Ok, since it seems we can bring up a serious topic, like the death penalty, and get rational, calm, intelligent discourse on it let's try again with another serious topic, namely nuclear power.

How do you feel towards nuclear power, as it exists today?

Personally I'm all for it, but would like to see a couplke minor changes made which I'll get to in a moment. But as is I believe nuclear power is a safe, viable source of clean, cost effective electricity, and the facts really do bear me out on this when looked at fairly.

First off, you must realize that two modern, industrialized nations, namely france and japan, get the overwhelming majority of their electricity from nuclear power, and it's safe, clean and affordable because those countries do it right.

First off, a well designed and operated nuclear plant is safe and ecologically friendly, it's cleaner than burning coal or oil that's for damn sure. Now some people will holler "Chernobyl!" and some older gits will holler "3 mile island!" but both those cases are examples of things being done very wrong, and are completely atypical of a properly ran nuclear plant.

First off, chernobyl was a type of nuke plant that would NEVER be allowed in the west, the design was totally different than ANY approved plant in the west and a plant like it would not be allowed in any western nation due to the crude and unsafe nature of the design. Comparing the cherbobyl plant to a plant made in the west is like comparing the hinderburb to the goodyear blimp and assuming because the hindenburg exploded the GYB could explode, and most people knw it can't.

As to 3MI, that was a case of a great design that actually worked despite everything possible going wrong and the media making a disaster out of an incident. In the first place, the design was good, but some greedy corporate pigs cut corners to save money, a criminal act known as "graft". Secondly, the operators were poorly trained and did not handle the incident properly in it's early stages, which, if they had, would have prevented any notable event from occuring.

BUT, and pay attention here, despite the plant being poorly constructed due to graft and poorly ran due to poor training, the findamental design was so good that despite these factors, it worked. No appreciable amount of radiation escaped from the plant. None. The containment system worked despite human greed and laziness. No  notable radiation escaped, and what did dissipate into the environment gave people less rads then they'd lget from a dental xray.

The fact is a well designed and ran nuclear plant is safe, the french have been using them for decades with ZERO dangerous incidents. Japan had an incident at a plant a few years ago, but it was due to poorly trained workers and the containment features of the plant kept the public safe.

As to disposing of nuclear waste, it's very easy, actually, once you ignore the shrills of anti-nuclear fanatics and just deal with it logically. In the first place if you use breeder reactor tech you reduce the amount of waste by a long shot, and secondly, fusing the waste into glass blocks (Vitrification) and sealing it in bedrock makes it nice and safe for as long as it takes to decay.

Also, consider this: 1 pound of nuclear material in an efficient nuclear plant generates as much electricity as 12 million pounds of coal.

I'm for nuclear energy, we just need to have ZERO tolerance form graft in the nuclear industry, with long rpsion sentences for anyone caught cutting corners.

So, how do you feel about nuclear power? Does your country use it?

I'm all for the peaceful atom.

I would not have had the life I had if not for my father, who almost exclusively has worked in nuclear plants since I was 12 years old.  

When he was just swinging a wrench, life sucked because we were so poor...then he got certified somehow to work in a nuke plant as a safety inspector for valves or something, and BAM, no mo' po'!  I mean, not rich, but no more public aid.

So, nuclear power is forever tied to me through my father.  I can't imagine anything safer, cleaner, more efficient, or better for everyone.

Gimme my nuclear power!

For.

Like a madman.  For.

So muchh for pundy's theory that 'geeks' aren't more intelligent than normal people, because so far every response to this issue has been the intelligent one, and a study of the facts that ignores then hysterical hyperbole of the anti-nuclear power crowd will show that to be true.

You know, I really wish the greens would get on the truth bandwagon and start supporting nuclear energy. When you consider that one pound of nuclear fuel can produce as much energy as 12 million pounds of coal it becomes obvious that nuclear power is more environmentally friendly than coal, which it can replace easily.

Wow.  I'm agreeing with Nox and Levi.  This is an untapped message for some politician.

For, for, for, for, for.

