A pretty decent article on the up sides of nuclear energy, with one serious caveat: humans are dumb. Given a chance, sooner or later, humans will screw up, trip over a box, run in to a wall, forget to turn on (or off) the stove, etc. To say that the nuclear accidents of the past decades have been a case of human error is probably true; to suggest that simply writing better procedures and rules and regulations will prevent human error is patently false. Ditto for pooh-poohing of nuclear proliferation concerns with some technologies.
That said, there are a lot of pros (and a few cons) of broader use of nuclear energy. Compared, say, to coal, it's much, much friendlier in both surface and atmospheric effects. It may very well be worth it. But that evaluation is going to be difficult to make in an environmental and political situation as we have today.
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Top 5 reasons why intelligent liberals don’t like nuclear energy | The Curious Wavefunction, Scientific American Blog Network
Many of my friends are science-loving liberals. Many of them are also environmentalists. But most of them are against nuclear energy, and this is where I …
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C'mon, what's the worst that can happen? Oh, right, that.
Since I became educated about nuclear energy (thanks to my nuclear physicist father-in-law), I'm in complete agreement with the author of the article, except that it isn't just limited to liberals.
I support nuclear power, but I also support better engineering controls. That's one of the reasons I'm a big advocate of LTFRs: if someone screws up, the station looses power, or whatever else, the very physics of the process shut it down safely and automatically.
My main concern is that the people and policies that made such a hash of it here, while many other countries pulled it off, will do the same again.
The French made it work. We made a few people wealthy.
The French discovered an amazing thing — if you build multiple of something and exercise a common design, you begin to (a) improve said design and (b) get constriction and operational efficiencies that one-off plants simply can’t do. Imagine that.