Nuclear energy has been making a come back, is this a safe alternative enrgy,?

Question

or is another chernobyl in our future

Answer 1

No in the long runm it is much worse than oil.
'It takes 200,000 to 500,000 years and up for those radiaoctive waste materials to become safe, and they are now being stored in the salt mine sof mississippi and missiouri and worse palces.
Salt is one of the most soluble minerals in the world which is why we have salty oceans and the idiots store radioactive materials in it.
Beside the damage an explossion or meltdown could do there is "no place on earth to safely store nuclear waste materials or to release the water run of from one. These things require tons sof water annually and there is no way to store that waste water removal as required. I personally think it is now being released into our water systems via the seas and left as future generations problems.
It is beyound stupid to use nuclear generations when the sun, wind, and seas/rivers could do the same thing so much safer and as cheap or cheap. Whjo ever said building a dam or dams and operating it is cheaper than building and operating a nuclean power stations is evidently on it's board of directors.

Answer 2

"Safe" energy will not exist until considerations for energy sources stop being driven by financial reasons.

Over the past 100 years, several safe alternative energy sources have been devised, and have just as quickly been crushed, because the oil-corporations would not stand to gain anything from these sources. And, if the oil-corporations can't gain anything, then no-one is interested.

There was also a guy in the 1940's who developed an engine which would run entirely on water, without any loss of energy and no waste-products at all. Ford bought his invention, placed the documentation in a folder marked "Highly Classified" and then discredited the inventor.

People remember Chernobyl, but what about Sellafield? And there are several other examples as well. Accidents will always happen. The idea is to use methods where the accidents will have least impact on the environment...

Solar energy? :-)

Answer 3

i asked the same question before just to see what kind of answers i would get and also because i am concern as i think u are about the environment . what i found out from the answers i got is that apparently nuclear energy has become the cleanest of all and that it has evolve so much that the waste by it today is minimum : http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Ah8dljDVRsarpDBBLARoQ_Tsy6IX?qid=20060619190509AAdISWV

although i am still a little bit concern , not about the nuclear plants but about the small nuclear plants which some universities have . not long ago there was a report at the news about how easy it was to gain access into them . they found one in particular with out any security . the only good thing about this is that this was exposed on national TV so the security had to get much tougher and they are not longer allowing people to tour around on them .

i also want to add that even when they are way safer than when Chernobyl happened i still think they should be kept to a minimum , as far as i know it is the only kind of energy which can produce a whole city to disappear if something when suddenly wrong . i obviously do not want that to happen so if it can actually be replaced by any other which is cleaner and safer i would happily agree with having that energy over nuclear energy . however even when many may agree with this what we have most of the time is because of how much we can expend , so then again if nuclear energy is cheaper than all others i can not picture people actually going for others which would be to expansive to them .

Answer 4

It is very unsafe. If we all used nuclear energy, then there would be so much waste, which can never be disposed of, that the planet would die.

There are several new alternative forms of energy which are being actively suppressed by the oil companies, such as zero-point energy, hydrogen energy etc.
If the world was run as it should be, then massive research would be put into these safe energy forms, and we would all be able to generate our own electricity at home. the reason that this doesn't happen is that the powers that be would lose a little of the control over our lives which they so eagerly relish.
Oil is controlled by the Illuminati, and they make vast fortunes from it. They also control the sources of uranium, and so are still in control.
Tesla discovered free energy over 50 years ago, but before he could promote it, he was murdered.

