There's plenty of irrational fears about nuclear power, but there are also valid significant doubts about it. And this isn't really that much about the technology, but especially about everything around it.
We haven't managed to decide on a place to store the nuclear waste, and all the plans decades in making have been thrown overboard entirely a few years ago. This is more of a political failure, but if we can't manage to fix this part in decades maybe we shouldn't produce even more nuclear waste we have no place to put.
How economical is it, if you include the costs of removing the irradiated plant in the end. It's kinda impossible to get unbiased numbers here as everyone has an agenda, but you can't just ignore that part of the costs and put it on the public.
The safety is a combination of the technology and the people and processes running the entire thing. I personally the technology is probably something we could figure out well enough, but I don't have that much trust in the softer parts here for a technology where you have a very small risk for a very large amount of damage.
Nuclear waste is a non-issue; I wish we could have one article about nuclear power without someone bringing it up since there is really nothing left to discuss about it.
The reason it's a non-issue is there is so little of it. All the nuclear waste ever produced could fit in one Amazon warehouse. In the worst case it could be stored onsite with 10 layers of protection and it still wouldn't be a significant expense.
Also, because the most reactive waste will decay the fastest, it quickly gets less dangerous with time.
I am going to call bullshit on the nuclear waste storage problem. Nuclear waste is incredibly dense, and we could simply dump low level solid nuclear waste in the ocean (gasp!) High radioactive waste is incredibly dense.
Yes, and if you read the article carefully, it's not really an issue. Sure they say "A single becquerel that gets into our body is enough to damage a cell that will eventually become a cancer cell," but that's like saying the only acceptable risk is zero, so at odds with reality. The fixation on nuclear waste is amazing, considering we get more radioactivity in the atmosphere from coal and loads of people die because of coal every day. People seem awfully chill about that.
We haven't managed to decide on a place to store the nuclear waste, and all the plans decades in making have been thrown overboard entirely a few years ago. This is more of a political failure, but if we can't manage to fix this part in decades maybe we shouldn't produce even more nuclear waste we have no place to put.
How economical is it, if you include the costs of removing the irradiated plant in the end. It's kinda impossible to get unbiased numbers here as everyone has an agenda, but you can't just ignore that part of the costs and put it on the public.
The safety is a combination of the technology and the people and processes running the entire thing. I personally the technology is probably something we could figure out well enough, but I don't have that much trust in the softer parts here for a technology where you have a very small risk for a very large amount of damage.