But then, I'm for drilling in my backyard if someone tells me there's oil there, so.

Quote from: joewolzI would not have had the life I had if not for my father, who almost exclusively has worked in nuclear plants since I was 12 years old.  

When he was just swinging a wrench, life sucked because we were so poor...then he got certified somehow to work in a nuke plant as a safety inspector for valves or something, and BAM, no mo' po'!  I mean, not rich, but no more public aid.

Dude, your dad had Homer Simpson's job???

RPGPundit

Nuclear power has two problems: one that is more serious than the other.  The less serious one, but the one that gets a lot of attention, is what to do with the toxic byproducts of nuclear energy.   The current solution, putting them deep in underground vaults for ten thousand years along with attempted warning signs so future civilizations won't accidentally open said vaults, is probably not the wisest course.  Something like launching this waste into the sun would probably be wiser, but much more costly.

And that's where we get into the other problem with Nuclear energy: its not actually cost efficient.  The costs of what it takes to get nuclear energy quickly gobbles up most of the return we get in the form of power. Add to that the fact that nuclear power is very expensive to maintain, and the question that we really should be finding another, more costly, solution to the nuclear waste issue than "lets put it in a hole and hope future humans won't wipe themselves out when they open it up in ten millenia", and you end up having something that isn't financially very viable, especially if you're thinking of nuclear power as the "answer" to the oil issue.

RPGPundit

Well, I'll agree that it wouldn't work as our sole power source, but few things would. I'd favor a shift in the direction of coal, supplemented by things like nuclear power, solar power, wind, and hydroelectric. Although waste disposal is a bit of a problem...

Designs like the pebble bed reactor are radically safer than all the crap that people got themselves terrified of.  The feedback cycles all run the other direction (when reaction goes up the reaction itself damps further reaction).  But the issue of waste is an unsolved one.  We're basically piling up a problem for a future generation to solve, and solving it is going to require a lot of energy.  So nuclear power seems (to me) like a perfectly workable stop-gap until you get new energy sources.  But then, what's the next step in the ladder?  How do you get rid of that waste someday?

Personally, I think Tokamak fusion reactors will be workable in our lifetimes, so I do think that there is a next step in the ladder.  Whether fusion will generate enough energy that we'll actually bother with whatever supercollider nonsense is necessary to render nuclear waste inert (is this even possible?) I don't really know, but it certainly looks like we've got at least one or two more steps of "new technology saves us from the crisis of the last technology" left to figure it out.

Well, we're making radical gains in the cost-efficiency of solar power. It becomes increasingly feasible to look to solar and wind power as two unlimited natural resources that will be able to provide for our power needs.  Of course dirtier fuel systems, including fossil and nuclear, continue to need to be used until the aforementioned are set up to run in a way that will work.

RPGpundit

Quote from: RPGPunditWell, we're making radical gains in the cost-efficiency of solar power. It becomes increasingly feasible to look to solar and wind power as two unlimited natural resources that will be able to provide for our power needs.  Of course dirtier fuel systems, including fossil and nuclear, continue to need to be used until the aforementioned are set up to run in a way that will work.

I thought solar and wind were still bolloxed by the peak-demand issue?  I mean, I suppose you could go with genuinely massive batteries, but this is the first I've heard about someone proposing that kind of setup in a serious way.  Color me intrigued.

For.

There's still nothing better than the High-Temperature, Gas-Cooled designs now being used in India and parts of Southwest Asia.  Couple them with desalination plants and you solve both power and water problems in one go, allowing for the creation of a revived basic economic infrastructure where there's plenty of room for private enterprise to operate for the commonwealth of the nation and to promote its posterity.  Solar, wind, biodiesel, etc. still consume more power than they generate overall.  The expended fuels can be reprocessed into new fuel with a high degree of efficiency, greatly reducing waste (and thus making it easier to deal with it), and the new designs don't deal in heavy water; you get hydrogen as a byproduct, making hydrogren fuel cells a viable battery-centric power system.  These are not the '70s anymore.