[rpiguyshy]

i just dont buy it. hypothetically, there is a nuclear power plant design that is perfectly safe in that it will never melt down. but there is no nuclear power plant that produces no waste. as long as you are producing waste, you are depending on bumbling bureaucrats to properly dispose of that waste and manage the waste often for extremely long periods of time. its just not an ideal situation. the government cant even keep the water potable in certain places.

meanwhile, solar is safe to set up, safe to operate, and there is no radioactive waste to manage. if flint michigan has a solar array, then the worst that can happen is that their lights go out. this is a small but critical advantage in my eyes.

and then look at the bigger picture. there hasnt been a nuclear reactor that is perfectly safe to operate. its still hypothetical. solar is growing every year, the battery market is growing every year. panels and packs never truly retire, just decline in capacity. solar wins.

[Daniel_sk]

The issue with radioactive waste is more of a political and emotional problem than a real one. The amount of waste is rather small and it's not like it will irradiate you from a kilometre away :-). It can be stored in safe containers and buried in stable geological sites or even stored temporarily for many years in storage houses and maybe later re-used in types of reactors that will be able to recycle the spent fuel rods. Whole US produces 2000 tones of radioactive waste a year. In fact, the U.S. nuclear industry has produced roughly 64,000 metric tons (one metric ton equals 1.1 U.S. tons) of radioactive used fuel rods in total or, in the words of NEI, enough "to cover a football field about seven yards deep." Which really isn't much compared to any other pollution.

[JohnJamesRambo]

The issue for me is not quantity but time. 1000-10,000 (or even much longer) years for decay is an incredible amount of time for the human race. Written language only appeared ~5500 years ago.

Let’s say ancient Rome 2,000 years ago made and stored a substance that kills everyone exposed to it, would we expect that substance to still be intact and unblemished right now?

[vimy]

Worst case scenario is that society collapses and nuclear knowledge disappears. Then at some point in the future some farmers will get radiation poisoning and others will avoid the area since it’s “cursed”. This hypothetical problem is hardly anything to worry about when nuclear is sorely needed to help us with an actual problem, climate change.

[JohnJamesRambo]

Well that is a quite crass and horrible fate to condemn those farmers to.

The point is why do any of this when solar and wind are cheaper and have none of these issues? It doesn’t matter what we say here, money always wins and that is why nuclear will be left behind no matter how many astorturfers always show up.

[redwall_hp]

It's kind of facile to argue about a hypothetical future a thousand years in the future when we're facing crises right now that depend on solving energy issues yesterday.

Scenario 1: a hypothetical societal collapse happens and scientific knowledge and written language are somehow lost. A handful of people explore a dangerous area and are swiftly killed by radiation from tampering with a storage facility.

Scenario 2: millions die from climate-related catastrophes and ecological collapse leads to famines that kill millions more.

We know we're facing scenario two as a distinct possibility, or we'd be happily burning coal until we can't find any more. The first scenario relies on several assumptions, none of which are honestly likely at this stage of human society. And it unlikely to have an effect on nearly as many people.

Fuel reprocessing is a thing, modern reactors deplete the fuel much more thoroughly, and there isn't even that much of it. All of the spent fuel France has used since the 1970s fits in a small fraction of their basketball-court sized storage facility.

[chordalkeyboard]

> It's kind of facile to argue about a hypothetical future a thousand years in the future when we're facing crises right now that depend on solving energy issues yesterday.

Its facile to dismiss the negative of creating waste that has to be managed for thousands of years based on a sense of urgency for solving immediate problems. Thats payday loan mentality, not statecraft.

> Scenario 1: a hypothetical societal collapse happens and scientific knowledge and written language are somehow lost. A handful of people explore a dangerous area and are swiftly killed by radiation from tampering with a storage facility.

Society collapses and the remaining primitive population is decimated or eradicated because of unmanaged waste entering the ecosystem.

> Scenario 2: millions die from climate-related catastrophes and ecological collapse leads to famines that kill millions more.

You think society collapses to the extent that we can no longer manage the nuclear waste, and millions of people don’t die? Millions of people die in both scenarios, but in one they are greater risk of nuclear waste exposure.

> We know we're facing scenario two as a distinct possibility, or we'd be happily burning coal until we can't find any more.

