In my younger days I was strongly anti-nukewith good reason I believe, but I’ve found my opposition softening lately. Tonight I read this article which points to a side I hadn’t really considered - global warming. The author makes a pretty good case. I still have important concerns, waste disposal being way up there.
What do you think?
Peace,
mangeorge
Personally, I think it was always time for nuclear and the reasons for opposing it were irrational. I bet we won’t see large-scale construction anytime soon, though.
Same here. I do think global warming pushes it from"good idea" to “urgent”; I wish I disagreed about the chance of more plants being built. For that matter, if more are built under this Administration, I’d expect them to be bad power plants; no-regulations pork-barrel jobs that will either never work or turn into Chernobyl 2.
Well, I’m hoping to see controlled fusion in my lifetime.
And a space elevator.
And I’d like a pony.
Nuclear tech has advanced and now we have so called meltdown proof reactors called pebble bed reactors because the geometry and casing of the nuclear material prevents it from heating to meltdown point which is around 2000 degrees and the balls don’t heat above 1600, when they get to 1600 they start cooling down. Plus PBR are modular, so should be cheaper and easier to set up.
China plans to spend 180 billion to get 25% of their energy from clean sources by 2020 and are going to start building 2 nuclear reactors a year as well as using things like wind farms or other sources. I don’t see nuclear reactors in the US though due to fears of terrorism and environmentalism.
http://www.terradaily.com/news/energy-tech-05zzzzzzzzc.html
There are still other clean energy soruces. Wind power cost has dropped by almost 80% in the last 30 years and is now cost competitive with grid electricity, and we have giant windmills now that can produce 10MW per windmill. Of course you can’t rely solely on windmills but still, it can help.
http://www.memagazine.org/backissues/jun04/features/apptowind/apptowind.html
As Bryan Ekers pointed out, most of the reasons for opposing nuclear power are irrational. Not all of them but most.
The amount of ignorance most people have regarding nuclear power and radioactivity is pretty astounding. I grew up with a decent idea of what nuclear power is, how it works and what the dangers are because my father ran a nuclear reactor saftey division. (He ran this test. It actually has nothing to do with this particular post except I love that video. He came home one day and gave me a set of pictures of the test and told me that was what he did the week before. I was about 11 at the time IIRC and it was the coolest thing ever at that age.) I caught the knowledge mainly by osmosis. Our summer vacations were to American Nuclear Society meetings. I stil have a pair of ANS socks that they gave out at one meeting 
Anyway, the publics lack of knowledge about all things nuclear is pretty immense. At one point in Albuquerque there was a huge outcry because Sandia Labs was going to dump some ‘radioactive’ water into the sewer system. There were letters to the editor going on about how evil Sandia was, that they were going to poison the city and wouldn’t someone please ‘think of the children’. The thing is that the water they were going to dump was a little more radioactive than beer. Yes, BEER. You could safely drink all of the water and it wouldn’t hurt you a bit. Heck, I stuck my arm in that tank of water. A salt substitute called NuSalt that you could buy in the local store was, IIRC, about 10 times as radioactive as the water (#1). The water was in a tank that had a strong beta radiation source at the bottom. They would take components, put them on the end of a pole wrapped in plastic and dunk them next to the source then pull them out and plug them in to see if they were radiation hardened. The outcry was quite ridiculous, it goes to show that the public is extremely undereducated when it comes to radioactivity.
Then there is also a point which no one seems to quite grasp. If you look at fossil fuels and adjust the number of deaths caused by its by-products due to lung cancer, explosions, etc to nuclear power, nuclear comes out way ahead. Using fossil fuels for power is a running accident. It damages the environment and people. The accident at Three Mile Island was, obviously not a good thing and neither was Chernobyl. At the same time, those were accidents, not standard operating procedure.
I think that nuclear is our best bet but I don’t think that is going to happen until either the public becomes much more educated about all things nuclear or the damage done by fossil fuels is so bad that nuclear becomes the only other choice. That is assuming, of course, that there isn’t a big technological leap in the near future.
Slee
Define “clean”. Don’t windmills kill birds, take up lots of land, and make lots of noise ?
Honestly - what took you so long to come around. The concerns you now bring to the table were well known decades ago.
Yeah. 
So, what do you think?
mangeorge
To begin with, I saw the word “irrational” being bandied around so much, here and in following posts, that I began to doubt my understanding of the meaning of the word. So I looked it up. Hmmm. No, it means exactly what I thought it does. So I guess you guts are simply being effusive in your passionate support of nuclear power. Good, I like passion. 
Waste is a problem. A serious one. We can’t just put blinders on and say it isn’t. And gathering fuel is no great shakes either. These problems can (hopefully) be addressed.
So what do we leave behind. A waste product that will be deadly for millennia? A burned up planet? A bunch of dead birds? All? None?
Some of each, I think.
Could we do better research on fusion?
Good point about information. The problem wasn’t just that people were sticking their fingers in their ears and going “nanananana”. The industry (and the govt.) were extremely secretive about nuclear power and it’s risks, and handed out a lot of bullshit about it’s safety and benefits. What do they call accidents? Events?
Nonpolluting. Wind turbines (not mills, please, nothing is being milled) are entirely clean. There’s no rational way you can say that they aren’t clean, whatever other real or perceived problems they may have.
I’m not anti-nuke, but all things being equal, my first choice is the one that isn’t going to kill anybody and doesn’t require toxic waste being stored in a mountain for 10 million years.
