why are enviromentalists against using nuclear power like france for the United states, even though its clean?

Answer 1

Because although it's a clean burning fuel/energy supplier - the waste it leaves (water/uranium) is dangerous and radioactive. Environmentalists are concerned with the outcomes of radioactive leaks - which can affect thousands of people, and effects might not be evident for several years, making the liabilities of suppliers lower in the long run if causes can't be verified.

Answer 2

Because most "Environmentalists" are not really very well educated about the subject. They make their decisions based on "Feelings", what some popular Hollywood star, or the media says.

I personally believe many more people are killed every year by other forms of energy production due to air pollution than all people killed in the last 50 years by all nuclear plants. There are millions of tons of hazardous materials spewing out of smoke stacks that we breath 24/7.

I would much rather live next to a nuclear plant. Other than Chernobyl which was nothing like our Nuclear plants design, I have heard of only a couple killed by nuclear power.

At the present time, there is not one alternative form of energy other than nuclear that can replace the amount needed to stop pollution and still maintain a good reliable power system. Solar? Wind? Think about it. If it were available, the world would be using it.

The US is not the center of the earth. Other countries (many others) have been in an energy crisis for many years. They also have great scientists and engineers that are trying there best to solve this critical problem. It is very arrogant of us to assume only we could possibly have the answers.

Answer 3

Not all environmentalists are against nuclear power. The technology is, as you say, a "clean" energy surce. That's nt the issue.

Safety is. Remember Chernobyl? If not---go read up on it. The point is, a lot of people then (and still) recognize that thisis a real problem Also, there is some concern about nuclear wasste. Not so much about storing it--we know how to do that--but about security. Nuclear waste isn't good for much-but it would make a dandy "dirty bomb" Security, however, is also something we know how to handle..

Look, you'll get different opinions. For what ts worth, here's mine. Nuclear power--in terms of reliability and safety--has an outstanding record. But--we have to balance that against the fact that a major failure like Chernobyl has the potential to kill thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people. So what would be a more than adequate level of safety/reliability for most purposes simply isn't good enough.

The positive side is tha **** very likely that--partly due to lessons from Chernobyl--we can design nuclear power systems with that extreme levelof safety. My only "condition" for supporting nuclear power is that we first see evidence that that level of safety can in fact be achieved.

Answer 4

They don't bring it up because many environmentalists don't really seem to understand it. Using the cherynobyl disaster (a decades old disaster at a poorly run and designed nuclear power plant) as a reason against nuclear power is like using the sinking of the Titanic as a reason not to use boats for travel or shipping. Both were disasters that happened decades ago using technology that has been vastly improved since then and were basically caused by human errors and not technological errors. Mining uranium is energy intensive and pollutive but not nearly as much as the mining of an amount of coal needed to provide the same amount of power yielded from uranium. There are effective means to dispose of nuclear waste in places like Yucca Mountain or similar that are generally abandoned mines where the waste can be stored literally miles underground.

Answer 5

Several reasons as listed above.

1) More nuclear power plants means more enriched uranium means more potential for nuclear weapons if it gets in the wrong hands.

2) While it's an improvement over buring fossil fuels, mining the uranium does create some greenhouse gas emissions.

3) There's the problem of what to do with the waste. There's a big NIMBY issue with nuclear waste - nobody even wants it transported near them, let alone stored anywhere nearby. The more waste is produced, the more acceptible and safe places you have to find to store it for thousands of years.

4) Incidents like Chernobyl and 3 mile island concern people, though nuclear power plants are really quite safe. If something goes wrong, it can really go wrong.

5) Like fossil fuels, uranium is a limited resource. There's only so much of it we can mine.

Nuclear power should be a significant component in our power production, but we don't want to rely on it too heavily for these reasons.

Answer 6

Nuclear power maybe clean that's only because Its was well contain and safely protected.Of course even If you believe nuclear energy Is clean It doesn't mean Its safe there been many cases In history like the one incident In Chernobyl, in the Ukraine where a power plant had a melt down which was called Chernobyl fallout which nuclear energy contaminated the area, and the side effects the population had suffer birth defects, Cancers, and tumours which killed some of the population off slowly even In America there Is some nuclear energy contaminated from A-bomb testing from the 1950-60's.

Answer 7

Speaking for myself, I suppose I'm what you could term an environmentalist but I'm not opposed to nuclear power.

Given the negative impacts of conventional power generation I think the potential drawbacks of nuclear are a more paletable alternative.

In an ideal world we'd get all our energy from the wind, sun, waves etc but this technology is in it's infancy and quite incapable of fulfuilling our energy demands. Maybe one day but not for quite some time yet.

In short, I consider nuclear to be the lesser of the two evils when compared to conventional power generation.

Answer 8

They are against it out of ignorance.

Every time you hear the name Chernobyl in a discussion about US nuclear power, you can count on that person knowing nothing about the subject...unless, of course, the discussion is about how glad our scientists are to have never pursued such a flawed design. If not for the fear created by environmentalists in the 70s, we could easily have curtailed our carbon consumption - global warming would be a moot point one way or another. Either there would be no warming from less CO2 production, or there would be no correlation between man-made CO2 and rising temps.

Ironic. Global Warming CREATED by environmentalists.

Here one that thinks better:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/14/AR2006041401209.html

Answer 9

Clean Nuclear is a pipe dream, the problem isn't so much that it can make energy relatively cleanily but what to do with the dangerous waste it creates which in the best situation will have to be dealt with for many thousands of years.
The US solution to getting rid of nuclear waste is to make weapons with it, start a war and spread the radiation all over the world.
Nothing at all clean about Nuclear.

Answer 10

The main issues are safety and the problem of what to do with the radioactive waste. Safety has been generally good throughout the history of nuclear facilities, and, now that the Yucca Mountain site has been selected, spent fuel rods will no longer be stored at the power plants on a long-term basis. In view of these factors, many environmentalists are re-thinking the issue.

Answer 11

In general, its because nuclear power is too complex a subject for them to properly understand, an example being the "millions of years" and "Chernobyl / TMI " comments above.

And nationwide debate over the approval of the Yucca Mountain storage site for nuclear waste was all the rage a few years ago, people have totally forgotten about it now.

A bright and shining example of a hardcare environmentalist who has accepted the truth about nuclear power is a co-founder of Greenpeace who uses the correct 40 year practical timeframe for nuclear waste to decay substantially. Nuclear foes aren't going to like this one, but a properly designed and operated nuclear reactor releases less environmental damage than even a wind generator when you consider both the noise and wildlefe issues. Nuke plants just sit there and produce power without killing anything, not even wind generators can make that claim.