What is your plan to get China et al to stop burning coal, by the way?

> Fuel reprocessing is a thing, modern reactors deplete the fuel much more thoroughly, and there isn't even that much of it. All of the spent fuel France has used since the 1970s fits in a small fraction of their basketball-court sized storage facility.

I can roll over my payday loan on a miminum wage paycheck, what could go wrong?

[orwin]

Cadmium and lead will stay inside landfill for 1000 -10,000 million years. It already kills people in China, due to the extraction process (probably in Africa too), and destroyed PV panels were a nightmare in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami, and it was often a small pv that just activated water pumps. If that happened now, it would be a disaster on top of a disaster. And one that would displace millions.

[Daniel_sk]

Well, there are vast amounts of highly toxic oil that we yet have to extract from below the surface - if something of that leaks by accident then it will poison and kill everything it will touch and it has been there since the dinosaurs died :-). Radioactive waste is solid waste and the amount is small - even if someone would dig it up, it would be only a local danger and it could maybe kill a reduced number of humans, but it will not be a global catastrophe. We are probably producing more highly toxic and poisonous waste that is not radioactive but it will also last hundreds if not thousands of years (e.g. toxic heavy metals) and kill many more people. Tens of thousands of people die every year from industrial pollution. How many people die from stored nuclear waste? Zero? (and even in worst case when a future civilisation digs up the nuclear waste - we are not speaking about hundreds of thousands like in case of industrial pollution).

[throw0101a]

In general there is an inverse relation between the half-life and the intensity of radioactivity of an isotope. Isotopes with a long half-life decay very slowly, and so produce fewer radioactive decays per second; their intensity is less. Istopes with shorter half-lives are more intense.

In nuclear waste, isotopes with very short half-lives, say a few days or even a few weeks, are not the major concern. They will decay to negligible amounts within a year or two. Isotopes with very long half-lives, more than 1000 years, are likely to be less intense.

Long-term isotopes are more complicated. They don't dose as heavily, but there are a lot more issues than just that. Plutonium for example is comparatively long-lived, but some of its decay products can be quite nasty. At the extreme end are isotopes that are so long-lived that their hazard levels are close to zero. Uranium-238, the kind left after the fissile 235 is removed, pretty well falls into this category.

[chordalkeyboard]

The problem is bioaccumulation of radioactive isotopes.

[StreamBright]

You are talking about worst case scenario.

There are nuclear reactor types specifically built for getting rid of high half-time traditional nuclear waste.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/destroying-nuclear-wa...

[AngryData]

I mean storing waste that is dangerous for that long is the result of politics, not any technological limitation. Recycling and reusing that waste would make most of it dangerous for like 50-100 years, and after that the only danger is living on top of the low radioactive waste for 20 years or eating it, which would kill you even if it wasn't radioactive because it is a heavy metal.

[throwaway69123]

Nuclear waste occurs naturally well before humans created it, I think we will manage

[Daho0n]

And yet we have places like the Marshall Islands where US nuclear waste is leaking at this very moment. If it is that easy to contain then why isn't happening?

The problem with nuclear is that people are too greedy to use it safely or want to weaponize it so lots and lots of regulation is needed. Nuclear energy will be fixed the day human greed and aggression are gone.

[FooHentai]

So nuclear has been up and running in mainstream use for what, fifty years at this point? If that waste sticks around for just 10,000 years (optimistic), and assuming no increase in demand over today (which is laughable), your ‘just one football field’ waste site is actually two hundred times bigger.

And that’s raw waste, it doesn’t include containment for each deposit you make.

Not to mention the issues we’re already having today with containment decay around existing waste sites.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

There's also more waste than just the spent fuel rods. One of the things I learned that really shifted my views is just how expensive decommissioning nuclear plants is. Meanwhile, recycling solar is basically the cost of shipping the material around.

[sudosysgen]

Two hundred football fields is absolutely trifling even now and much less on the scale of 10 000 years.

You're also ignoring the fact that reactors that recycle spent fuel have been made and can be drastically improved, so demand for storage of waste as well as how hard they are to contain can very realistically go down.

[FooHentai]

>Two hundred football fields is absolutely trifling even now and much less on the scale of 10 000 years.

