Nuclear Power? Good or Bad?

Decided to post this after the crisis in Japan last year. Personally, I think the criticism is a little overblown. I mean, Chernobyl happened in the Soviet Union. If you look at how The USSR did their Plants, and how the rest of the world does theirs now, then you know that Chernobyl cannot easily be repeated. And the incident in Japan, it took a combined earthquake and tsunami to even get close to some kind of a disaster. That's not going to happen in most places. But that's just my opinion.

I think nuclear power is a good alternative fuel source t use, but only until we can make the other natural energy sources such as solar and wind energy more practical and efficient.

Nuclear power is the best possible power source we have right now till we get nuclear fusion because then we have a near infinite energy source.

Nuclear power can provide power to millions but can also render my testicles to be useless, therefore, it must be respected.

I am a supporter of nuclear power.

In very limited cases yes, it's not for everywhere though. Just because you can build a nuclear plant instead of a coal plant with less atmospheric pollution does not mean you should. I feel that if we can come up with a viable way to store our nuclear waste safely for at least thousands of years or until the majority of it has decayed, then we can finally use nuclear power responsibly. It sounds like a HUGE engineering task because it is, but if you've got highly radioactive materials with half-lives of millions of years sitting in containers that need constant upkeep then you best hope the people in charge of maintaining these containers are capable of doing so under almost any circumstances. I mean, if not then we are banking on not having a societal collapse for thousands of years or at least until we have the means to successfully defuse radioactive waste.

That is why I think that we can not use Nuclear power as our primary source of energy. I think it's a good alternative, but I don't think it can and should replace coal. Unless of course, as you said, we can find a viable way to store the nuclear waste. Welcome to the Forums, by the way. I see that you are new.

Nuclear power has untapped potential.

Thanks, and yes that is essentially what I was getting at. I think nuclear energy is definitely an option, it's rough around the edges though and until through experimentation we become more adapt at using it it should only serve a very limited role. In my first post I was also kind of one sided, everything I mentioned only applies to fission plants, if we ever get fusion to really work then we should dump most of our alternative energy efforts into that as it does not create any waste, instantly shuts down and can provide immense power. The true power of the sun.

Coal and pollution are more dangerous. We have safe ways of storing it we keep them in places that if they did leak it would do nothing. I want a energy entirely composed of mostly nuclear and green energy sources. It's safe there is nothing wrong with it. Ontario gets 75% of it's power from nuclear energy and it's perfectly safe and nothing has gone wrong.

France gets 76% of their energy from nuclear power plants, sells the burnt fuel rods back to the British at a high price, and then buys them back from the British at a low price.

Sure they are statistically, and you can use the whole air travel vs car travel argument but it's not entirely the same. Coal is immediately dangerous, nuclear power has the potential to be comparably far more dangerous. We have yet to experience a full blown nuclear meltdown out in the open, both Chernobyl and Fukushima's meltdowns were at least contained within a reasonable amount of time.

Sure, safe for the foreseeable future. So long as they are maintained everything is fine, but nuclear waste can have half lives of millions of years, are you sure that we'll be able to maintain them for that long? As for the waste not causing harm that's just incorrect. Most nuclear waste is still highly radioactive and even if it was not spent uranium itself is highly toxic posing many ecological hazards.

Canada is a stable country with the resources to run nuclear plants. At one point the soviet union was also a fairly stable country with the resources to run it's own nuclear plants. A disaster happens and because they are a stable country with the reasonably to maintain their plants they contain the damaged reactor and begin to clean up. Now, however with the soviet union broken up the Chernobyl facility is in the hands of the Ukrainian govt. This is a country that inherited this reactor, does not have the resources to maintain it and as a result is struggling to build the more modern sarcophagus required to keep the reactor safely sheltered. This is because the Soviet Union, a nation that at one time looked internally stable fell apart. To have safe nuclear plants we need to be sure that we will be able to take care of them beyond the foreseeable future. I don't believe we are capable of this. Also, if you'd like I could provide evidence to support my claims, I just don't have the time right now.

Nuclear power is a good source of energy, for the present, but must be closely monitored because of the inherent danger surrounding them.

Yes, some waste is recyclable, but not all of it is. I seriously doubt that France is able to get rid of all it's waste that way. Some waste is unusable, some of it is too radioactive to be useful, some is just untranslatable, my guess is that as far as efficiency the system France has worked out is better than the rest but the waste is still there and a real long term problem.

Just dump it on the African countries

Or Antarctica

WHAT!!! THE PENGUINS LIVE THERE!

I would prefer China.

I like Nuclear Power. It is monitored by the EPA. It has no emissions and the "smoke" is actually steam. They cannot emit CO2 and other gases directly. Nuclear Power plants are very durable and rarely break down.

Are you telling me you don't want penguins with laser eyes capable of flight?