the case for nuclear power

acuity said:
The idea of launching it into the sun has always interested me.
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Or send it to the Moon like in the TV series Space: 1999? ;)

But seriously, it would cost far more to implement such a solution than could be saved using nuclear power.
 
Blue Mountain said:
A radioactive waste dump can be toxic for a long time. Like longer than many civilizations with their languages and writing systems. So how do you set up a message that someone ten thousand years in the future can interpret as "Danger: travelling through this area will kill you"?
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Well, for one thing, it won't "kill you."

I think much of these risks are overstated. Keep in mind we exploded large numbers of nukes above ground in the 50's testing programs. The U, Pu, fission products, and neutron activated suround was openly dispersed. Cities that were directly nuked have long been rebuilt. The vast bulk of the radiation energy that can be produced in any given 10 year period from all of that has long since happened. As for deep earth storage, should civilization decline to the point that residual low level radiation hazards from these are not recognized, there will be more significant threats to the survival and health of the species.
 
Crossbow said:
Well, if the burying solution was indeed a viable solution, then it would have been done decades ago. However, since this not been done it shows that burying the waste is not a viable solution.
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That is very poor logic. The technology, economics, and politics associated with waste storage have changed and continue to change. In such a transient situation, saying "we didn't do it in the past, so it obviously isn't a viable option now" is illogical.

Improvements in transportation mean there is less risk in moving waste to a repository, improvements in construction mean that repositories can be safer and more secure, the demand for a repository is increasing as plants have to use more and more resources to store spent fuel on site, and increased security concerns make it more favorable that waste be stored in a small number of large sites instead of at more than 100 small sites scattered across the country. All of these factors can explain why we didn’t use this strategy in the past but may use it now.

Also, keep in mind that few people are advocating literally burying waste from power plants. The repositories proposed are carved into mountains and would hold spent fuel in vaults. We are not talking about digging a hole, putting the waste in it, and then filling the hole in. Repositories offer more control of the waste, security from exterior threats, and protection for the surrounding environment. Also, it allows access if the waste ever becomes useful again (if we start reprocessing it). The only waste we might consider burying and sealing in would be very high level waste, and there isn’t much of that about.

Marting is right about health threats, too. In addition to dispersal, radioactive becomes a much weaker threat as it ages. There is a catch-22 when dealing with radioactive materials. Highly radioactive materials have short half-lives, but that means they deplete very quickly. Slightly radioactive materials have long half-lives, which means they are radioactive longer but release less energy over a given amount of time. Waste might still be radioactive in 10,000 years, but it won’t be anywhere near as dangerous as it is now. Isotopes with very long half-lives (the ones that will still be around in significant quantities in 10,000 years) are fairly safe. Uranium, whose isotopes have half-lives on the order of hundreds of thousands to billions of years, can be handled with bare hands. You wouldn’t want to eat it or inhale it (as is the case with any heavy metal), but you can hold it or keep it under your bed and it wouldn’t be a concern. If someone is walking above a buried radioactive waste site 10,000 years from now, it probably won’t cause any harm.

It is also important to remember that most calculations and estimates concerning radiation involve large amounts of conservatism. The nuclear industry is riddled with overly-conservative assumptions as the result of decades of “better safe than sorry” approaches. Indeed, the claim that there is no safe level of radiation is itself an overly-conservative assumption – and one that appears to be contradicted by scientific studies (in fact, studies have suggested that small amounts of radiation are beneficial; something that would not be surprising considering that we evolved on a radioactive planet). This conservatism is a good thing, but it tends to be forgotten when people make claims about the threat of radiation. If a calculation says that a site will be “dangerous” for 10,000 years, it wouldn’t surprise me if it posed no unique threat after 5,000 years or less.

Finally, to address some other questions in this thread, launching waste into space is not practical at this point. Launch vehicles are too risky and too expensive to be used.

The ocean is also risky because control of the waste would be too difficult. Waste cannot be put somewhere and forgotten, it has to be managed. The ocean makes this difficult. More importantly, the ocean is a harsh environment and protecting the ocean from the waste would be nearly impossible (salt water and currents are particularly problematic). Since the ocean is a vital part of the eco-system and food chain, this option is too dangerous to use. We might find those metals in our food someday, and that would be extremely bad.
 
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leaving the safety aspect of decommisioning to one side the monetry cost of decommisioning seems remarkably high....purely on a £ per joule of energy produced does nuclear energy make economic sense?