Yet today, there's about a quarter of a million tonnes of waste in holding storage at various locations awaiting proper disposal. The only deep geological disposal facility currently operational is WIPP and of the three that have ever existed in the world, the other two in Germany have permanently closed. It should be noted that both those sites have major issues with long-term stability and significant ongoing investment is occurring to attempt to remediate them.

The issues at WIPP in 2014 are a clear example of how non-trifling the task is: Underground truck fire, followed a few days later by (unrelated) airborne release of radioactive materials due to a waste barrel being packed with, and I am not making this up, the wrong kind of kitty litter. After a three-year hiatus and at a cost of five hundy million to remediate, it's been running again for a couple of years and due to permanently close in as little as three years.

This will be a good thing because ceasing operations and permanently sealing the site drastically reduces the risk of incidents due to human fallibility. Now in fairness it's a pilot site even in name, so procedures should be improved on the next iterations. But this is a field clearly in it's infancy, it's not yet matured.

I just can't agree that disposal even of the waste generated so far is trifling. When the waste of today is on track for secure, permanent, safe storage I'll be a bit more optimistic.

>You're also ignoring the fact that reactors that recycle spent fuel have been made and can be drastically improved, so demand for storage of waste as well as how hard they are to contain can very realistically go down.

Yeah I hope so. Re-processing of a significant chunk of the existing waste would be an encouraging sign.

[throw0101a]

Princeton did a study, and found to get to net zero by 2050, the US could do it with only renewables (the "E+ RE+" scenario). To accomplish that:

> Cumulative total wind and solar farm area in E+ RE+ by 2050 is ~1 million km^2, or roughly an area the size of AK, IA, KS, MO, NE, OK, and WV combined (with an additional 64,000 km^2 of offshore wind); directly impacted lands total 70,000 km^2, an area larger than WV.

* PDF: https://environmenthalfcentury.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/t...

* https://environmenthalfcentury.princeton.edu

Most of it taken up by wind farms (94%)

Transmission lines would have to expanded as well: in 2020, there is ~320,000 GW-km of capacity, and so by 2050 ~1,702,000 GW-km (5.3x) would be needed. They estimated it would cost US$ 3,710B (3.7T), though amortized over the next thirty years.

E+RE+ assumes that renewables can be constructed/grow at a rate of 10%/year. They have a E+RE- scenario which growth is limited to what was achieved already, and that scenario needs some nuclear to get to net zero.

Of course net zero may be "too much", and we can achieve good climate goals with modest releases of carbon/GHGs.

[pfdietz]

> Most of it taken up by wind farms (94%)

Wind farms do not exclude the land involved from also being used for other purposes, like agriculture.

[fulafel]

This study starts with existing laissez-faire energy demand projections. Hopefully another large part of the emissions reduction will come from people adopting less wasteful living, transport, eating etc behaviours and preferences.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Hopefully another large part of the reduction will come from people adopting less wasteful living, transport, eating etc behaviours and preferences

Zero chance. This would require reductions in quality of life. Even minor fuel tax increases have spawned capital-freezing protests from the Arab world to Paris.

[throw0101a]

Buildings are responsible for 40% of the total amount of energy needed (US, EU). Mandating better air tightness (<1 ACH@50) and raising insulation levels would go a long way to reducing that.

Residentially, you can built a 5000 square foot (500 sq. m) home that needs only 1500W (1.5 kW)—basically a hair dyer—to heat/cool:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vul4vMFdkA

Using an HRV/ERV with an air filter per ASHRAE 62.1 and 62.2 gives you very good air quality.

[fulafel]

There's a lot of low hanging fruit, eg electricity consumption per household is ~3x in the US vs the EU. I feel it's quite likely that the coming voter and decisionmaker generations have increasingly developed consciences about these things.

Regarding fuel tax protests, I think your anecdotes are actually pretty unrepresentative. In the EU the fuel tax increases have been going on for a long time. And there haven't been any Arab world spanning protests recently from my memory.

[acdha]

Less wasteful is a huge, unsupported claim contradicted by many examples. As a simple one, think about how much electricity the 1990 PC user consumed compared to one today – EnergyStar encouraged that but it had basically nobody cared about it enough to whine about it, much less riot. Lightbulbs did have some efforts to turn them into a conservative rallying point but even Trump supporting it wasn’t enough to get traction because only the most diehard ideologues are going to say they want to give more of their money to the utility company.

