coal kills more people, this is a fact. so with blocking nuclear lead to coal, so they indirectly supportered killing thousands, incredible stats really.
who said art can't be bad for the public?
A hidden danger of coal is ironically the radioactivity of its waste, which gets put into concrete products and contribute to indoor air quality issues.
The paranoia around nuclear power is tied to generational fear mongering of governments during the Cold War. The oddest part is why not use safer reactor designs; water reactors make sense for the US Navy and not on land.
Miniscule, yet extremely dangerous and incredibly difficult & expensive to deal with.
The estimated cost of making the UK's current stock of waste safe is currently £136bn, for a value of "safe" that leaves at least one of the high level waste pools being at an "intolerable" level of risk of leaking into groundwater until the late 2050s.
For comparison, the estimated cost of achieving net zero in the UK by 2050 is £110bn.
It’s only irrelevant to you as long as it doesn’t leak into your ground water supply after a few decades down the line, when we discover the containment didn’t resist corrosion as well as we thought. The danger of nuclear waste does not correspond to the amount at all.
According to the author of The Curve of Binding Energy [0], civil reactors were being subsidized by the purchase of plutonium (from the spent fuel rods) by the Department of Energy [1] to the tune of $1,000,000 per kg of Pu. The end of this program was coincidentally at about the same time as the Three Mile Island incident which leads many people to think that reaction to TMI was the reason that US reactor construction stopped.
When the Senate ratified some non-proliferation treaties, that also ended reprocessing spent fuel in the US which gets blamed on Carter.
Just for curiosity, are there proposed fusion reactor designs that don't create nuclear waste? I haven't followed what's going on in that space at all.
All fusion reactors by definition (to my understanding) don't produce the same waste we're used to since it doesn't require fission. The byproduct is literally helium. If a catastrophe happens, the reactor implodes instead of explodes, so the concern for the surrounding environs is far less than with fission reactors. The only issue is that fusion reactors have been perpetually out-of-reach for decades.
The paranoia around nuclear power is tied to generational fear mongering of governments during the Cold War. The oddest part is why not use safer reactor designs; water reactors make sense for the US Navy and not on land.