Decommissioning the UK's ageing nuclear power stations will cost billions of pounds more than originally expected.
In its first report, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority estimates that £56bn will have to be spent cleaning up 20 sites.

NDA wants to speed up the clean-up, including that of the ageing Magnox plants, from 125 years to 25 years.

It has published consultation plans which will be open until 11 November, with a proposal finalised in December.


Nuclear legacy

NDA chairman Sir Anthony Cleaver said the £56bn estimate was higher than the £48bn figure the four-month-old agency had inherited.

We believe it ought to be possible to complete the decommissioning of these stations over a 25-year period

Sir Anthony Cleaver,
Nuclear Decommissioning Authority


Hard decisions of clean-up

The higher estimate is based on the costs over the whole lifetime of the sites, calculated by the UK Atomic Energy Authority and British Nuclear Fuels.
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4140636.stm


There's an article about this http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16286304/
although no clear conclusions.....
 
I thought another big problem with nuclear power stations is that they can't be switched on and off quickly and are therefore mainly used to supply the base load on the national grid. Peak loads are handled by generators that can be turned on and off quicker, like gas.

Is this correct, or have I got the wrong end of the stick (again)?
 
andyandy said:
leaving the safety aspect of decommisioning to one side the monetry cost of decommisioning seems remarkably high....purely on a £ per joule of energy produced does nuclear energy make economic sense?


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4140636.stm


There's an article about this http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16286304/
although no clear conclusions.....
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The costs don't seem so large when one considers two things. First, those plants provided large amounts of power. Nuclear power plants tend to be heavy hitters in terms of electricity production, and they tend to last a long time. When the cost is averaged out over the production from those plants, it becomes less signifficant. Secondly, remember that that cost is buying you electricity that is virtually pollution free. How much is the UK spending on people who suffer respiratory ailments that come from coal, natural gas, and oil power plants? How many man-hours is the economy losing to asthma, lung cancer, and heavy metal poisoning that is the fault of fossil fuel power plants.

Also, you have to consider that these plants were originals. Many of them were built when the technology was very young. You cannot expect the cost per unit power over the lifetime of the plant to be the same for new plants as it is for old ones.

Ivor the Engineer said:
I thought another big problem with nuclear power stations is that they can't be switched on and off quickly and are therefore mainly used to supply the base load on the national grid. Peak loads are handled by generators that can be turned on and off quicker, like gas.

Is this correct, or have I got the wrong end of the stick (again)?
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You are generarlly correct. Plants can be shut down in seconds if they need to be, but such shutdowns are bad economically. They also usually require an explaination to the NRC or comparable regulatory body. When a plant is shut down for a scheduled outage, the power is typically ramped down for days or weeks before the shut down occurs.

If a plant is shut down quickly, it cannot be restarted for about 9 hours due to poison buildup in the core. The poison has to be allowed to decay before the plant can come to power again.

So no, nuclear power cannot be used for peak power. It is very good at generating base power, though, as a plant can produce a consistent amount of power with about 90% availability. They are so good at base power, they run continuously when available. Gas and coal plants are the ones shut down when demand is low (the only source cheaper to operate than nuclear is hydro).

Ideally (if health and environmental concerns were top priority), our baseload electricity would come from nuclear and hydro, and our peak power would come from natural gas. Coal would be removed from the picture entirely.
 
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acuity said:
The idea of launching it into the sun has always interested me.
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The problem with that is that some rockets will explode by accident, and just one such accident would spread radioactive waste over a large area.

I like dumping it into a subduction zone, but there are currently legal and political barriers to that. An international treaty called the Law of the Sea forbids that kind of pollution. The USA has not signed the treaty, but accepts most of its terms as being accepted international law. Furthermore dumping waste in the deep ocean is unlikely to be an easy political sell in the USA.

Cheers,
Ben
 
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Solar, not nuclear

Regarding "the case for nuclear power" (2007-02-15), there is absolutely no need for nuclear power in the UK (or anywhere else in Europe or the USA) because there is a simple mature technology that can deliver huge amounts of clean energy without any of the headaches of nuclear power.

I refer to 'concentrating solar power' (CSP), the technique of concentrating sunlight using mirrors to create heat, and then using the heat to raise steam and drive turbines and generators, just like a conventional power station. It is possible to store solar heat in melted salts so that electricity generation may continue through the night or on cloudy days. This technology has been generating electricity successfully in California since 1985 and half a million Californians currently get their electricity from this source. CSP plants are now being planned or built in many parts of the world.

