Thread: Nuclear energy - Opinions on its use as a power source?

You bring up a good point. Most people who talk about nuclear energy talk about how safe it is...that is unless of course something goes wrong or it's being built near them. There are currently two plants in California built on a fault line with a prediction of an 8 plus earthquake on the richter scale in the future. How safe will it be then!

There are areas in this country where wind turbines could be placed out of the way that would provide plenty of safe electricity. As it stands, nuclear power only provides 8% of our energy use in this country, which probably also contributes to its lack of incidents. If we conserved more as a society we could probably make that up. Once we start building more plants and depending on it the incidents are likely to rise with a great cost. And don't forget we'll have to de-regulate them over time because that works so well for us!

There's a plant in NC that holds spent fuel rods from two other nuke plants. It's estimated that an explosion in that pool could blast more than three times the materials into the atmosphere as was released from Chernobyl. To me that "what if" factor is too much. I'd rather look out my window and see a wind turbine than see the roof of a nuke plant in the distance.

John