Liberal. I don’t know what % of energy demands can be met with wind, solar and batteries alone. Of the other choices nuclear is the next best option for power (after hydro and geothermal).
Supposedly the new generation plants do not meltdown. But what about natural disasters like what happened in Japan?
I’m not against nuclear power; I am against nuclear waste.
I am a cautious supporter of nuclear power; I don’t think it is intrinsically and unsolveably dangerous, but I do think it is the kind of technology where an unregulated profit-motive industrial corporation could do a shitload of damage. I suppose my inclination would be to pursue nuclear power with an exemplary power plant built in Washington DC and others in politicians’ home neighborhoods.
There’s no way to acquire energy without some ecologically destructive potential being involved.
Don’t build a nuclear power plant next to an ocean in a country that has regular tsunami threats.
I cannot believe the amount of money spent on research and development of the Yucca Mountain site, all for naught. Fracking is a-ok, but storing nuclear waste at Yucca isn’t?
And yes, I understand the concerns…water table, transport of waste to the facility, seismic activity, etc…but we’ve poured so many resources into that site and even partially built the facility just so people can tour it like a museum? The proposed site is even already located within a former nuclear test area.
It’s because a large majority of Nevadans oppose it, and one of their senators was the Senate majority leader for eight years.
well, when everyone is saying “do it but NIMBY,” eventually someone is going to have to have the spine to say “sorry, but your back yard is the best option. Tough shit.”
Well, that’s the fundamental problem. Nobody wants to play host to a nuclear waste repository. States like California and Illinois are fine with build and getting significant portions of their electrical power from nuclear plants but when it comes to disposing of waste! that is SEP (Sombody Else’s Problem), preferably a state like Nevada which, at the time the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository was proposed, had little influence or power in Congress, which is precisely why it was selected over locations with greater long term impermeability (e.g. salt caverns). In theory, given a sufficiently robust containment storage system, high level waste could be stored virtually anywhere that is above the water table and isn’t subject to massive seismic activity, but Nevada was chosen because it was (at the time) a desert state with few people and little revenues, and Yucca Mountain was built and intended to be operated largely at the public expense.
But this sidesteps the biggest issue with permanent underground storage of ‘expended’ fuel; it is actually an energy-rich material that could be used to generate more energy with only a modest amount of reprocessing, provided we use the right nuclear fission technology. Vitrifying it and burying it underground in permanent deep storage, trying to somehow dump it into the Marianas Trench, or launching it into the Sun at great expense and risk are all ‘solutions’ trying to solve the wrong problem. It’s like giving your server a $20, getting back $17.54 in change, and then going to find a toilet to flush down the money because you think it might be unclean. Our natural reserves of high grade uranium are not unlimited and are only found on a few sites on the planet, and are extracted and milled with some amount of unavoidable contamination of the nearby environment; we should be making the best use of the fuels we have while trying to develop a genuinely carbon neutral energy production source in controlled nuclear fusion, not burying mostly unused fuel elements in an out-of-site-out-of-mind scheme that renders it very difficult to access for future use.
Stranger
Paleo-Libertarian. I support Nuclear power. I also support R & D going towards dealing with nuclear waste and improving the technology instead of going towards wind and solar, which cannot support 21st century Western society.
If we had spent the last 40 years working on nuclear power instead of letting stagnate, we would be 40 years closer to a solution.
As I said above, let’s start with the politicians’ own back yards. That gives me some measure of faith, even if it’s an attenuated measure thereof, that there will be some modicum of common-sense safety protocols and a minimum of corner-cutting / cost-saving shortcuts.
We’ve gone past NIMBY to BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.
Though perhaps not on this board, I consider myself a left leaning centrist (well, I actually think I’m a centrist leaning centrist but that wasn’t a choice and I’m more left leaning than right on most things) and I definitely support nuclear power. It should definitely be a large part of our energy mix, though I think solar and wind should also be larger parts as well, though they are more niche power generators while nuclear should be the core. IMHO and all that.
As to the waste issue, that’s certainly a concern, but it’s manageable and, basically, you are talking about a local risk verse a global one…I’m going to go with the global one as being more serious and immediate. I think that a lot of that risk could be mitigated with public support of nuclear power and the use of next generation reactors, though obviously there will always be some risk (even if we ever figure out fusion there will be risks).
I can understand why people are against nuclear power. When I was a kid, and I heard about chernobyl, and about how nuclear waste would be around for millions of years, I though nuclear was just all kinds of stupid. It’s dirty, it’s dangerous, and it leaves behind waste that will be problems for longer than humanity has existed.
I kept that bias for a bit, going into adulthood, thinking that nuclear was not the way to go. It was really the anti-nuclear crowd that opened my eyes, though, because even in my fairly ignorant state, what they were saying just didn’t make any sense.
So, I looked into it, and did my own research. I found that the dangers were vastly over hyped. Things could go badly, but not all that badly, really, and the waste issue was not nearly the problem that people made it out to be. And that is with current reactor technology.
We have stuff on the planning table that is much more efficient and safe. There are technical problems to be worked out, and some may prove insurmountable and close particular avenues to nuclear power. If certain types of reactors are practical, it would cut down the waste substantially.