I feel that "anti-nuclear hysteria" is poor wording. New plants (even if they're much safer than existing ones) still produce waste. Long term storage is an unsolved problem. There is nothing hysteric about that. Oh and remember Fukushima? That plant is still not cleaned up and the cost go into the billions. Still hysteric to say no to new plants?
My stance is: don't build new nuclear infrastructure if it's not sure how to cope with its waste. Better: don't build new nuclear infrastructure at all.
The waste 'problem' is minor compared to current generation which burns fuels and just releases it into the atmosphere. Long term waste storage sites are possible.
No current efficient power generation is either waste or accident free, although natural gas is probably the best if you have access to it. Coal mining kills many more people than nuclear ever has, and leaves holes all over the place. On a per-megawatt basis, nuclear is the safest generation type.
However, these are factual arguments which normal people can discuss and argue, which is fine.
What I am talking about is non-factual hysteria, of which many groups have produced volumes of, to the point where the average uninformed person will react badly to the mere mention of nuclear power. Popular culture is full of references to nuclear accidents or bombs leaving areas uninhabitable for 10,000 years or more, and most people are irrationally frightened of radiation in tiny quantities.
Nuclear power is an excellent power source for reliable, emissions free base load power. Instead of trying to shut down any research or funding, those that are concerned should be pressing for phasing out of old plants and replacement with newer, safer designs. And coming up with the best waste storage plans.
Yet this non factual hysteria has essentially zero bearing on important power infrastructure.
But every time nuclear technology falls short in some way, its proponents come rushing online to blame the shortcomings on some anti nuclear cabal that has somehow infiltrated both society and media.
Personally I think the worst problems of nuclear power are those proponents. Without the constant straw men of this or that technology is much more bad perhaps there could be some constructive public debate, but we haven't seen that in my lifetime.
Nuclear (fission) power is very expensive 60s technology. Centralized big plants with lots of high pressure steam and exotic compounds. Billions have been spent on research for over 40 years, and the technology that is promising today is pretty much the same same as in the 80s. Breeder technology for example has time and time again been shown to be expensive and prone to failure.
The whole energy sector is full of these complicated problems. Fusion power seems just as far away as 30 years ago. Solar and wind has obvious scaling problems. Only hydro power and geothermal power is reliable and cheap enough but doesn't work everywhere.
Coal plants, which would likely replace the nuke plants that don't get built, will output way more radiation then the waste you don't want to worry about.
Though the worst case scenario for a nuclear plant is considerably worse. I think comparisons to coal are unfair. Coal is terrible. Everything looks good compared to it.
I oppose coal plants as well. It's not only the waste I care, it's also that I care quite a lot that we, human mankind haven't been able to come up with a better solution yet to nuclear power. I also care, that our next generations have to deal with the waste. Have you seen the issues with the experimental storage waste sites in Germany?
Perhaps we should build better software that helps to reduce power in electrical devices?
A decade back I remember every office in a building I worked in (in the UK), leaving their machines on pretty much 24hrs. The building manager suggested the idea of cutting electric between certain hours, and people protested.
Phone chargers, desktops, monitors were all on. Probably for 16 hours of each day when no one was there. Even when people were there the machines were barely busy.
Computers could have been suspended to ram or turned off. I still see this even in offices with modern PCs that can boot quickly and suspsend to ram with ease (used to be touch and go).
Could spare CPU cycles be farmed out?
I'm glad to see better power saving settings in newer CPUS, and operating systems. But this needs to be better. Some mobiles can hold a charge for a week even with voice calls. Other smartphones are getting charged daily, some with negligable use. Charging batteries takes more power than you get back out.
Lots of small energy efficiencies could really help. Stuff like giving screen savers the boot, having sensible power defaults in OSs etc.
Really, that stuff is small potatoes. Look outside at night time and see how much power goes into lighting. Then heating/cooling, large scale manufacture.
It was fashionable a few years back to turn off your devices 'at the wall' so stop so-called 'vampire use' - which was TVs and other equipment on stand by. It sounded plausible - but in reality is just noise in the overall consumption picture, and is just window dressing to make people feel like they are doing something.
I'll agree that idling PCs and monitors should go into sleep mode like laptops do, but that stuff is not going to make the slightest dent in consumption anyway. Compare the power consumption of an electronic device with something like an iron or a stove or a clothes dryer and you'll see why. And that's before you start looking at heavy industry and large-scale building temperature control.
Large wattage items aren't on for that long in my experience. We could get our electric use right down and probably run it on solar during the summer months, save for the fridge/freezer, fan in the bathroom, the kettle and hair dryer.
Even with our paltry electric use we are still getting high bills (UK)! Expense is the biggest incentive for us to get our electric use down.
If server farms have become a bigger polluter than the aviation industry, I see that as a challenge. Use the hardware as efficiently as possible. Caching layers could hugely reduce CPU use. Perhaps we could measure an app's power consumption aswell as bandwidth use?
How about this then: take all the immense acreage of land we'd need to use for wind/solar, put a nuclear power plant and storage facility in the middle of it, and then turn all the earmarked land into a no-trespassing national park.
We'll produce just as much energy, we'll be efficient about it, and we'll have a ton of wildlife and preserved habitat.
Because to actually power the country with renewable resources will require a TON of space.
In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy.
Page 168 mentions the fact that coal ash contains uranium, and that people living near coal power stations are exposed to more radiation than those living near nuclear power stations.
My stance is: don't build new nuclear infrastructure if it's not sure how to cope with its waste. Better: don't build new nuclear infrastructure at all.