Yeah, it seems to be surprising to you that there are people who did not drink the nuclear Kool-Aid. Why is that? Has your 2-party system, the influence of corporations and your declining media made you unable of critical thinking?
I can't speak for the previous poster, but I started 'sipping the nuclear kool-aid' once I took a nuclear physics class.
Of course, the class was taught over cable TV by fox news anchors funded by both GE, the DNC and the RNC. That's pretty much how the US got to be a superpower and stuff.
> I can't speak for the previous poster, but I started 'sipping the nuclear kool-aid' once I took a nuclear physics class.
Same here. And I think I know why: understanding the risks puts you in control, to some degree. People are highly averse to risks they cannot control.
I mean, the news is a joke. They talk about "radiation" but appear to have no idea how it's even measured. The news anchors don't seem to know what a Sievert is, nor why knowing that kind of stuff is important.
Superficial understanding of subject is worse than no understanding at all. People who blew up Chernobyl knew what Sievert is, and in fact possessed nuclear engineering degrees.
Cancelled nuclear plants probably have more to do with public relations then actual danger.
As an example, 4,000 people died in 2007 collecting coal for power plants, oil pipelines have a habit of https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_pipel... exploding, and tankers run aground, hydroelectric dams routinely kill off migrating fish and do damage to ecosystems. Solar cells require large amounts of toxic chemicals in their production and neither solar nor wind turbines can provide baseload energy reserves simply because the sun doesn't shine at night and the wind rarely blows the amount you need it to.
At the end of the day, we only really have three options for baseload energy: You have fossil fuels, hydroelectric or nuclear power. From what I can see, we are starting to run out of viable hydroelectric plants, fossil fuels are apparently causing widespread short term and long term damage to the environment, and nuclear power has gotten a lot better over the past few decades.
It is my opinion therefore that the view that nuclear power is horribly unsafe comes from the same sort of thinking that leads to the belief that planes are unsafe vs. cars, ie. that a small number of accidents make it to the news, simply because they are uncommon as opposed to lack of news coverage on the more dangerous subject simply because people dying of it is not news.
Case in point: How many news stories do you hear about "X died from terrorism" as opposed to "X died from a heart attack?". The latter is more likely to kill you, the former is the one people are more afraid of.
Meanwhile, hundreds of coal-fired plants were built in their stead, and those are currently spewing radioactive waste into the air in normal operation.
Coal-fired plants were not mentioned by me as an alternative or as desirable.
Please stop that.
I see that you are confused when somebody has not the view of the nuclear industry. You are brainwashed by the corporations. Even thinking that there are alternatives that are not coal seems to be not possible.
It does not matter what you happen to think are good alternatives or are desirable, because those of us who live in the real world have to deal with "what is", not "what could/should be." For base electric load in the US you really have three options: nuclear, coal, gas. One produces a lot of radioactive toxic waste over the course of normal operations, one produces lots of CO2, and the other is nuclear.
