What should we be doing about Atomic power plants ..agree or disagree?

Question

Cleaner air ...pollution free ..except for the Uranium leftovers.

Answer 1

we should build more of them.
it is way easier to contain a few barrels of waste than a few cubic miles of gas.

Answer 2

yes we should build them, but the answer is far more complicated than a simple yes or no answer. The uranium (5% enrichment for fuel rod manufacture) cycle - everything from mining and enrichment to fuel rod production to electricty generation is energy-negative. It takes much more energy to deliver the electricty than you actually get in the form of electricity over the lifecycle of the plant. However the process producess far less carbon dioxide than fossil fuel power cycle. The french get 80% of their electricty from nuclear power plants and have 100% safety record. The disposal of spent fuel is a problem, but one rather easily addressed with modern technology. We do have an underground storage facility in Nevada which is built in vocanic tuff (no groundwater to cause problems and no seismic activity to compromise the integrity of storage caverns). Safety of power plants can and is addressed by modern technology very successfully. Decomissioning of old plants is a problem, but relatively minor one. Unfortunately the US is very far behind in nuclear power plant technology because of a serious accident at Three Mile Island in 1979. Fossil fuel plants cause far more deaths and human health problems than nucler power (marcury emissins, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon emissions, acid rain, carbon dioxide emissions, soot, and carcinogens released from ash storage). The people do not protest fossil fuel plants as it it is the classical devil you know (fossil fuels) vs the devil you do not know (nuclear power cycle) dilemma. It is also NIMBY, not in my back yard, problem. People want 100% risk free living and cheap energy, not unexpected demands, but impossible to meet with modern technology. Living in a modern society involves risk, it is the matter of how we manage it that matters. It is also how the problems faced with nuclear power cycle are presented to the public, eduactaion is needed so people can make educated decisions.
If you were a leader of a country the size of US and a person approached you and told you he can build a device which will transport people from place to place at will, quickly and will be inexpensive enough to be accessible to most of the population, but he will require in exchange, a human sacrifice of 38,000 lives each and every year. You would say *no*, of course.
But, that is how many lives we lose in automobile accidents every year.

Answer 3

With conventional fossil fuels running low, we should building more of them, the modern ones offer very little in the way of danger to the planet, the Swedish are building small econimical plants with very good safety standards.

In the future there will have to be some sort of renewable energy supply, even if you covered the planet in wind generators they would not supply enough for our needs.

The spent fuel rods can be safely buried in concrete in deep mineshafts (possibly by using the old abandoned South African Gold mines for example.)

We are doing untold damage to the planet from the gasses and chemical polution from the old coal burning plants same for oil plants.