it became another technology we ‘gave’ to the Japanese.