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Originally Posted by FredSnerd
Mark, I agree there are lots of other problems with nuclear power we haven't touched on like waste as you mention and water pollution etc. As for the safety issue, I think statements that "it is safe" are frankly absurd. You may as well be standing on the Titanic declaring "It is unsinkable" How often have we fallen for that kind of rubbish, disseminated by people who only have one thing on their mind. Selling!!!
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It's like I said before, Claude. Nothing is guaranteed to be 100% safe. If you want that you might as well discard all technology and go back to living in caves. Even there, you could scorch yourself on an open fire.
If you want to see some progress being made in energy generation technologies, you're going to have to wait some time before things get a move along. Until then, we can only use what we have at hand, what our best and most consistently reliable sources for power generation are. At present, wind and solar are stopgap measures. They're not reliable or consistent enough to be the main power generating systems for society. Might be great for small to medium sized communities, but try and power a large city with them...or a whole nation. How many square kilometres of countryside are you prepared to put under mirrors or solar cells in order to power Canberra, or Sydney, or Melbourne?? You'd have the environmentalists complaining about that, then!!!!. Or, they'd complain about having to mine all the silica sand in order to make the mirrors and/or solar cells. They're never satisfied unless they hear themselves whining about something. 99% of them haven't a clue about what they're talking about. The other 1% aren't there solely for the sake of the environment, either.
If we have to go nuclear, then that's what we have to do. I'd rather do that than hold off on the promise of a "brighter" tomorrow, when that technology might take years to develop. We don't have decades left to hang around and wait. Once we have that technology, then we can implement it. The nukes can then be taken offline and dealt with in just the same fashion as the coal plants will have to be dealt with. Carefully.