The real lesson here is that the best way is to give people clear price signals. Stop subsidizing fossil fuel consumption and suddenly people will make less wasteful choices in many areas. We saw this in the US before fracking took off, when fuel economy was creeping up because $4/gallon gas was enough to get people thinking about whether they really needed a Suburban to take 1-2 people grocery shopping.

The Arab & French protests did involve fuel pricing but that was more in the sense of being the last straw than an unavoidable cause. If the French government hadn’t been using that to lower taxes on the wealthy, for example, or simply been less unpopular before it started, it wouldn’t have flared up like that. It’s a valid concern but I wouldn’t generalize too much from a more complex scenario than it might appear. Especially in the US, where the average family could make substantial energy usage reductions with simple, low-impact changes (combining trips, reducing food waste, insulating houses, replacing antique appliances, etc. are not the stuff of revolution).

[arrosenberg]

In large parts of the US, this isn't necessarily true. Our cities and suburbs are designed around individual auto use. Re-designing these areas to be more pedestrian and mass-transit oriented would likely be a quality-of-life increase for most people.

[abernard1]

I do not know if this is pro or anti-, but I thank you for your statistic.

The land required for this is absolutely insane. Insane.

I challenge anyone with a straight face to argue that utilizing 6 huge to medium size states out of the 50 is an efficient use of land or physical resources. We can't recycle ordinary trash correctly without throwing it to developing countries, who are rejecting it. We don't recycle wind turbines at all. But we're supposed to be able to routinely recycle six whole states worth of panels and turbines?

It's madness.

[rpiguyshy]

i dont want to be contrarian, but this is wrong. you get 150-100 w per square meter. what am i missing?

[throw0101a]

Talk to the PhDs at Princeton and their collaborators:

* https://environmenthalfcentury.princeton.edu/experts

I'm just copying and pasting the December 2020 report.

Off the top of my head, renewables (in the US) only produce electricity about 30% of the time, so you have to 'over build':

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor

They have energy storage experts, so I'm sure batteries and such are taken into account.

[rpiguyshy]

total power requirement of the united states / amount of average power including weather and TOD produced by a square meter of land + amount of land to store necessary batteries = a corner notched out of nevada. not multiple states. i dont think you need a phd to see this, and elon musk also agrees with this and i think he is knowledgeable enough about solar and batteries. plus, there are lots of efficiency gains still in the pipes that will reduce our power consumption. when all houses are properly insulated, heated with a heat pump, have efficient appliances, thermal loops and have solar on their roofs then all of this becomes even more feasible. and thats not even including wind, hydro or thermal.

[numpad0]

"High level nuclear waste" is such a weird idea once you take a bit of in depth look at nuclear technology. It's just fuel. Just nuclear material. No need to "manage for extremely long periods of time". Only requiring more sophisticated Fast Neutron technology to be used, and if used, provide practically unlimited supply of electricity and nuclear material to a nation.

The reason as to why "safe storage of nuclear waste" is a problem lies in the last part: unlimited supply of nuclear material. Completely destroys national security for everyone. Without that part the problem reduces to just engineering challenges of building and running some Sodium cooled Fast Neutron reactors.

[orwin]

Disclaimer1: I'm "pro" nuclear (as a baseline to supplement hydro), and i think nuclear is the 3rd best option (behind hydro and reducing consumption) Disclaimer2: i have investissment in veolia

Panels do decline, a lot, and especially older panels, but also most newer industrial solar PV are using heavy metals that can burn land (I mean, go to indonesia and look at farmland or even forest near communities were ONG installed a lot of PV before the tsunami, you'll understand what i mean, you can literally see where those PV were buried).

Veolia Rousset plant was the first to recycle most of the materials (the shareholder paper said almost 95%, i believe them) and not simply landfill them. But this have increased cost, and right now, most PV panels end up in landfills, poisoning earth for decades (and now that we understand saturnism)

I'm not saying PV is not a solution, it is, especially locally, but it have to be handled well. But you can't have solar+wind make up more than 50% of your electrical network, its not possible. And even 50% add a lot of costs.

[croes]

Why is it not possible?

[orwin]

Well, it is tbh, but not right now, and not in the US. It would probably be doable in Europe if we massively overbuilt?