CSP works best in hot deserts and, of course, there are not many of these in Europe! But it is feasible and economic to transmit solar electricity over very long distances using highly-efficient 'HVDC' transmission lines. With transmission losses at about 3% per 1000 km, solar electricity may, for example, be transmitted from North Africa to London with only about 10% loss of power. A large-scale HVDC transmission grid has also been proposed by the wind energy company Airtricity as a means of optimising the use of wind power throughout Europe. A recent report from the American Solar Energy Society says that CSP plants in the south western states of the US "could provide nearly 7,000 GW of capacity, or ***about seven times the current total US electric capacity***" (emphasis added).

In the recent 'TRANS-CSP' report commissioned by the German government, it is estimated that CSP electricity, imported from North Africa and the Middle East, could become one of the cheapest sources of electricity in Europe, including the cost of transmission. That report shows in great detail how Europe can meet all its needs for electricity, make deep cuts in CO2 emissions, and phase out nuclear power at the same time.

Further information about CSP may be found at the websites for TREC-UK and TREC . Copies of the TRANS-CSP report may be downloaded from the TREC-UK website . The many problems associated with nuclear power are summarised on the website "From Greenhouse to Green House" .
 
France generates 75% of its electricity from Nuclear energy.
Why can't the UK just do the same?

Failing that at least develop alternative strategies to address our energy needs, nuclear being one of them.

More information here:
http://www.uic.com.au/nip28.htm
 
GerryWolff said:
Regarding "the case for nuclear power" (2007-02-15), there is absolutely no need for nuclear power in the UK (or anywhere else in Europe or the USA) because there is a simple mature technology that can deliver huge amounts of clean energy without any of the headaches of nuclear power.

I refer to 'concentrating solar power' (CSP), the technique of concentrating sunlight using mirrors to create heat, and then using the heat to raise steam and drive turbines and generators, just like a conventional power station. It is possible to store solar heat in melted salts so that electricity generation may continue through the night or on cloudy days. This technology has been generating electricity successfully in California since 1985 and half a million Californians currently get their electricity from this source. CSP plants are now being planned or built in many parts of the world.

CSP works best in hot deserts and, of course, there are not many of these in Europe! But it is feasible and economic to transmit solar electricity over very long distances using highly-efficient 'HVDC' transmission lines. With transmission losses at about 3% per 1000 km, solar electricity may, for example, be transmitted from North Africa to London with only about 10% loss of power. A large-scale HVDC transmission grid has also been proposed by the wind energy company Airtricity as a means of optimising the use of wind power throughout Europe. A recent report from the American Solar Energy Society says that CSP plants in the south western states of the US "could provide nearly 7,000 GW of capacity, or ***about seven times the current total US electric capacity***" (emphasis added).

In the recent 'TRANS-CSP' report commissioned by the German government, it is estimated that CSP electricity, imported from North Africa and the Middle East, could become one of the cheapest sources of electricity in Europe, including the cost of transmission. That report shows in great detail how Europe can meet all its needs for electricity, make deep cuts in CO2 emissions, and phase out nuclear power at the same time.

Further information about CSP may be found at the websites for TREC-UK and TREC . Copies of the TRANS-CSP report may be downloaded from the TREC-UK website . The many problems associated with nuclear power are summarised on the website "From Greenhouse to Green House" .
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First of all, you have your plants confused. The only plants in California that use storage were Solar One (which used water and ran from 1982 to 1988) and Solar Two (which used molten salt and ran from 1996 to 1999). The water one was largely unsucessful at generating heat away from peak hours. The salt plant had only three hours of storage for its power -- that isn't nearly enough to run continuously. Neither were used for commercial power production. Both were 10MW plants, which are very small. A generation III+ nuclear plant, by comparison, is 1100-1600MW, depending on the design. The next step in this plant design's development is a 150MW plant being planned in Spain. This one will have a bigger tank, capable of storing 600MWh worth of salt, which sounds impressive until you consider that is only four hours worth of operation.

Call me skeptical, but I'm not going to be impressed until I see one that is much larger. I am familar with molten salt as a heating fluid from my studies -- molten salt nuclear reactors have been on the drawing board since the 60's. The problem is that molten salt is an incredibly difficult material to work with, and there is no reason to believe that the success of a 10MW plant can be scaled up to a 1000MW plant.

