A majority of Americans (57%) say they favor more nuclear power plants to generate electricity in the country, up from 43% who said this in 2020.
Personally, I think this is a good development because we need sources of clean energy, and nuclear power generates a lot of it!
There is always the problem of nuclear waste, but we have ways to safely contain and dispose of it. Until we find a way to generate energy via fusion, nuclear power is the cleanest way to generate energy in the quantities we need it.
Nuclear waste is an issue we’ve had solved for decades, the public perception of it however is not at all accurate. And that’s not helped ny a lot of popular media incorrectly depicting it like leaking glowing barrels.
Most nuclear waste (~95%) is low-level waste that becomes entirely safe within a couple years. The high-level waste people are scared is stored in containers that are insanely robust and have neer has an issue in storage or transfer, even cross-country. Long-term storage is only an issue because NIMBYs won’t allow proper research and development, so the majority of long-term storage instead of being put into a more permanent location is jsut stored on site at the plant out in the open. Never once being an issue, but I bet those same NIMBYs have no idea that’s happening because it’s not an issue in reality, they’re complaining because they don’t understand it and are scare of it because of how terrible the media portrays nuclear and the media’s complete inability to provide accurate information, instead going for sensationalism because that beings in the advertising revenue. 95% of nuclear “waste” is low-level waste. The remaining 5% of all nuclear waste ever produced on the planet would fit within the area of a football field. It is melted into what is effectiverly nuclear glass encased inside stable concrete and lead containers, no liquids in old oil barrels that can “leak”. But the media loves to talk about it like there’s all this highly radioactive waste that we have no chance of ever containing properly that can leak everywhere.
Modern reactor designs are much more focused on fail-safe containment and additional safety than the existing plant designs and can operate using less material. Some designs don’t even use highly radioactive elements like uranium at all, instead using other materials that are much more abundant on the planet, like thorium which utilize fail-safe designs where power is not needed to maintain cooled temperatures like in a uranium-based reactor after the reactor shuts down, instead needing power to maintain a higher temperature to operate. So scenarios like flooding causing a generator to die and loss of power to the cooling infrastructure like happened at Fukushima aren’t a thing that can happen since a loss of power means the system would effectively contain itself as power is needed to actively prevent that from happening.
The actual nuclear danger now is from things like nuclear medical devices being abandoned, creating an “orphan” nuclear device, like in Goiânia, Brazil in 1987. Kyle Hill has a good 22 minute video explaining this incident on Youtube for those that don’t want to read about it. Every day an estimated 20 devices are orphaned in the world. But no one talks about those because they don’t have “scary” cooling towers. A small orphan device combined with a conventional explosive would create a dirty bomb without needing any knowledge of nuclear weaponry or how a nuclear weapon works. Most people wouldn’t think anything of a report of a terrorist cell stealing a medical device though.
Oh, wow! This is a good comment! I completely agree with it.
Right now, I believe nuclear is the best way forward. I’ve always believed the worst part of nuclear power is the name – it sounds too scary for some people, and hollywood doesn’t help.
I have had arguments before where nuclear waste was the crux if the issue, and no matter how much I tried to explain how little waste there actually was, the opponents stressed that any waste was unacceptable. It was very frustrating that they would prefer even coal power to nuclear!
Then, if you can manage to persuade them the waste is not an issue, then disasters such as Fukushima and Chernobyl come up. Even explaining that both of those are outliers and modern plants are far safer is not enough. They make it sound as if every nuclear plant is a disaster waiting to happen.
Selling these people on nuclear is difficult. They imagine each one as if it’s a nuclear bomb waiting to blow up (or something) and don’t care to understand how the plants actually generate electricity.
I’m not worried about waste so much as logistics. It takes a LOT of money and many years to spin up a nuclear power plant. How many windmills, solar panels, heat pumps etc could be leveraged for the same time and cost? Not saying it’s either/or just that it will take a spectrum of tech.
This is fair. But with proper planning I think it can be overcome. We can use wind and solar in the short term, but why not plan with nuclear in the long term?
We already have guidelines for 200 year buildings - many skyscrapers, for example, fall into this category. With proper maintenance, they could last much longer (the Roman Pantheon, though much smaller and less complex than a skyscraper, is an example of this.) Why not try this with a nuclear power plant? (Note: I don’t actually expect a power plant to last thousands of years, I am only pointing out we can build to last if we put our mind to it.)
I think our society has shifted far too much towards the short term, and we need to start investing in infrastructure projects that might only benefit subsequent generations.
Exactly. Thread it in and make long term plans all while focusing on infrastructure.
Wind, solar and other renewable sources need to be the long term future. Nuclear can only serve as a in-between, as they are not absolutely safe as history has proven and from a cost perspective it makes zero sense to build new ones today. Even for the running plants I don’t think a single country actually did successfully establish a safe final disposal side, so as of now, it’s still theoretical that we can create and maintain them. And one we can, I am not sure why people are hyped to have nuclear waste below their feet, especially when there are already a lot of concerning cases where leaks in temporary storage was actually not disclosed by governments and shrugged away as “probably still safe”. Sure, the idea is thatbfinal storage sites can’t leak but… temporary ones also were not supposed to simply leak.
Why would we risk another Chernobyl or Fukushima when wind and solar is safe?I really don’t get why people are suddenly so hyped about nuclear power when we have alternatives, especially since a lot of them you can install on your own property to safe money and be a bit more independent.
Good. Nuclear power is awesome
No. 😡