You want to have a stable baseline because you want to be able to provide electricity to some services in worst case situation. Those services often have backup generators, but in worst case scenarii, the generator is too cold/old/dirty, and you don't take risks. In France we had a scenario were our grid managing center is under attack and cannot indicate who dispatch power to who, and to respond to that you can't not have a base load. But also, having a base load that can fluctuate daily permit emergency maintenance on multiple electricity production site.

[rrdharan]

Isn’t there still a lot of implied waste from the solar panels themselves though, as well as the storage batteries i.e. once they’ve reached their end of life?

My understanding is that this cost and the manufacturing cost (rate earth metals etc.) are often overlooked when reasoning about the total footprint of both solar and electric vehicles..

[philipkglass]

rare earth metals etc.

The rare earth elements are the lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium [1]. None of these elements are needed to manufacture solar panels. The only rare metal used in quantity by solar panels is silver, which is used to make electrically conductive pastes for cell contacts [2].

The question of what resources solar panels require is deliberately muddied by a couple of vested interests.

1) Junior mining companies and their promoters who want to create the impression that vast wealth awaits the next rare earth miner. (It doesn't. Consumption is too limited. The market value of zinc alone eclipses all rare earth element production combined.)

2) People who are playing up the environmental impacts of solar to make the fossil fuel status quo look better by comparison. "Sure, coal is a dirty mining business, but so is rare earth production!"

These people either don't know or don't care that solar doesn't use rare earth elements.

You also have credulous people who just repeat what they heard from members of groups 1 and 2.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element

[2] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/08/28/slimming-down-on-silv...

[selimthegrim]

Hafnium is used in some next generation MEG solar cells, to say nothing of ITO electrodes

[pfdietz]

Hafnium is not a rare earth.

[selimthegrim]

Thanks for the correction! I did think its price had gone up permanently these days though.

[sjg007]

Batteries should be refurbish-able and definitely recyclable.

[reedjosh]

And definitely energy intensive to recycle.

[afterburner]

Are you under the impression decommissioning a nuclear reactor is a simple and tidy task?

[StreamBright]

>> meanwhile, solar is safe to set up, safe to operate, and there is no radioactive waste to manage

Only some giant amount (only 300x compare to nuclear) of non-radioactive waste that ends up in poor countries. Do you care about that?

https://www.solarpowerinternational.com/wp-content/uploads/2...

https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die...

https://www.technocracy.news/solar-energy-produces-300-times...

[pfdietz]

That last link is hilarious. It cited a study that found that the mass of solar panels is 300x the mass of SPENT NUCLEAR FUEL. Because, of course, pound-for-pound a solar panel and spent nuclear fuel have the same toxicity?

[orwin]

You can build recycling plant and force PV vendor to sent their panels to said plant once the panel hit the end of its life.

[sudosysgen]

Then do that and see how costs increase, and do the comparison again.

[phonon]

>there is no nuclear power plant that produces no waste.

"no" is difficult. "Very little" is feasible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor#Nuclear_...

[throw_nbvc1234]

As long as flint's heat is still natural gas based then lights going out is the worst thing. I'm guessing an average winter in flint (if it's not then shift my statement to MN where it is) is much colder then the mess Texas just went through. Things just break when things are that colder, particularly electricity. Just try starting your car when it's -30F.

Power generation for Billions of people seems like a complex problem that everyone seems very willing to boil down to solving with "Just focus on electricity and use wind, solar, and batteries." Sounds a lot like the "just use mongoDB" talk from 6-7 years ago.

[reedjosh]

Solar requires energy storage. It is not on demand. Wind and solar must be backed by an on demand source as we don't have sufficiently cost effective storage methods.

Options are then basically hydroelectric, natural gas, petroleum, coal, or nuclear. Nuclear is the cleanest if you can't put a dam somewhere.

[mbgerring]

Or batteries, which are getting cheaper and are now less expensive than natural gas peaker plants in many locations

[reedjosh]

Interesting. Can you please provide a source? I've never heard as such, but would be glad to find otherwise.

[rpiguyshy]

there are many huge packs. tesla has built some of the biggest ones.

[reedjosh]

> bumbling bureaucrats

Sounds like a government problem, not a nuclear problem.