The "half a million homes" you are talking about are probably powered by the SEGS in California. The SEGS is a parabolic solar plant that has been operating since 1985. It has no power storage. It is rated at 350MW, which means it makes 350MW of electricity at the peak of a clear summer day. When the sun goes away, the plant stops making electricity (and the load probably shifts to a coal plant). Nuclear plants, on the other hand, operate continuously, except during scheduled outages. Owners of nuclear plants don't have to read weather reports to find out how much electricity they'll be producing on a given day.

Saying that these plants could provide 7000 GW of capacity is misleading too, for two reasons. First, the scalability of this technology is yet to be proven. Second, they don't give any important accompanying terms like cost or area required. They could make 7000 GW if they litter the desert with 700,000 of these 10MW plants, sure. Of course, a proponent of nuclear power could reply by simply saying that the same could be achieved by building 7000 of Westinghouse's new AP1000 power plants. It is really easy to do that when you only talk about raw power generation and none of the pesky details like cost, reliability, or the lack of a proof of scalable concept.

As for your transmission ideas, I'm sorry but you are falling for some good PR. First of all, HVDC power lines are very expensive. If you factor in the cost of building a distribution system that runs across the country (or across a continent), you are going to drive the cost of generation through the roof. Second, HVDC has to operate on one synchronized frequency. England, northern Europe, and central Europe are unsynchronized. Different regions in the US are unsynchronized. If you want to generate lots of power in one area and then ship that power to lots of different regions, you are going to have a big (and expensive) mess on your hands. Third, HVDC lines must be actively controlled. Current power lines are passive -- the properties of the power line regulate the flow of electricity. HVDC lines have to be regulated by a controller. This makes them more costly and dificult to manage. In short, what you are proposing would require a near complete and very expensive overhaul of the electricity grids in North America and Europe.

HVDC lines were developed in the 1930s. They haven't been implimented on a large scale in any western nation. The largest I could find is used to carry 10-20MW of electricity. What makes you think this can be scaled up to transmit the power for a whole country?

In addition to that, are you seriously proposing that Europe generate all of its power in Africa and transmit it to the countries that use it? I shouldn't have to explain the potentially huge consequences of relying on generation and transmission in regions that are not exactly politically stable. I don't think the British, for example, would be too keen on the idea that several well placed attacks or acts of sabatoge could cause their whole nation to go dark.

Solar technology is nothing new, so don't pretend like you are revealing a cure-all answer to us all. That plant in California has been running for over 20 years now. If it is so successful, then why haven't more been built? I'll tell you why. They aren't built because they are expensive and unreliable.

There is promise in solar and wind, but they are nowhere near ready to take on a signifficant role in providing electricity to the world. Unfortunately, we don't have time to sit on our hands. China is building a new coal plant every week. Coal and natural gas plants are being constructed all over the planet as we speak (type). Something has to be done now, and we can't wait for solar to live up to the promises it has been making for decades.

The bottom line is that we need proven technology. Nobody has ever proven that what you are proposing can be done. You are talking about technology which has never been used to make more than 10MW of electricity, scaling it up to 7,000 GW, and then transmitting it using a yet to be developed grid which uses line technology that has never been used to move more than 20MW at one time. Nuclear, on the other hand, is proven technology. There are existing 20-30 year old plants that already make more than 800 MW each. The new designs build on this and are more impressive. Westinghouse's AP1000, which produces over 1100 MW and is based on the proven AP600 design, is already licensed in the US. GE's new ESBWR is based on their proven 1350MW ABWR design which is operating in Japan. AREVA's 1600MW EPR is being built in Finland and is moving towards licensing in the US. This is proven next-generation technology that can get us off of fossil fuels for baseload electricity production.

You'll have to forgive my passion on this issue, but my wife is three months pregnant with our first child and I know that there is a greater chance that that child will have respiratory problems now than there has ever been in the past. And every time I see anti-nuclear protests or read anti-nuclear posts it causes my heart to sink because, even though they don't mean it, those people are aiding the coal industry that is poisoning our air.
 
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That is a very good and interesting site. I particularly like the "Irrationality in the debate" page where he describes the pointlessness in arguing for a zero-risk standard.

It reminds me of my Reactor Safety class in graduate school. We had a former commissioner of the NRC (who was a lecturer at my school) teach a few lectures in the class. He described how the NRC was tasked with determining both how to quantify risk and how much risk was to be considered acceptable. The NRC had a public comments meeting where anyone could come and give input or ask questions. Of course, there was a long line of people demanding that zero-risk was the only standard the NRC should use. The NRC, which is forced to respond to all claims, basically responded by saying that a zero-risk standard was absurd since there is no such thing as zero-risk in the real world (of course, they used much more scientific and diplomatic language).
 
pvt1863 said:
That is very poor logic. The technology, economics, and politics associated with waste storage have changed and continue to change. In such a transient situation, saying "we didn't do it in the past, so it obviously isn't a viable option now" is illogical.

