Alright, there are a stupid number of misconceptions regarding nuclear power in this thread.
Indeed the modern designs are much safer, but it is still dangerous because of the radiation during the process and the radioactive waste afterwards. And you cannot terminally rule out an accident which leads to coolant loss.
Actually, in the event of a coolant failure a "nuclear poison" is injected automatically before the coolant even begins to boil away, this nuclear poison absorbs all the excess neutrons without shedding any itself and limits heat produced to decay of the products of the main fission reactions. This amount of heat is readily dissipated by modern reactor designs just by radiant heat and basic air convection around it. So in a modern reactor,
even if you cut the coolant to it you're still not going to have a meltdown.
Also, we can reprocess waste and have low-level waste* and new nuclear fuel.
*Low level nuclear waste is very easy to dispose of. In fact, it's not even really that dangerous. You still wouldn't want to bathe in the stuff, but just being near it isn't dangerous.
There is a lot of solar, wind, and water energy still untapped, so this part is way underrepresented. The Europeans plan large solar power installations in the northern African desert. The US could plaster a good part of Nevada in similar ways.
The sun doesn't always shine, the wind doesn't always blow, tidal power is really impractical and just about every place where we could build a hydroelectric dam is either protected or already has one. In northern Africa they're going to have serious problems with dust accumulation on the panels. Not to mention the difficulties of extreme long range power transmission are going to make it extremely expensive.
On top of that,
What I'm currently keeping a close eye on is LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reaction). An engineer by the name of Andrea Rossi claims to have harnessed a Ni+H=Cu nuclear fusion reaction, and showed some results that at least are worth to observe. He is said to build a factory to build those e-cat devices as water heaters somewhere in the US. There are critics who claim it is a scam, but so far this would be a big, expensive and rather pointless scam. If he really delivers, though, his invention will be THE NEXT BIG THING (a 10kW water heater/central heating element for your home for $600-$800, and $100 of fuel/year to keep it going). As this device is designed to run continuously, excess heat could pe turned into locally generated electrical power.
Yours, Christian
No. There are a hundred problems with it, and the fact that it just flat out doesn't work like he claims is the biggest of them.
Not nuclear power. Too many problems. Even if you trust computers and people enough to where a meltdown is impossible (and I trust neither), you're forgetting acts of God and sheer human incompetence. Like, say, building a reactor on a fault line. Not to mention storage of waste, getting the stuff out of the ground, the inevitable cancer that occurs as a result, inevitable accidents from transport and storage, terrorism, etc, etc. Not to mention: non-renewable resource.
For modern reactor designs there is zero risk of a meltdown. Human incompetence and acts of "god" can only cause problems if there is a weakness in the design to begin with. A reactor is basically a big ball of metal, even if the fault line was literally directly under it the most you'd do is shear it away from its base. Waste reprocessing pretty much negates waste storage and only requires a small amount of "fresh" material. Everything gives you cancer, you're being paranoid. Did you know there is radioactive material naturally in your body? Mostly carbon and phosphorus.
Transport and storage problems? Have you SEEN the containers they store this shit in? You can have a train slam into them at full speed and you will only mildly inconvenience it. And the designs are getting better and better. No, really:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mHtOW-OBO4Modern containment buildings for modern nuclear reactors are built with terrorism in mind. In fact, one of the proof tests after it's built and before anything is put into it is to fly a remote controlled 747 into it. All that does is create minor spalling on the concrete. Sure, you could probably nuke it, but it'd have to be a big bomb (100kt+) and after a ground-burst nuke of that size the additional contamination from the nuclear reactor is going to be minor compared to that from the bomb.
It isn't renewable, sure, but there's so much of it** and so little of it is actually needed that we'll have evolved into an entirely new species before we run out. Even if the entire world was powered by nuclear power.
**Uranium is very common, and thorium is even more common and safer when those designs are mastered.
And before you say fukushima, that reactor was built in the 60's and designed in the late 50's. It's about the oldest design you could get that hadn't been shut down. Chernobyl was a molten sodium cooled reactor with graphite control rods, which we now realize was really really fucking stupid. Three mile island was grossly blown out of proportion by the media, and it doesn't even really count as a meltdown because the reactor vessel wasn't breached.
Or next to people.
You don't want it built next to you? Despite the fact that "conventional" power plants release more radioactivity (due to isotopes contained in the fuels the burn) then a nuclear plant (which have very strict regulations)? Ok, fine, but I'd rather live next to a nuclear plant because it is, quite bluntly, far safer.
So... why, exactly, do we not pursue this in favor of a more dangerous alternative?
Because it's really really impractical and the "more dangerous alternative" (that is actually the safest power generation out there) is comparatively simple and cheap per unit of power.
I'm not against nuclear power... I'm just against it...being built...next to people.
I'd actually like to live next to a NPP.
You're better off there then next to a coal fired plant. Or a wind farm, for that matter.
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