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I'm sure I'll get down voted for contradicting this post, but here goes. First, a correction. Three Mile Island did indeed experience a core meltdown which the
by mimixco 8y ago
I'm sure I'll get down voted for contradicting this post, but here goes.
First, a correction. Three Mile Island did indeed experience a core meltdown which the power company suppressed. Don't ask my sources; just look it up yourself.
The biggest problem with nuclear is that all of its problems are unfixable. Cost is out of control, as the OP says. Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island can never be cleaned up. Never. And those are only the household name accidents. The history of nuclear power is littered (literally) with accidents, screw ups, and permanently contaminated sites -- one of which is where the latest PG&E wildfire started. Again, don't ask me how I know this. I spent years doing my homework. But even a cursory review of nuclear power's history will show that it's full of plants gone wrong. Poke around.
The most common unfixable problem of nuclear power is the waste. No one has ever figured out how to deal with plutonium's 200,000 year half life of fatal radiation output. It's a problem at a scale that humans simply cannot address. And don't lecture me about breeder reactors or what they do with waste in France. Do more research and you'll find that I'm correct. There is no working storage or recycling solution anywhere in the world and we're 60 years into the problem.
The OP says it's not so bad because "nobody died," but that's not true either. Again, a little more digging will show that nuclear mining, waste, leaks, and even normal operations affect cancer numbers everywhere they're found.
Who's afraid of nuclear power? The people who sell it. They're afraid the world has figured out their massively subsidized boondoggle and is backing away, which indeed many countries are doing.
A terrific resource if you want more than Facebook-level facts is Helen Caldicott's book, Nuclear Power is Not the Answer. That's a good place to start.
As Einstein said, "It's one hell of a way to boil water!"
- velobro 8y agoAlmost every one of your paragraphs had some form of "don't ask me, look it up". Doesn't make a very compelling argument.
- mimixco 8y agoAnd I did give a good starter reference for those who care. Most people want everything reduced to a tweet. You can't do that with this issue and I'm not going to try.
- mimixco 8y agoI'm writing a book about nuclear power bit this isn't it. I'm tired of HN folks whining "Where is that from?" A modicum of Google will bear out everything I've said.
- jobigoud 8y agoI'm sensible to these issues but I find most people have already strongly held opinions about the topic and very thick filter bubbles. How do you intend to approach your book so that it's read by anyone not already convinced?
- mimixco 8y agoYou're right. Also, there are industry trolls who do stuff like derail online conversations and downvote logical arguments. My book is a scathing exposé about the entire con job of nukes, from the promise of "power too cheap to meter" (that was a good one, huh?) to "radiation might be safe" and other nonsense. One reason I get so pissed off at these trolls is that I've accumulated over 250,000 pages of documents, some of them from my own Freedom of Information Act requests. It's taken an enormous amount of work to be sure that I had original souce materials for everything I write, and I don't mean a Wikipedia article. One unique facet of the book is that every single claim I make is backed up by full and original quotes with sources, many of them from the industry itself. Have you ever noticed that a post like mine will immediately be slammed with "show me sources!" but the original poster's outrageous claims like "nobody died" are met with blanket acceptance? How can the person who wrote that article say there was no meltdown at Three Mile Island? Jesus, even Wikipedia has that right. Yet no one questions them. This is trolling at it's finest.