[rpiguyshy]

exactly. fission is great if its run by smart, motivated people. unfortunately, the government is not always populated by the kind of people who are up to the task. and they are not always structured in a way that allows them to work optimally. its a big, complicated system. to have total confidence in it is foolish. its like any other huge, complicated and convoluted machine... you should be skeptical of it, not blindly faithful in its ability to do things like manage nuclear waste. maybe someone comes back at me saying that the government already does things like manages the nuclear arsenal, wages war, etc. my response is that you should be worried, we should try to reduce all of that as much as possible.

[afterburner]

Hope you have a solution to never having bad government.

[reedjosh]

Yes, none.

[afterburner]

That's what Texas is going for, not working out too well.

[reedjosh]

Ironically in 2020.

"On June 1, Austin Energy issued a notice of suspension and its receipt has been acknowledged, according to the utility’s COO, Charles Dickerson. The energy generation facility will be retired Oct. 31"

https://www.austinmonitor.com/stories/whispers/decker-creek-...

[reedjosh]

Texas energy is traded through ERCOT, an energy market "...governed by a board of directors and subject to oversight by the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Texas Legislature."

http://www.ercot.com/about

[afterburner]

And they failed. You proved my point.

[abernard1]

> as long as you are producing waste, you are depending on bumbling bureaucrats to properly dispose of that waste and manage the waste often for extremely long periods of time.

The entirety of nuclear waste ever produced by humanity can fit in a football field.

This is without even considering fuel recycling. Acting like this is a problem has to be the most absurd (and I might add politicized) argument ever made against nuclear energy.

[rpiguyshy]

ok well lets settle it. how much waste would be produced if the whole country ran on nuclear? regardless of the volume of waste, how serious is a breach of containment? is the waste a target for terrorists? can it be weaponized?

[abernard1]

> ok well lets settle it. how much waste would be produced if the whole country ran on nuclear?

That waste goes into Yucca mountain, and it's behind / underneath 100s of meters of neutron heavy metals. If we were exclusively powered by nuclear power for a century without recycling, it'd be something like 100 football fields. Absolutely, completely, utterly inconsequential.

1 inch of neutron-heavy lead is enough to dispel the radioactivity from full blast of a thermonuclear weapon and be safe for a human. Saying that the Yucca mountain waste facility had potential for harm is the most unscientific, embarrassing thing that a certain unnamed political party has ever claimed on nuclear waste.

[thinkcontext]

> That waste goes into Yucca mountain

Yucca Mountain hasn't accepted waste and there is no plan for it to begin accepting it. The government collects a tax on nuclear generation and used it to construct Yucca Mountain but political considerations have blocked it being used.

There is no current plan for long term storage of nuclear waste in the US.

[abernard1]

> Yucca Mountain hasn't accepted waste and there is no plan for it to begin accepting it.

Replace Yucca Mountain with any out of the way mountain, and there are many around the world globally. (We wouldn't want to be shipping every nation's nuclear waste to one spot).

The point is that nuclear waste has been well understood for 75 years. The mechanism for how it's shielded, by natural means, is so well understood that the political destruction of these sites is a crime against science.

The fissile, radioactive isotopes came from mountains in the first place, and we're not telling people to not live by mountains.

[rpiguyshy]

ok but i just have doubts. you say that buried nuclear waste is safe but i need more detail. what if it leaks into ground water? can it leak? what kind of containment is necessary? and does it need to be guarded? do people want the stuff for bombs or something? i just have a bunch of doubts and i think they are reasonable.

and meanwhile solar is simple and there are no doubts about it. probably much easier to do cleanly. nuclear people want us to hold out for this miracle reactor that cant melt down, but they are too impatient for a panel that doesnt have heavy metals?

and its not embarrassing, i just think solar edges out nuclear. im not dogmatically against nuclear.

[tedk-42]

The problem is that you see it as one or the other as opposed to investing in BOTH solutions and trying to adopt both technologies for the better.

It seems like we should put all our eggs into one basket but why? If people realised how 'anti-nuclear' they actually were, things would move along faster.

[rpiguyshy]

well for the record i am not saying we should have zero nuclear. i think we need nuclear waste products to power rovers, do certain medical diagnostics and we need nuclear subs to keep the chinese at bay.