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First of all, you already have coal power dominating. Coal and oil energy together have provided a greater rise in standard of living for more people than any o

First of all, you already have coal power dominating. Coal and oil energy together have provided a greater rise in standard of living for more people than any other discovery in human history. You would definitely not want to go back to life before coal power. Secondly, nuclear power at scale is simply not possible. There isn't enough uranium in the world to provide all the baseload power currently generated by coal. Nuclear plants take decades to build and are uneconomic to maintain. It is unlikely that the US will build even one more plant since there is only one under construction now and it's facing cancellation. All other proposed plants in the US that were approved or under construction have been cancelled. Even with the small amount of nuclear we have, the environment still suffers from the incredibly toxic acts of mining and processing uranium into fuel pellets. The waste created by nuclear power plants has a 270,000 year half-life. A single particle of plutonium, if ingested, is enough to cause cancer. There is no safe level of radiation exposure and it's simply irresponsible to keep generating this kind of waste when most of it is literally sitting around in swimming pools (on nuke plant sites) because it has to be kept cool and we haven't figured out anything better to do with it.

tropo 8y ago
This is alarmist and mostly wrong. There is enough uranium for two reasons. First, we can recover 95% of the uranium in a fuel rod via reprocessing. Second, supplies change according to market demand, as happened with oil. Remember, we were to have run out of oil by now, but that sure didn't happen. Nuclear plants do not need to take decades or be uneconomic. This is self-inflicted due to political opposition, largely by an insane regulatory agency (won't discuss preliminary designs, gives only a yes/no on final plans) and the very same lawsuits that make every big project a mess in the USA. Having a long half-life means that the substance is not a problem. The longer the half-life, the less radioactive something is. An extreme example is tungsten, an element for which we recently observed radioactive decay and thus finally proved that it is in fact radioactive. A single particle of plutonium, if injested, will almost certainly do you no harm. You face a far greater radioactive risk from the common banana, which is laced with radioactive phosphorus. We have figured out what to do. First we reprocess the spent fuel rods, recovering about 95% of the fuel for making new fuel rods. (Japan does this) Next we bury the remainder in Nevada, for example in the already-contaminated underground test sites.

tropo 8y ago

This is alarmist and mostly wrong. There is enough uranium for two reasons. First, we can recover 95% of the uranium in a fuel rod via reprocessing. Second, supplies change according to market demand, as happened with oil. Remember, we were to have run out of oil by now, but that sure didn't happen. Nuclear plants do not need to take decades or be uneconomic. This is self-inflicted due to political opposition, largely by an insane regulatory agency (won't discuss preliminary designs, gives only a yes/no on final plans) and the very same lawsuits that make every big project a mess in the USA. Having a long half-life means that the substance is not a problem. The longer the half-life, the less radioactive something is. An extreme example is tungsten, an element for which we recently observed radioactive decay and thus finally proved that it is in fact radioactive. A single particle of plutonium, if injested, will almost certainly do you no harm. You face a far greater radioactive risk from the common banana, which is laced with radioactive phosphorus. We have figured out what to do. First we reprocess the spent fuel rods, recovering about 95% of the fuel for making new fuel rods. (Japan does this) Next we bury the remainder in Nevada, for example in the already-contaminated underground test sites.