"...Thirty years after the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania led to moratoriums on new plants across the nation, concerns about the cost and safety of nuclear power remain, including what to do with the growing stockpiles of highly radioactive waste from the nation's reactors..."
If we could only be a bit more open-minded when it comes to nukes, we could have a network of plentiful, clean energy that fuels the entire United States with little difficulty.
Instead, we demonize the technology by reading emotions into it when in truth, nuclear is safer and cleaner than any option out there.
It's expensive, to be sure, but what plant project isn't? And we've worked the science: to the best of our knowledge the waste will not harm anyone when properly stored.
Legitimate concerns, but next to a coal plant I'll take a nuke any day of the week.
Quote courtesy of SFGate
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I tried to write a comment about your last post, but alack, found myself too ignorant of solar power to write meaningfully.
But nuclear! Let us sing songs of woe, the ballad of American Nuclear Power. I have to control myself when I hear members of the environmental movement who still gloat over how they stuck it to the Man and protested the building of new nuclear reactors in the 70s and 80s.
1) A generation III or III+ reactor would have none of the problems of a I (Chernobyl) or II (Three Mile Island). Near-total reduction of waste. Reactions that stop if something goes wrong. Awesome stuff.
2)Three Mile Island wasn't even a disaster.
3)Ignorant stifling of new technology is the original reason why we're dependent on non-renewable energy sources in the first place!
Grr.
Here's my favorite source:
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4092
I have decided to become an advocate of thorium-based reactors due to the fact that absolutely nobody else would agree with me.
Bizarrely enough, I actually worked on a paper the other day about India's growing capability in thorium fast breeders.
Oddly, it was interesting.
I had a discussion the other day with a friend of mine who works at DoD about why hardly anyone seems uses the things. Consensus seems to be (at least among me and him) that it's *precisely* because they don't generate any of the really good, which is to say explosive, isotopes in the fuel cycle.
Seriously, though, India has huge amounts of thorium. If anyone really jumps on this in a commercial way, it'll be them.
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