Power to save the world - Page 2

RWebb · RWebb's Garage

What do you do with the nuclear waste?

Just give it to the terrorists??

red-beard · red-beard's Garage

In 1981, I wrote a term paper about Nuclear Power Plant Safety. The extreme lefty teacher gave me an A, because I, an 11th grader, convinced her, even with Three Mile Island in recent memory, that nuclear power was safe.

Every point brought out in post 1, I put forward in my paper with direct references. And the idea that it takes more energy to build and dismantle a nuke plant is absurd. Show us your data.

Mule · 12-19-2007, 05:21 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dan in Pasadena

EVERYONE says, NIMBY - Not In My Backard - to this problem.

Ted Kennedy says NIMBY to windmills!

Chocaholic · 12-19-2007, 07:56 AM

No expert here but....I used to travel to Belgium quite often. Perhaps some locals will comment. All their juice comes from nukes. There is so much left-over capacity, that every highway in the country is lit like a pinball machine all night long free of charge, just to maintain capacity (I know I'm not explaining it well). They say it's one of the few man-made things that is visible from space.

Hard-Deck · 12-19-2007, 08:05 AM

Who lives in San Diego, Seattle, Jacksonville and other Naval Surface Base Locations? All but one of our aircraft carriers are nuclear powered...no problems so far. If you live in San Diego, sometimes you have 2-3 nuclear powerplants parked right downtown.

IROC · IROC's Garage

I worked in a nuclear plant for years. While I will say that nothing is 100% safe as long as human error is a factor, today's nuclear plants have many layers of safety designed to even mitigate the human error part. I'm pretty familiar with how a nuclear plant and it's safety systems work (at least a BWR) and I'd be hard pressed to come up with a realistic accident scenario that actually threatened the populace.

I read something once (a long time ago, so forgive me if the numbers aren't exactly right), but if one compares a nuclear plant and a coal-fired plant of the same output capacity (1000 MW, I believe it was), it would take approximately 1 ton of uranium fuel to operate the nuclear plant for one year. It would take 89 one-hundred ton coal cars PER DAY to operate the coal plant for the same period of time. Kinda puts it in perspective.