Improvements in transportation mean there is less risk in moving waste to a repository, improvements in construction mean that repositories can be safer and more secure, the demand for a repository is increasing as plants have to use more and more resources to store spent fuel on site, and increased security concerns make it more favorable that waste be stored in a small number of large sites instead of at more than 100 small sites scattered across the country. All of these factors can explain why we didn’t use this strategy in the past but may use it now.

Also, keep in mind that few people are advocating literally burying waste from power plants. The repositories proposed are carved into mountains and would hold spent fuel in vaults. We are not talking about digging a hole, putting the waste in it, and then filling the hole in. Repositories offer more control of the waste, security from exterior threats, and protection for the surrounding environment. Also, it allows access if the waste ever becomes useful again (if we start reprocessing it). The only waste we might consider burying and sealing in would be very high level waste, and there isn’t much of that about.

Marting is right about health threats, too. In addition to dispersal, radioactive becomes a much weaker threat as it ages. There is a catch-22 when dealing with radioactive materials. Highly radioactive materials have short half-lives, but that means they deplete very quickly. Slightly radioactive materials have long half-lives, which means they are radioactive longer but release less energy over a given amount of time. Waste might still be radioactive in 10,000 years, but it won’t be anywhere near as dangerous as it is now. Isotopes with very long half-lives (the ones that will still be around in significant quantities in 10,000 years) are fairly safe. Uranium, whose isotopes have half-lives on the order of hundreds of thousands to billions of years, can be handled with bare hands. You wouldn’t want to eat it or inhale it (as is the case with any heavy metal), but you can hold it or keep it under your bed and it wouldn’t be a concern. If someone is walking above a buried radioactive waste site 10,000 years from now, it probably won’t cause any harm.

It is also important to remember that most calculations and estimates concerning radiation involve large amounts of conservatism. The nuclear industry is riddled with overly-conservative assumptions as the result of decades of “better safe than sorry” approaches. Indeed, the claim that there is no safe level of radiation is itself an overly-conservative assumption – and one that appears to be contradicted by scientific studies (in fact, studies have suggested that small amounts of radiation are beneficial; something that would not be surprising considering that we evolved on a radioactive planet). This conservatism is a good thing, but it tends to be forgotten when people make claims about the threat of radiation. If a calculation says that a site will be “dangerous” for 10,000 years, it wouldn’t surprise me if it posed no unique threat after 5,000 years or less.

Finally, to address some other questions in this thread, launching waste into space is not practical at this point. Launch vehicles are too risky and too expensive to be used.

The ocean is also risky because control of the waste would be too difficult. Waste cannot be put somewhere and forgotten, it has to be managed. The ocean makes this difficult. More importantly, the ocean is a harsh environment and protecting the ocean from the waste would be nearly impossible (salt water and currents are particularly problematic). Since the ocean is a vital part of the eco-system and food chain, this option is too dangerous to use. We might find those metals in our food someday, and that would be extremely bad.
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The logic is hardly poor!

If the solution was viable, then it would have been done decades ago. Or if there is some great new approach to dealing with nuclear waste, then it would be done now. But the fact is that now, as in the past, there is no viable way of dealing with nuclear waste.

Dealing with nuclear waste in terms of a national repository that is isolated in terms of population demographics and that is reasonably geologically stable with new, long-term storage technology, sounds all very well and good in abstract terms. But when it comes down to the practical implementation of the plan, then there is a real problem since there are not any state officials who wants his state to be the repository of the nuclear waste from the other 49 states.

In short, in order to viably store nuclear waste for the long term on national basis, then one must have both of these items:

One, the technology to safely store the waste for at least several decades. And this technology is available right now.

Two, a place to actually store the waste for at least the next several decades. And currently (as in the past), there is no such place available.
 
Crossbow said:
Two, a place to actually store the waste for at least the next several decades. And currently (as in the past), there is no such place available.
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Sure there is. The only reason it hasn't been done yet is because of all the chicken little fear mongers and NIMBY types fanned on by spineless politicians.