Answer 5

The technology is 100%, and US nuclear has a very good track record for safety, including three mile island. Problems occur when contractors get greedy and cut corners when the facilities are built (the discovery of poor workmanship and faulty materials caused the shut-down of construction of a major nuclear power plant in CA years ago). If the plants are built to specs the containment buildings that house the reactors will withstand the impact of a loaded 747 crash and remain intact. The old soviet plants, like Chernobyl, have no containment sturcture. If an accident occurs in one of these, radiated steam or other material simply escapes into the atmosphere. God only knows what type of plants and safety systems are used in third world countries. Nuclear, like any energy source, is only as safe as the people that handle it. Take LPG -- one train tanker full of the stuff will level a city block if it were to somehow ignite. Coal, a plentiful and cheap source of fuel, is used in hundreds of power plants across America. If the 'scrubbers', (the mechanical cleaners installed in the exhaust stacks of the plants) were to shut-down, and it has happended before, plumes of slupher acidic smoke spews into the air. If we are lucky, only a few thousand cars will have acid burns on the paint. If not, several thousand citizens have burned lungs. Chernobyl was a disaster waiting to happen. Our NRC had warned the Russians years before it happend that their facilities needed containment buildings and redesigned SCRAM systems. Mankind can use our greatest asset, our brain, to keep us safe from this horror if we just choose to do so.

Answer 6

Look at it another way - Is a car safe or is it an accident waiting to happen. It all depends on the driver

Nuclear power can be considered a safe form of power production. There are many many nuclear power plants globally that have run without incident for years and years, and because of the repairs carried out on them and the regulatory works that must take place, they are safer than ever.

What makes them safer is incidents such as three mile island and Chernobyl. Because of Chernobel, we now instinctively fear the awesome power that can come from the overload of a nuclear power facility. From Three mile Island, we have learnt that the preventitive measures in place to prevent a catastrophe were not enough, and stricter controls, dedicated phone lines and management up links were installed.

I am not saying it is completely safe, and we still are to find a way to safely process the waste products from a nuclear reactor, but compared to Coal, Oil and Gas power, it is the cleanest, safest form of mass producing energy known. Accidents are bound to happen in any industry, but with proper care and procedures these can be minimized dramatically.

Answer 7

Just to clarify some points about waste materials...

1) Most of the waste material is relatively short lived Co-60. With a half life of 5.27 years, it has generally decayed away in 26.35 years. There is longer-lived high level waste, but...

2) Spent fuel containing Pu-238 can be reprocessed into Mixed Oxide Fuel (MOX). This fuel source not only recycles spent reactor fuel, but is also a means of using weapons grade fissile materials as reactor fuel.

3) While salt is highly soluble, this is not a bad thing when it comes to storage of high-level waste. If salt is present in an underground repository (like at Yucca Mountain), this means there isn't any groundwater available to act as a transport means for radioactive materials that leak from their storage container.

One last note on weapons and reactors. A nuclear reactor is not designed or constructed to support a "weapons type" explosion. In order for the critical geometry of the core to be maintained in a weapons explosion, a conventional explosion occurs outside of the core to hold the fissile materials together to cause the chain reaction. In a reactor, the core would blow apart, causing the reaction to stop. The core material would then be contained by the containment building (assuming it acts as designed) preventing release to the environment.

Answer 8

Do you think the boffins have just been patting themselves on the back for more than half a century since they first started building and designing nuclear power-plants? I don't.

I reckon there's been some colossal progress in that time and when the oil and gas finally runs out we might just get to hear about it.

In the future, every household will have it's own little nuclear power-plant in the cupboard where the electricity and gas meters are now. Cars will have them under the bonnet instead of engines.

They're already putting similar things on deep space exploration craft, though you'll never get a close look at them, and I doubt that even these are really as good as it gets.

The plants in nuclear submarines are the size of domestic refrigerators, already. It doesn't really take a lot of imagination to appreciate the potentials.

Answer 9

I think there are significant enough advances in technology and security that nuclear plants are really becoming safer. The only thing I don't like is the possibility of growing amounts of waste from these plants which must be stored either underground or in concrete for very long periods of time. The energy source I would most like to see utilized is wind... windmills/ generators are relatively low-cost and low-maintenance, and have a low impact on the environment.

Answer 10

It's not worth it. I've spent a lot of time in Belarus with the children affected by the Chernobyl disaster and I have seen what nuclear power can do.
I have lots of friends, in their early 20s, in Minsk who have all suffered cancer due to the fall out.
Other renewable energy sources should be developed.
More wind and wave power please.