Slashdot Mirror
Europe Warms to Nuclear Power
FleaPlus writes "The CS Monitor reports that for the first time in 15 years a European nation has started building a nuclear reactor, with six more likely to be built in the next decade. France is also planning to develop a safer and more efficient "fourth generation" reactor by 2020. This is in light of rising fossil fuel prices and a desire to reduce CO2 emissions. Still, a majority of EU citizens are opposed to nuclear energy, primarily for environmental reasons, even though nuclear power releases less radioactive material than burning coal."
The effect of the meltdown is Chernobyl was a few dead employees and firefigthers. Just like any other factory/powerplant accident. There has been no increase in birth defects in the region, or other of the left wing FUD effects.
Compared to accident at any other plant, the only extra effect of chernobyl is, that an areas was evacuated, and can not be used for some years to come.
Waste storage is solved. Make holes deep into the ground, and dump it where it came from. In Denmark we have salt deposits that are very suited to this. Yet we have no nuclear power (apart from research reactors currently in the shutdown phase). We buy nuclear power from Sweden/Germany though. And Sweeden has been friendly enough to place a nuclear powerplant less than 5 miles from our capital, Copenhagen.
People are hysteric when it comes to nuclear power.
Personally I think reactors in britain could be invitation for terrorists! It's like building them a bomb in the right place that they need only come along and detonate... surely?
Well, if Friends of the Earth had anything to do with energy policy, we'd all be living in mud huts, wearing hemp smocks and gathering nuts and berries from the woods. Forget medicine too. It'd be shamens and healing crystals all the way.
Unfortunately, political pressure groups such as these have had far too much influence over the last 20 years.
The nuclear industry (the R&D part) in the UK is all but dead now as a result, and the generating stations don't have long left.
Stick Men
Nuclear power has only been used in a very limited way for say fifty years and we already have a massive disposal problem. If the solution is to replace fossil fuels with nuclear power we're talking 100X the waste in the next fifty years. Dealing with the waste is insanely expensive so there's a great myth about how cheap it is. Ask our great grandkids how cheap it is? It's simple is why people and companies like it. Put up a handful of plants and you get a lot of power, and a lot of waste by products not just the fuel cores. Decomissioning a plant largely involves walling them up and forgetting about them. Have we all forgotten "National Sacrific Zones"? Probably the single stupidest idea to ever come out of the government. This plot of land gave it's life for it's country. There are many places that won't be safe to enter in our children's lifetimes. The worst mess oil or coal ever caused people can walk on. Now we want this times 100? Just how much land needs to be declared uninhabitable before we percieve this as the madness that it is? Oh gee one day it'll be safe. Not entirely true. Ever hear of the baby teeth studies? Nuclear material doesn't cycle out of the environment. Plutonium even dead cold is still toxic. Our recent battlefields have been contaminated because some genius decided depleated uranium would make neato shells. It leachs into the ground water and causes health problems. Ask the people in Bosnia. There's less rainfall in Iraq but the ground water will eventually be contaminated there as well. Just because it's high tech doesn't mean it's a good idea. In fifty years there's never been a way found to safely store or dispose of nuclear waste. Even chemical weapons can be incenerated and reduced to carbon but not nuclear waste. There is a simple solution to storage. Everyone that is pronuclear power gets to store a drum in their back yard. Just remember it's perfectly safe and you'll be just find. And on the brightside if the cat goes missing you can track them with a gieger counter. Ain't technology grand!
Complete bullshit, and yet again we see this tired old lie trotted out again and flogged until it stumbles around the ring once more... this is true ONLY if you only count "releases" as "stuff that comes out the top of the chimneys on site". Apart from the tons of highly radioactive waste (the spent fuel rods, cladding, reactor containment material etc) there's also the issue of how you decommission a nuclear station. I happen to live and work within fifteen miles of the site of the first ever nuclear power generation reactors to be decommissioned, so I take some interest in this topic. They started work in 1988/89, IIRC, and I believe work is scheduled to finish, ooh, any decade now. In fact final site clearance (leaving a 100 foot wide concrete cube containing the reactor core, which will be lethally radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years and cannot safely be disposed of elsewhere) is scheduled for completion in the year 2089. No, I'm not making this up, that's how long it's going to take. Costs? No idea, who knows? It's a blank cheque - we HAVE to clean it up, regardless of the cost; if it comes down to it, nuclear clean up must be funded ahead of the health service, education, armed forces, transport,.. *everything*, in fact. Strangely, the govt and the privatised nuclear energy company refuse to divulge cost estimates, but the BBC mentions a figure of 2.5 billion quid.
Folks: it's not worth it.
the official plans (which of course are highly optimistic and filled with disclaimers along the lines of "if nothing goes wrong" - ie., we don't have any major disruptions of civil society, loss or power or shortages of energy, skills, resources, raw materials -