I see which side you have taken...
 
http://www.freedomforfission.org.uk/cyc/waste.html

For an idea of what this means, consider the American nuclear power output for 2005, which amounted to around 90 GW.yr. The volume of high level waste as spent fuel produced is therefore around 90m³. This means that almost a decades worth of high level waste from the entire American civil reactor fleet could fit into a single Boeing 777 freighter such as one based on the medium capacity aircraft shown in figure 1 (getting the aircraft airborne with that load is another matter however). So Air France's order for 5 Boeing 777Fs is sufficient to store the spent fuel produced by the US reactor fleet over its entire lifetime.

Of course HLW would not be crammed into aircraft in this fashion, since it requires shielding and space for heat dissipation (after first removal from the reactor, spent fuel is placed into cooling pools for a few years while the most radioactive fission products decay away). It is simply an illustration of scale. Future reactors, with higher burnups, will reduce this further.

Solid waste from coal burning, which includes the permanently toxic metals mercury, arsenic and selenium, is produced a thousand times faster. This cannot, by any standard, be characterised as fit for human consumption either. It is however, not subject to the same stringent controls and accounting as nuclear waste is. Because of its large quantity, to impose similarly proportionate controls would be prohibitive. In addition, fossil fuel burning also releases large gaseous emissions into the atmosphere including sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides as well as particulates.
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Later on:

With full actinide recycle the volume of raw waste is reduced thirty fold. However, a lot of glass is introduced into the mix and the vitrified block is placed in canisters such as the ones shown in figure 4, so the end effect is an increase in the volume of high level waste for disposal. A gigawatt-year of canisters of vitrified fission products from a Generation II LWR, will typically be around 2-3m³ in volume. So we may need up to fifteen 777F's every half-century. This is still a minute quantity of waste on the industrial scale for even one year- or a week in some sectors- let alone half a century.
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Aw hell, just read the page I linked.
 
WildCat said:
Sure there is. The only reason it hasn't been done yet is because of all the chicken little fear mongers and NIMBY types fanned on by spineless politicians.

I see which side you have taken...
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True enough!

To give you some personal perspective, I am 44 now and I remember seeing news reports when I was all of eight discussing how all of the nuclear waste in the nation would be stored in a facility located in Idaho. Which made everyone, except the people in Idaho, rather happy that the problem was now settled once and for all.

Now about 36 years later, a different site is being discussed (which, by the way, I have been very aware of for several years), that is also making everyone, expect the people in Nevada, quite happy.

Like many national issues, there are the technological problems and the political problems. And usually, the technological problems are far easier to deal with than the political problems, that is why I rail on when some people state that solving the national problem of nuclear waste disposal is an "easy" problem to deal with.
 
pvt1863 said:
Ideally (if health and environmental concerns were top priority), our baseload electricity would come from nuclear and hydro, and our peak power would come from natural gas. Coal would be removed from the picture entirely.
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In terms of climate change, I agree that hydro trumps coal. However, in the case of local ecosystem/habitat destruction, hydro is disastrous.

I worry about energy. :(
 
WildCat said:
[Greenpeace]
But but but but, what if some kid 10,000 years from now crawls into the cave and gets radiation poisoning! Why does nobody think of the children!!!!
[/Greenpeace]
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Greenpeace can ...

Hm.

I think I'll break at least one rule if I say something at this point. Let's just say that I have no respect for Greenpeace. At all.

Nuclear energy isn't as bad as people like to make it out to be. People make bigger deals about nuclear power and radiation than coal, oil, or any other energy product. A lot of this stigma is, IMO, unwarranted. Yes, there are concerns with nuclear energy and radiation, just as there are concerns with any large-scale industrial manufacturing that involve potential pollutants. However, old methods are not new methods (as was mentioned earlier), and new methods and techniques make any kind of process easier and more efficient. Nuclear energy is very efficient, and can provide for centuries of power; enough time to potentially give us a better energy option.

I also believe that Fusion is growing more available, which is even more energy efficient, though it's more expensive I believe. I'd have to look into that some. But either way, there's more options (and better options) than solar collectors and the like. But in the end, there will never be "one" solution; there will be some forms of energy used for some things, some for others. However, solar energy and the like are going to be a minor provider of energy in the long run. Right now, oil and the like are the major provider; nuclear energy and possibly fusion energy can become a major provider, and not just a subsidiary.

Of course, folks like Greenpeace will go out of their way to attack it. Usually by distorting the truth and telling outright lies at times. But the ends justify the means, I guess, even when the ends are the means...
 
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