Probably. This needs to be more fully understood and factored into deciding where to put them. The extent of this problem is not fully established, not that it keeps people from using it for political leverage.
Define “lots.” If there’s one thing the US has in abundance, it’s unused land in windy areas. One wind turbine takes up an area about the size of a city block.
Probably not a total energy solution for a city of 100,000 or more. but there’s no good reason that most small towns in sufficiently windy areas shouldn’t be powered by 4 or 5 turbines independently from the grid. Also, offshore turbines can be installed where they do not take up land and cannot even be seen.
I don’t think that’s true. I lived close to 4 very large wind turbines in Japan; these powered our whole town. I never heard any noise from them. Granted I never got closer than rock-throwing distance, but then, why would one need to? These are usually unattended stations on the edge of town .
Indeed. I have nothing per se against nuclear power, but I’d be uncomfortable with expanding our current nuclear power infrastructure at a time when we have yet to develop a good system to store the waste generated by our current plants.
There is a lot of ignorance on the part of the public of the type sleestack describes. But the basic idea that these plants generate a lot of nasty and dangerous stuff that is difficult and expensive to transport and store is not an irrational concern. The fact that we have been producing nuclear power for half a century and are still using rather ad hoc storage solutions is a good indicator of the size of the problem.
So in answer to the OP, it will be time for more nuke power when we figure out a way to deal with the waste generated by the nuke power already generated.
As opposed to, say, waste like arsenic which is lethal forever ? Radioactive waste isn’t nearly as dangerous as people like to pretend. Sure, you don’t want to eat it, or take a dive in the stuff, but the really dangerous stuff decays over a period of years or decades, not millenia. The stuff that lasts for millenia isn’t that dangerous, especially if it isn’t concentrated. A little leak from a burial siite a thousand years in the future isn’t likely to kill anyone, and it certainly wouldn’t lay waste to the land. The low level stuff is mostly dangerous because it’s so massively concentrated.
I don’t want to rely on something which we don’t know can ever be practical.
Outside of Chernobyl, which had less to due with nuclear power and more to do with Soviet stupidity, nuclear power has been rather safe. I’m sure people have died putting up windmills, from falls and so forth.
And nuclear waste does not need to be stored for “ten million years”; our ridiculous paranoia is what makes dealing with it so difficult. Like I said, waste like arsenic is dangerous forever; we don’t need such extreme methods to deal with it.
It’s more an indication of how politics screws things up when they become involved.
Housecats kill more birds than windmills
Apparently there are myths about wind power too. Aside from the fact that cats and houses with windows kill more birds is the fact that wind stations are not something you can hear from over 200 yards away. One site says they are only 45 db
There’s a coal burning plant nearby…I’ve done some equipment work in the spoil area, there are hundreds and hundreds of acres of spoil area across the river from the plant…nothing really lives there, never will. I have known some people that have worked there, they say you don’t want to take a good car there…the wind might change direction and ruin the paint. It’s amazing the soot that belches out of the plant…it can’t be good. I’m pretty sure that many people have died coal mining. And, hey, strip mines are pretty welcoming…aren’t they.
One winter I got to dive with manatees near a nuc in Florida, it was fun.
The public isn’t just ignorant about nuclear power - the public has been indoctrinated against it by an endless stream of lies and misinformation, largely unopposed, from the environmental movement and Hollywood. Not so much these days, but in the 70’s when nuclear power had a chance of really becoming our primary energy source, there was an amazing amount of disinformation flowing around against nuclear power. Remember “The China Syndrome”? “Everyone knew” that nuclear power was insanely dangerous, that each reactor was a regional disaster just waiting to happen, and that if we foolishly listened to the nuclear industry and built more nuclear plants, we’d wind up with children with mutations, poisoned groundwater, etc.
I remember when the Three Mile Island accident happened. Listening to the media and the environmental spokespeople, this was a huge national tragedy, a disaster on a monstrous scale. We were going to see mutated fish, a huge spike in cancer deaths in the next couple of decades, blah blah blah.
In fact, the radiation released in the accident was trivial. The average dose of radiation that the people in the area got was 1 millirem. A chest X-ray gives you 6 millirems, and that region has a normal background radiation of 125 millirems per year. The radiation exposure to the people of the area was totally irrelevant. Even right in the facility, the maximum increase was only 100 millirems, which is the equivalent of 1 year’s background radiation.
There was not a single death or injury in this ‘disaster’, nor any increase in risk from radiation to any person involved in it. Many, many studies have concluded that TMI had absolutely no effect on public health. It was a purely economic problem. Probably the most overhyped ‘disaster’ in history.
As a result of all the hype, and pressure from activists, the nuclear industry then got wrapped up in increasing numbers of lawsuits, public pressure against new licenses, and increases in regulatory oversight that made it uneconomical to commission new plants, and the industry was dead.
The first big ‘win’ for the environmental movement. And now that some of them, like the ex-leader of Greenpeace, are discovering that maybe nuclear was the right choice after all, they’re having to fight the battle for it in a hostile anti-nuclear atmosphere they helped create.
And they can be mounted in places where the city blocks are already occupied by buildings. Vertical axis wind turbines are compact and do a good job of catching the updraft at the tops of tall buildings.
Also, if you’re worried about radiation, coal is a much bigger worry than a nuke plant. American coal is full of uranium and thorium, and the smoke and ash are not entombed the way we do with nuclear waste.