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Originally Posted by RWebb
People in Nevada aren't too pleased....
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No one ever is pleased when something goes in their back yard, but they need to take one for the team, IMHO.
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Nuclear certainly has some tremendous benefits. But it has some potentially catastrophic risks also. The liklihood of many of those events is very very small, but....
Other 'events' include transport accidnets and terrorism/crime gang theft of nuclear material.
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Commercial nuclear power's safety record has been so good for so long that even it's opponents are finding it hard to argue an "accident" as a credible risk. Transport accidents are a relative non-issue. The casks are more than adequate to pevent release in an accident. And terrorists can't steal nuclear waste - well, OK, I guess they can, but then what will they do with it? Without a substantial processing facility, they'll just die when they open the cask.
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The other thing to be considered is centralization of the power grid. Brown-outs and failures in the last decade have convinced many that wee need a more nodal type grid that would be similar to the Internet. Solar panels fit the bill nicely for this. Nuke plants do not.
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The only problem is that solar panels currently suck in the power generation department. We have here at my facility the largest and most efficient solar array in the state of Tennessee. It's almost 300 feet long and it produces 50 kW.