(02-28-2022, 06:04 PM)p_rushing Wrote:

(02-28-2022, 04:07 PM)mikesez Wrote: I'm thinking bigger than that.
We get 20% of our electricity from nuclear.  Very few countries do more than us.  But France gets 70% from 
nuclear! There is no reason we can't aspire to get to France's level in the coming decades.  Nuclear jobs are good jobs.  We could and should get so good at building nuclear that the Indias and Nigerias of the world are calling us, trying to get us to build and supply plants for them! Today they call South Korea.

Nobody wants them near them though. Having some brief experience, it is done as safe as possible. The main issue right now, at least in the US, the technology is very old. They are limited in what they can do after the plant is built. A lot is still paper based and communications are usually nonexistent in most of the onsite buildings.


I wouldn't want one near me but that really goes for any plant.

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I would rather live near a typical American nuclear plant than a typical American coal plant.  Coal plants spew far more cancer and asthma causing particles into the air and water than nuclear plants do.  
CNN.com has an alarmist essay right now about how there's no perfect disposal system for nuclear waste.  The essay says we need to turn away from nuclear because nuclear leaves behind waste that we will still be having to contain generations from now; all known existing technology corrodes and degrades before the nuclear waste is done radiating.  And that's true.  But carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere about as long.  
Currently nuclear waste is buried in steel and concrete bunkers near where it is produced.  Geiger counters are placed all around to detect any leak that starts, and workers will have to suit up and repair any leak that is detected.  Humans will have to have those Geiger counters and teams of repair workers for centuries, for millenia.  And that's still OK.  That's still better than having the dew point in the tropics become so high that humans literally can't breathe, which is a problem we'll be dealing with sooner than that if we don't change course.

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