There is a bit of hypocrisy among people who make claims about being friends of the natural environment.
On the one hand, they claim that our need to reduce carbon emissions is critical – a global emergency wherein each year that goes by increases both the proximity and the level of approaching doom. And many of them refuse to even consider using nuclear energy.
THIS IS A STUB ARTICLE WHICH WILL EXPAND ON THE FOLLOWING TOPICS:
Nuclear energy is just about the safest energy source available.
Three Mile Island
Okay. What about it? Need to look up some more on this one. But from what I’ve found, it’s all hype and no radiation.
Fukushima
Paranoia rules the day. Again.
More people were killed by the rushed evacuation than were even affected by radiation.
The level of radiation in vast areas of farmland where the topsoil was being removed to supposedly mitigate radiation danger was significantly less than the background radiation from simply living among the granite hills of the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.
If only they had put the emergency generators on a hill or even on a stand above the expected tsunami flood level, the reactors would not have had a problem.
Hype about radiation from it reaching the United States is 100% hype. Absolutely nothing besides scaremongering. (Look up video with computations of levels of dilution.)
Chernobyl
The Western World is not Russia. Don’t need to talk about Chernobyl. But since everyone talks about Chernobyl, let’s talk about Chernobyl. They had procedures that would have prevented the incident. They were told by management to override the procedures. (Need to look up details about this.)
Solution: Procedures rule. That’s the way we run things in environments like an aerospace manufacturing plant in the United States. Even if it’s the president of the company who tells someone to override a safety procedure, it’s the president who gets in trouble. Everybody in the entire organization goes through annual training that drills into their heads the concept that, if anyone tells you to override a safety procedure, you immediately report the person and the person who told you to use an unsafe method is in deep trouble. (Perhaps one – maybe the only – benefit of a society that is overzealous about lawsuits.)
France
Nuclear scaremongers never talk about France. Why do they not talk about France? France gets 70% of its energy from nuclear. Did you hear about the nuclear generator disaster in France? Neither did I. That’s because France is a Western country where the people follow the Western mindset about procedures. France is not ruled by Russia. (Thanks, Eisenhower.)
Radioactive Waste
We have a perfectly good place to store it. It’s right in the middle of the desert where we’ve already exploded hundreds of nuclear bombs. We’re not using it because of nothing but paranoia.
Also: Theoretical Physicist Richard Muller has a company to develop another procedure using the simple technology of oil drilling rigs to bury it where nobody would encounter it for tens of thousands of years.
Different kinds of reactors
Not all nuclear reaction processes are created equal.
Modern procedures can use up old waste.
Also, do more research on thorium. The word on the street that it can be used more safely than uranium and is more abundant. But it sounds too good to be true, so there’s got to be cons to go with the pros.
And there’s always fusion. But that’s 40 years in the future, just like it was in 1980. So we’ll talk about that separately.
If you want a solution to carbon dioxide emissions now, we’ve got a solution.