MaliA wrote:
Captain Caveman wrote:
Shit, I'd take burning babies over nuclear.
Out of inerest, why?
Where to start...?
The aptly-named Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl spring to mind, not to mention a whole bunch of near-misses many of which we'll never know about. We talk about leaving legacies for our grandchildren; how about humans living on this planet in 1,000, 5,000, 50,000, or even 200,000 years from now?
As an engineer, I abhor the practice of embarking on a project with absolutely
no decommissioning strategy whatsoever - that's nuclear power. The irresponsibility of those scientists and engineers who built these things is to me utterly breathtaking.
Fission by-products and irradiated reactor parts/coolant etc. are the most toxic materials on the planet. One-millionth of one gram of plutonium, if inhaled or ingested, will kill you. Other by-products like strontium-90, iodine isotopes etc. are readily incorporated into the body with catastrophic results. Some half-lives range in the hundreds of thousands of years; we have no available technologies to safely and securely these materials for even a tiny fraction of this timescale, and there are already tonnes and tonnes of it, with much more to follow it would appear. To make matters even worse, it's hardly as though they are inert; heat and explosive gases are generated as they decay - for thousands of years. The risks posed by these materials of irreparable genetic damage to the human, and other genomes, e.g. through irradiation and/or actual contamination of germ cells, cannot be over-stated.
In terms of the reactors themselves, these cannot be engineered to be fail-safe in the event of freak planetary conditions like earthquakes, or conflicts, or human error, or human sabotage. All it takes is one meltdown.
To cap it all off, as if that wasn't enough, it isn't even cheap or green: nuclear power is fucking expensive, even if everything goes to plan, and even if you conveniently ignore the huge, albeit unquantifiable, decommissioning costs. There are huge environmental impact considerations; who would want to leave next door to, or anywhere near a nuclear reactor installation?
Not really sure what else there is to say TBH, and that's just the short version. I have been anti-nuclear (power and most certainly weapons) since the age of 16; at that time it seemed so fucking obvious to me. At 45, my views have not changed so much as one iota.
_________________
Beware of gavia articulata oculos...
Dr Lave wrote:
Of course, he's normally wrong but
interestingly wrong