Slashdot Mirror
US Nuclear Power Industry Poised For a Comeback
ThousandStars sends us to The Wall Street Journal for a report that momentum for nuclear energy is waxing in the US. "For the first time in decades, popular opinion is on the industry's side. A majority of Americans thinks nuclear power, which emits virtually no carbon dioxide, is a safe and effective way to battle climate change, according to recent polls. At the same time, legislators are showing renewed interest in nuclear as they hunt for ways to slash greenhouse-gas emissions. The industry is seizing this chance to move out of the shadow of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and show that it has solved the three big problems that have long dogged it: cost, safety and waste."
Look a little further.
If not for people like Carter (who put into place the first US prohibition on nuclear fuel recycling, which would be the RESPONSIBLE thing to do with our so-called "nuclear waste"), Obama, and the left-wing environmental wack-jobs who made it impossible to set up a new nuclear plant anywhere, we'd have a lot less reliance on oil/coal today. Probably not total (there are things, like cars, that work best off oil fuel, to say nothing of the plastics industry) but we'd have a heck of a lot less coal or oil electric generation at the very least.
And why did Carter put that in? On the idea that it would serve as an "example" to other nations who would then not refine nuclear fuel for things like weapons. Let's see - how did that work for North Korea? Iran? Pakistan? India? I see that it did almost nothing.
The question of Solar is whether you can get it ubiquitous. Up until recently, putting it on roofs on homes was cost-prohibitive for most people (the "running cost" of maintaining them and keeping them clean, the initial roof modifications to handle the added weight, proper mooring for the old rotator-types in case there were a major windstorm, and the initial production costs of the solar panels themselves). Most other "renewable" sources are at best, unreliable; windfarms continually take damage if the wind's not "just right" (not to mention the occasional mechanical malfunction) and generate "peak power" only at very specific conditions. Solar farms work only so well without direct, unimpeded light; a few days of overcast skies can have you shipping in power from other areas.
And of course there's the initial battery costs and the running cost of maintaining batteries to provide power during "non-producing" times, plus the toxic chemicals associated with those batteries.
Going after foreign oil isn't going to do a whole lot. On the other hand, get us enough nuclear plants and we can wean off almost everything else while we work out the battery/fuel-cell tech necessary for an alternative to oil.