Americans Favor Moratorium On New Nuclear Reactors

An anonymous reader writes "While a drop in public support for nuclear power would be expected after an incident like the Fukushima reactor crisis, the nuclear disaster in Japan has triggered a much stronger response among Americans. When Japan — the nation that President Obama held up as an example of safe nuclear power being used on a large-scale basis — is unable to effectively control its considerable downside, Americans are understandably leery about the same technology being used even more extensively in this nation. And safety concerns about the existing nuclear plants also deserve serious attention."

Comments

Re:So uh

[DarkOx]

I am big fan of COAL, because we have lots of it! The carbon emissions may or may not be an issue. The science on both sides to this point is so bad its not really worth considering. That said the cautionary principle applies and because we don't know what will happen if we radically alter the carbon cycle we should treed carefully and where is not to economically disruptive try and limit emissions.

Biofuels though are not net carbon emitters. In almost all cases growing them pulls as much carbon out of the atmosphere as burning them puts back. So in the emissions sense they may be a very good alternative. The larger issue when them is efficiency. So far its been a challenge to get more energy out than the input energy to produce the fuel substance, excluding the solar that biofuel really seeks to capture by growing algae/switch grass/soybeans/corn or whatever the biofuel crop du jour might be.