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

I'd like to say most of my views stem from good old common sense.

To me, nuclear is not "green" and probably never will be unless a life form on the planet evolves to being unharmed by radioactivity, has a voracious appetite for radioactive metal and its waste products render said radioactive metals inert. Radioactive emissions are the quintessence of toxicity to life. Some forms of plutonium used in nuclear reactors have a half life of over 300,000 years?!

I've got to tell you. The common sense part of me sees nuclear power as an option in a theoretical world where human life could not exist except with the power generated by nuclear. In such a theoretical world, it would make sense to me but in no other. I would have no problem, for example, if wind turbines became a ubiquitous part of life and landscape.

IMO nuclear power is like Russian Roulette. Everything is OK unless the trigger hits a bullet filled chamber. Life is too unpredictable (natural disasters, human error, mechanical malfunctions, terroristic attack/sabotage, etc) to play such a game for energy created in that manner.

Chris L

You want a series of huge wind turbines in the lots surrounding your house? Most folks don't. Many many people die each year in coal mining throughout the world and who knows how many cases of cancer come from breathing the particulates from coal or oil fueled power generators. Travel to coal mining areas and look what the landscape looks like. In a world where oil will become more and more expensive and coal just dirty nuclear is an alternative unless they get serious about solar or geothermal.

All this current concern about nuclear power tends to make one think about what might be going on with the reactors from the eight U.S. and Russian nuke subs that have sank in waters around the globe. And what about the nuclear weapons they had on board. Or maybe the nuclear waste from Hunters Point Navy Yard that was dumped in the Pacific near the Farralon Islands before they had any better disposal methods. Hear the ticking?

We've known for 50+ years that reactor meltdowns are extremely hazardous, even deadly. In July 1959, one of the reactors at the Santa Susana Field Lab in far northwest Los Angeles County/eastern Ventura County suffered a partial meltdown that was later described to be worse than Three Mile Island. Over the next several years, this facility saw four of 10 reactors suffer accidents. Later on, we saw Three Mile Island, and later still Chernobyl. Based on this track record, nuclear power could have been done away with years ago, but it wasn't. Why? In spite of the risks, it does what it's supposed to, providing a reliable source of electricity.

As for wind power, it may have some promise...Pros and Cons of Wind Power, but I think there are still too many hurdles to overcome.

Currently there is no real serious alternative to replace nuclear energy. Sad but true. Not only business, society and factories but common people as well need more and more energy to keep and improve their standard of living.

Green energy technologies are still in their babies shoes, so windmills or solar power with current poor efficiency are not realistic option for nuclear/water/coal energy. Non of these current main energy powers aren't harmless either.

Every single modern and past nuclear reactor is based on nuclear fission which leaves radioactive nuclear waste. Once scientist succeed on building reactors that work on fusion power then there will be no radioactive waste of such amount any more. It has already tested in laboratories but estimated time when such reactor could operate is about 2050 or so.
What is wrong with current nuclear plants is that almost all of them are build near teutonic plate boundaries or shore making them very vulnerable for things like earthquakes, tsunami or sea level rise.

I hope that recent tsunami strike in Japan will make scientist to improve current green energy technologies to be more effective. Also i hope it makes people to understand that the power they use is just not something they get from the wall socket. If we want greener energy then we need to use it less with the technology we have today.

It seems to me that one very common problem is to not properly evaluate the cost of doing something vs. the cost of not doing it. For example fossil fuels are really good long-term energy storage, and if you mostly care about the cost of extraction and distribution they're really cheap at the present. But when you start factoring the environmental and health impacts, the equation can change quickly. Even the simplest thing of taxing pollution, so that you can account for the total cost a little better has been stalled in US for decades.
And the problem is the same if not worse with every other energy source. Everybody wants to externalize as much of the costs as possible and especially when that involves tons of money it's fairly easy and cheap to just brainwash the public.
Nobody wants to walk, shiver in the cold, give up the american military dominance, etc.. Nor to have wind turbine, coal mine, or nuclear storage, in their back yard, and neither do they want to pay somebody else whatever it takes to do it. So you just ignore the problem and just kick it down the road for some other generation to figure out (which occasionally works due to big innovations, but it's still completely irresponsible).

Nuclear energy is no different than anything else. You can make it as safe as you want but it'll cost you.
At the end of the day the best way to make sensible policy is to compare the real costs between the various alternatives, but unfortunately this requires less gullible voters. Until then it's almost all politics.

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

There are 2 important issues to keep in mind.

1) modern reactors are built to use a different type fuel and work according to different principles. It is simply impossible to get a melt down if the cooling fails because it's the coolant that makes the reaction possible. Older reactors are still the design which can go critical and which are in effect nothing more than controlled nuclear bombs. The only reason those older reactors are still used is that they are not yet written off, and they still produce energy.

2) coal plants actually barf loads of radioactive dust in the atmosphere on a daily basis. You don't hear much about that because it's in American interest to keep burning coal, and 'everybody knows nuclear is bad'. The thing is: unless you are very near the fukushima reactor, you are getting more radiation from your granite tabletop.

In the early 20th century they figured that they would lose one ironworker per floor on average when building a skyscraper. That was an acceptable level of risk at that time. Safe work practices developed that improved that statistic considerably. The old saying that you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs comes to mind. When they build nukes, chemical plants, cement plants there is certain amount of danger to the surrounding community. That is life in the big city. How many more people get killed driving to and from work every day than have been killed as a result of nuclear power plant accidents ?

I've worked in nuclear power plants on shut downs quite a few times back in my ironworker days. Been in the containment and around the spent fuel pit and seen fuel rods with my own eyes thirty years ago, and lived to tell the tale. I can only say that the cost of maintaining nukes is astronomical compared to conventional units and than you have the problem of dealing with radioactive waste. Affordable energy is already a problem and it won't get easier as the population increases. Tough out there and getting tougher every year that goes by. I think we need to take advantage of the nukes while we work on alternatives. There are risks but that is part of life.

I'm not too worried about nuclear. Generally its pretty safe, as long as the plants arent on a fault line, or in Soviet Russia. Perhaps there is something I don't know, but building a nuclear plant on a fault line just seems like a bad idea in the first place.