A real energy future....

[UnderseaLcpl]

I see the primary argument agains nukes is expense. So be it.

Nuclear reactors are actually quite cost-effective to build, even under most extremely cautious and sometimes silly Federal regs. The main cost of building and operating the plants comes from insurance costs. These insurance costs are based on irrational fear of nuclear catastrophes. How many dissenters have ever been inside a nuclear plant? The thing practically runs itself. You would have to be deliberately trying to cause a radiation leak to actually make one. Only a very unlikely series of unfortunate circumstances could cause one.

Nuclear disasters are also over-rated. Many people cite Three-mile island without actually knowing anything about it. Some think it was close to a "meltdown" without knowing what that term means. Others think the reactor leaked "dangerous radiation"

Firstly, a meltdown is nigh-impossible. I have said it before, and I will continue to say it until I stop hearing that stupid term; there is no meltdown. That term comes from that retarded movie "The China Syndrome" wherein a nuclear reactor "goes critical" (has an uncontrollable reaction) that causes the reaction mass to become so hot it melts the containment unit and threatens to melt through the Earth's surface until it reaches the water supply. The nature of the term is engendered by the ludicrous belief that such a reaction could melt a hole to all the way to China.
The very nature of this argument should discourage any belief in it but amazingly it does not.
Secondly, no American has ever had their cause of death established as "exposure to Nuclear power plant radiation". You are much more likely to die from cancer caused by natural radiation than that produced (assuming it was somehow released" from nuclear power plants.
Producing an "uncontrolled" reaction in a nuclear plant would have to be deliberate. Even the Russians haven't managed it and we know all about their history with nukes. Before anyone says something about it "The 2005 report prepared by the Chernobyl Forum, led by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and World Health Organization (WHO), attributed 56 direct deaths (47 accident workers, and nine children with thyroid cancer), and estimated that there may be 4,000 extra cancer cases among the approximately 600,000 most highly exposed and 5,000 among the 6 million living nearby.[4] Although the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and certain limited areas will remain off limits, the majority of affected areas are now considered safe for settlement and economic activity"
This is from wikipedia but the deaths hardly constitute a threat on the level most anti-nuclear activists subscribe to.
The General consensus is that the "explosion was caused by atmospheric overpressure which was in turn caused by a fire that had nothing to do with the fissionable materials contained therin.
If the explosion was nuclear in origin, all the better. What a ptitiful amount of damage for something people fear so much.
Blame it on my being American, but I also consider the fact that the Soviet Union ran the damn thing to be a major factor. That's almost as bad as referring to an episode of "Captain Planet" for one's arguments.
The death toll from this one, isolated incident, in the hands of an irresponsible, and I must say, socialist government, caused fewer deaths than coal-mining accidents throughout America's history as a nation.

The failure of the nuclear industry to establish itself, until recently, as a primary power source in the U.S. is due to nothing more than irrational fear and the costs associated with it.


Skybird also posits that France and Sweden have had recent nuclear accidents. Maybe they did, but the lack of international outrage and the fact that U.S. media has somehow not covered these failures extensively leads me to believe that they were minor and probably killed no-one. Without doing any research whatsoever I can confidently say that news concerning gas prices somehow eclipsed these incidents and that is most likely because they are trivial and if they did kill some people it was not because of exposure to radiation, they pose no threat to the public of the aforementioned nations and, well what more is there to say?