Minor nuclear power plant incident in Slovenia

BBC

Nuclear energy scares the bejeebus outta me. I know it's claimed to be very safe lalalalalala...but if it goes bad, it goes really bad. I give nuclear energy a 9/10 in the "fuck this shit right up the ass" scale.

Nuclear energy is safe, and this non-event proves it better than anything. If something does go wrong, things get dealt with.

Nuclear energy is the only solution we have that can supply the demands of humanity for energy without threat of destroying/irreversibly polluting the planet and that is based on a sound and proven method. I think anybody that holds an extremist view on a subject like energy as you do, should spell out his alternatives before shutting off our light bulbs, or otherwise just stop using anything electrical.

The problem with Nuclear energy is: All plants are considered nuclear plants.

So when one fails, all nuclear energy is looked at as dangerous. It's almost like saying: "drive a car? do you know how dangerous motorcycles are?!" There are indeed, some designs which are fail safe.

Safe like Chernobyl, or safe like 3 Mile Is.? How is all of the waste taken care of in a safe and non destructive manner? What sort of fallout does one get from solar energy and windfarms?
My views are hardly extreme, many nations are anti nuke

Timmeh, you illustrate my point exactly. The design I linked to in inherently safe. Living next to a windfarm would probably be more dangerous.

Anti-nuke people might also want to take note: Coal plants release more radioactive material during their lifetime than Nuke Plants.

Coal is shite, highly pollutant. Ok, so you've provided a "fail safe" nuke reactor. What about the waste? Is that also disposed of in a non destructive manner?

For waste, I'm a big fan of breeder reactors, or just burying it. There are a lot of naturally occurring nuclear waste sites

In all honesty, yes solar, wind, and tidal are great and should be incorporated into an overall energy policy. But they can not supply a nation's energy needs. Nuclear is a great 50-100 year solution before we achieve fusion

Fusion.

Reagan shut down both the Breeder Reactor Project and the Fusion Reactor Project at the Oak Ridge National Lab in the early '80s. Very bad move!

While solar, geo, wave, and wind are wonderful, they simply cannot produce as much energy as we (humans) currently consume. Nuclear is the lesser of the many evils. Coal, oil, and gas being the top three evils.

So you can debate how bad nuclear is, but you cannot claim its worse than coal, oil, gas.

And you can't claim that "good" energy sources will alllow us to phase out those bad 3.

And you can only dream that we'll consume little enough energy to allow the above to be possible.

Edit Yes fusion will be wonderful when it works. But it might never work. At least high oil prices are making it attractive to throw massive quantities of money at trying to make it work.

I don't honestly think burying nuke waste is a particularly great long term solution. I'd take hydro over coal, oil or gas.

Two problems. Only Norway had the landscape to produce enough energy for its needs from hydro. And hydro is very environmentally destructive, not in pollutants, but in modifying the eco system.

However I'll take heart from the fact that you're not proposing gas as clean. CO2 in large quantities is our biggest pollution problem, which gas produces same as oil or coal.

Not necessarily. Micro-hydro isn't destructive on the environment and small generators can power whole townships. Some people have their own generators in their backyards to power their home, completely non destructive. Obviously that's not viable for all, but I think that there is much more to come from hydro than is what is being currently exploited.

With billions being poured into renewable energy sources, smart investments into developing more robust technologies for nuclear waste disposal are a good value for money spent. Solar, wind or hydo is for sure clean, but on a value for money basis I'd argue that nuclear is cleaner.

As I said, what are your alternatives? I consider this opinion extreme even if many countries are against it. Remember that the horizon of a western politician is at most 4 years (some say the memory horizon of a western citizen is 4 days), so they basically don't care what happens after that. If they go for nuclear people like you would scream and screech murder, and so they opt out for gas, coal and oil. It's extreme because it's disregarding tomorrow and avoiding important decisions while screwing tomorrow slowly to death.

Tell me which would you consider better. As mentioned by others, solar, wind and hydro can't scale large enough.