Quote:
Originally Posted by Torplexed
The irony is that the environmental crowd out here is always lobbying like mad to have some of these dams torn down to restore salmon runs and make the rivers "wild" again. I love salmon as much as the next guy, but I have a feeling that keeping about 90 million people in electricity is probably more important right now.
|
I guess fish ladders just don't do enough, but I can't argue with the power to the people logic, either - I was lucky enough to avoid the consequences of the East Coast Blackout of 2003 by virtue of being a few miles outside the directly-affected areas, but I remember the edge of panic in the media that went with it.
I think it's safe to say that there's a ton of variables that have played a role in the dispersal of nuclear plants in the States.
Would I be happier with "cleaner" power? Truth be told, there really is no cleaner power out there, once you remove the spent fuel from the equation. We're basically talking steam-generated power, which is tremendously efficient; it's just our means of generating the steam that have been the problem all along, whether it was coal, oil, or nuclear.
I think that whoever finds something to do with spent nuclear fuel that doesn't involve shoving it under a mountain with a "Do Not Open Until 20,000 CE" on the door will be a very rich person.
I'd rather see one mountain turned into a nuclear waste repository than see all the mountains reduced to gravel while they try and pry the coal out of them, or see the oceans with an oily sheen over them.
And like MattJ said, it's not like the Fukushima reactors didn't just go through a metric shed-load of grief before having the problems they're having; certainly more trouble than any reactors anywhere else in the world have had to go through. And while we're hearing about Fukushima, we're NOT hearing about all the other Japanese reactors that are still online and working fine.