That's right! Unless one of those plants was in New Orleans or Houston and suffered a Fukishima type meltdown due to flooding. Or somewhere in the midwest where one suffered a Fukishima type disaster from a tornado. Or if one of the thousands of trucks and rail cars that would be required to ship nuclear waste to centralized storage locations crashed or derailed and irradiated a massive area.
The fact is that nuclear energy carries real and tangible risks along with its benefits. Unfortunately many of the most ardent supporters of nuclear power downplay (or deny completely) the tangible and serious risks which only serves to increase skepticism among an already skeptical public.
> Unless one of those plants was in New Orleans or Houston and suffered a Fukishima type meltdown
If the nuclear industry were a person, when it built Fukushima it wouldn't have been old enough to drive a car. Today, it would be retired. It learned a thing or two in the intervening years. If Fukushima had been built a mere 2 years later it wouldn't have had its fatal flaw. There are some horrible reactor designs still out there posing a danger to everybody -- but refusing to build new reactors because extremely old reactors were (and still are!) dangerous is... tragic.
> if one of the thousands of trucks and rail cars that would be required to ship nuclear waste to centralized storage locations crashed or derailed
> Unfortunately many of the most ardent supporters of nuclear power downplay (or deny completely) the tangible and serious risks
The people who don't take the risks seriously are the people who refuse to perform numerical comparisons and instead make snap judgements on the basis of meltdowns being scary.
Other energy sources have risks too. The Banqiao dam makes Chernobyl look tame, but hydroelectric has a squeaky clean rep. Even solar and wind do worse per kWh, because their density is so low that they require (comparatively) tons of install work and upkeep, so the severe slip & fall accidents add up.
So yeah, we do care about the tangible and serious risks. We should pay more attention to them. I don't think that calculus points in the direction you think it does.
>There are some horrible reactor designs still out there posing a danger to everybody -- but refusing to build new reactors because extremely old reactors were (and still are!) dangerous is... tragic
Pretending that the only potential danger posed by nuclear power and its toxic byproducts come from older plants is exactly the attitude my post addressed. No system is perfect, even under "ideal" circumstances. Natural disasters, negligence, greed, incompetence and human error are only a few of the everpresent factors that lead to inevitable system breakdowns - no matter what sort of system it is. Its disheartening but not at all surprising that those who worship blindly at the altar of technology exhibit many of the same delusional tendencies that those who worship at other religious altars do.
>Other energy sources have risks too.
Every endeavor comes with potential risks and rewards - which should be dispassionately scrutinized and quantified. The fact is that nuclear power is uniformly touted as a risk free panacea by the overwhelming majority of its advocates and any discussion of the very real risks is ridiculed or dismissed.
Did you even bother to google where these plants are located? One of my colleagues' wives is an operator at Waterford. It shut down during the 2011 floods in good time.
The fact is that nuclear energy carries real and tangible risks along with its benefits. Unfortunately many of the most ardent supporters of nuclear power downplay (or deny completely) the tangible and serious risks which only serves to increase skepticism among an already skeptical public.