A hidden danger of coal is ironically the radioactivity of its waste, which gets put into concrete products and contribute to indoor air quality issues.
replyThe paranoia around nuclear power is tied to generational fear mongering of governments during the Cold War. The oddest part is why not use safer reactor designs; water reactors make sense for the US Navy and not on land.
Then again, if we hadn't had the Cold War and the associated nuclear arms race, we wouldn't have had civil nuclear power either, so...
replyAccording to the author of The Curve of Binding Energy [0], civil reactors were being subsidized by the purchase of plutonium (from the spent fuel rods) by the Department of Energy [1] to the tune of $1,000,000 per kg of Pu. The end of this program was coincidentally at about the same time as the Three Mile Island incident which leads many people to think that reaction to TMI was the reason that US reactor construction stopped.
replyWhen the Senate ratified some non-proliferation treaties, that also ended reprocessing spent fuel in the US which gets blamed on Carter.
Notes:
0 - https://www.amazon.com/Curve-Binding-Energy-Alarming-Theodor...
1 - The DOE owns all of the US nuclear weapons and leases them to the DOD.
None of you ever manages to answer the waste storage question. That was, and still is, one of the deciding factors in Germany, for example.
replyBecause its an irrelevant problem. The amount of waste nuclear produces is miniscule.
replyIt’s only irrelevant to you as long as it doesn’t leak into your ground water supply after a few decades down the line, when we discover the containment didn’t resist corrosion as well as we thought. The danger of nuclear waste does not correspond to the amount at all.
reply> The amount of waste nuclear produces is miniscule.
replyAnd yet people worry about it and the OP claims it led to the situation in Germany.
Maybe addressing the issue needs to occur, rather than dismissing it?
> The paranoia around nuclear power is tied to generational fear mongering of governments during the Cold War
replyAnd Chernobyl. And Fukushima. Nuclear is great but it has some very real risks
Don't forget Windscale and Three Mile Island
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