[coldtea]

>We need more nuclear power and less nuclear scaremongering.

And why not more investment in solar power and renewable energy sources, instead of a potentially dangerous industry that produces extremely toxic waste, and can fuck everything around it in case of a terrorist attack, meltdown, etc?

[jmackinn]

Base load. Please look this up when talking about using renewable energy sources for our electricity. Without things like nuclear power, coal, and natural gas plants we cannot maintain a proper base load.

This is totally besides the fact that when you look at the break down of the environmental impact of all power sources, nuclear continues to be one of the greenest solutions.

[cobrausn]

Nuclear power is proven technology. Solar and renewable sources continue to ask for decades of research and funding to hope to be nearly as capable of providing as much power.

As an aside, having one does not exclude using / researching the other.

[rsync]

1. Read "Normal Accidents" by Charles Perrow.

2. Alternately laugh and cry as you read the nuclear plant chapter(s).

3. Begin to seriously consider marching in the streets to protest new and existing nuclear plants (of the common, standard models).[1]

[1] More modern designs without tightly coupled systems and associated risks (thorium, molten salt, pebble-bed, whatever) seem very promising.

[mpyne]

Certainly we can invest in renewable, but you'd also have to invest in energy storage in that case.

However toxic nuclear waste may be in its most compact form, that is a political issue, not an engineering one.

And the plant itself is hardly a problem in the scope of a terrorist attack, flying a plane into a skyscraper or disabling the brakes on a petroleum-filled train parked on a hill would be greater risks to public health for a given group of terrorists.

Someday we may even finally upgrade from 1950s and 60s designs that can meltdown, but even the rickety old reactors have not been public health disasters on a par with coal or hydro.

[lostlogin]

Given how badly protected power stations are, they seem a soft target. this may in part explain the insane over reaction here https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/15-7.

[mpyne]

Nuclear civilian power stations are fairly incredibly well-protected post-9/11. One of Canada's nuclear power facilities has continually swept the various S.W.A.T. competitions they hold in North America for at least a couple of years now, and other facilities are similarly well-guarded.

But even if you managed to break in, you can't destroy the containment building with just the explosives you can carry on your person (it is, after all, designed to contain something much worse). Likewise you wouldn't be able to make it near the reactor complex itself as the radiation would kill the terrorists before they could get close enough to damage something.

The best case (for the terrorists) is trying to impeded reactor cooling from the control stations, but that takes a long time for actual damage to occur (time enough to preclude the damage in the first place), and even if you somehow managed to hold out for a whole day and let the reactor try to melt itself (at a rickety old facility without passive safety), you'd just get something like Three Mile Island, not Fukushima.

Perhaps you might try to fly a plane into the containment? But even that wouldn't cause a nuclear yield or anything close, especially with U.S. style containments. Steel-reinforced concrete simply eats planes for breakfast.

The story you linked comes from a description of a nuclear weapons production facility, and even that security lapse was not inherently more severe than breaking into something like a chemical production facility.

There's no magic fairies that kill 10,000 people just because you touched something labeled 'nuclear' after all, so even breaching into the facility wouldn't be a public health risk by itself.

[rayiner]

I'm not convinced the semiconductor manufacturing process that goes into solar is appreciably cleaner than nuclear in practice.

[ekianjo]

Because fission produces massive amounts of energy compared to anything else. Solar is not cheap when you remove government subsidies. Its an economic choice as well.

[ars]

> that produces extremely toxic waste

Solar power produces far far more toxic waste per energy produced.

[coldtea]

Citation needed.

[ddeck]

> Citation needed.

No idea regarding relative amounts/toxicity etc., but I presume they are referring to these issues:

http://news.yahoo.com/solar-industry-grapples-hazardous-wast...

[fnordfnordfnord]

Have a look at LFTR, a much safer reactor design that produces much less waste.