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France To Shut Down All Coal-Fired Power Plants By 2023 (independent.co.uk)
French president Francois Hollande announced at an annual UN climate change conference on Wednesday that France will shut down all its coal-fired power plants by 2023. He also "vowed to beat by two years the UK's commitment to stop using fossil fuels to generate power by 2025," reports The Independent: Mr Hollande, a keynote speaker at the event in Marrakech, Morocco, also praised his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama for his work on climate change, and then appeared to snub president-elect Donald Trump. "The role played by Barack Obama was crucial in achieving the Paris agreement," Mr Hollande said, before adding, in what has been perceived as a dig at Mr Trump, that becoming a signatory to the treaty is "irreversible." "We need carbon neutrality by 2050," the French President continued, promising that coal will no longer form part of France's energy mix in six to seven years' time. France is already a world leader in low-carbon energy. The country has invested heavily in nuclear power over the past few decades and now derives more than 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear fission. It produces so much nuclear energy, in fact, that it exports much of it to nearby nations, making around $2.66 billion each year.
"theoretical ways to deal with the waste products" = "no actual ways to deal with the waste products"
As opposed to coal and other fossil fuels, where we have a very effective way of dealing with the waste products: just let them go up the smokestack!
P.S. You do know that coal mining releases more radiation into the air, and kills more people, than nuclear power - right?
Actually, most of that "waste" can be reused as fuel. Modern light water nuclear plants only use about 3% of the energy in uranium. That's why the waste is "hot" for so long - it's like burning 3% of a gallon of gas and declaring the rest of it waste which has to be buried. A breeder reactor can use the "waste" as fuel, and in the process convert it into a form which can be sent back to light water reactors for use as fuel. Done properly, about 90%-95% of the energy from the uranium can be extracted, and the remaining waste is only "hot" for a few hundred years.
France uses breeder reactors, so they don't have anywhere near the nuclear waste problem that we do. (Jimmy Carter banned the commercial use of breeder reactors in the U.S. because they can be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium.)
Also, nuclear in the U.S. produces about 800 TWh of electricity per year. The amount of spent fuel that's created to produce that much energy is about a single tractor trailer's worth (the entire volume of nuclear waste produced since we began using nuclear power would about fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool). Contrast that with coal. A ton of coal produces about 2000 kWh of electricity. So to produce 800 TWh would require about 400 million tons of coal, or about 300 million cubic meters - enough to fill a thousand oil tankers. It also produces 1.14 billion tons of CO2.
So compare that single tractor trailer of nuclear waste (which still contains 97% of the energy in the uranium because we don't reprocess) to a thousand oil tankers full of coal. Still think nuclear is such a bad idea?
Explain to me how nationalism valuing America first is anti American
Because it is counterproductive and leaves the country in a worse place than being a responsible member of the international community does. Also, it is too easily leveraged into white nationalism.
For them to put the interests of foreign nations or even the international community above the interests of the US seems treasonous on its face.
We have many conflicting interests as a nation, many of which are the same interests as the international community (like defeating ISIS.) In order to make progress on some of our national interests, it is necessary to compromise on others.
In other words, you can wish really hard that America exists in a vacuum, but wishing does not make it so.
Someone had to do it.
Easy solution: Give regulatory control of the nuclear power industry to the navy. No joke. The US Navy has been operating nuclear reactors... hundreds of them... for nearly as long as there's been such a thing. And they have a perfect operational safety record. That is: zero nuclear accidents in the 62 years since the USS Nautilus was launched in 1954. (They *have* lost two nuclear submarines at sea. But neither the Thresher nor Scorpion were lost due to reactor accidents.)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja...
They do it by standardizing on a small number of reactor designs (Generally one per ship/sub class. Though the S5W persisted from the Skipjack class until it was replaced by the S6G with the Los Angeles.), training the sweet holy hell out of their people (There are stories of standing desks at power school, so trainees don't fall asleep while sitting and studying... and of the occasional *thump* when someone standing falls asleep anyway.), and holding them strictly accountable to operations and safety standards throughout their careers.
Imagine all the people...
You're making the wrong comparison, on three different levels. First, wildlife as a population can be fine even if some individuals suffer. The safety precautions (regarding eating mushrooms etc.) protect individuals. We know that many individuals fare badly around Chernobyl. Second, humans are much more long-lived that your wildlife, so there's more room for deleterious long-term effects in humans. Third, the reason why wildlife around Chernobyl thrives is much less because of the induced increase in mortality due to contamination being small and much more because of the decrease in mortality due to removal of humans being large.
Ezekiel 23:20