Yes, but unfortunately logic and reason don't factor into the decision making around nuclear energy policy. People love to point scream and shout about the dan

Yes, but unfortunately logic and reason don't factor into the decision making around nuclear energy policy. People love to point scream and shout about the dangers of nuclear energy. In conversation I've noticed that people think of nuclear energy as interchangeable with nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are incredibly difficult to build compared to a nuclear fission reactor. The experimental data you need to build one either requires numerous tests or stealing it from a government. Nuclear reactors on the other hand, can be very simple. The simplest reactors are just lumps of radioactive material carefully bonded to thermoelectric devices! The biggest risk from a conventional nuclear reactor is a steam explosion and the dispersal of radioactive material. I reckon the second biggest risk is having tons (quite literally) of spent fuel laying around the country for no good reason. The storage ponds aren't 100%, accidents will happen. For most of the ponds if the cooling systems went offline the water would boil away and then the fuel would self-heat till it started to oxidize. At that point you've basically got hundreds of miniature fallout generators going. You better hope the structure above the pond is airtight because no one is going to be entering it again in this century. The same group of people that scream and shout about nuclear energy being unsafe seem to actively ignore the dangers of conventional energy generation. For example, steam explosions are still a risk to the employees operating the plant. But I guess their lives don't matter? The pollution from coal isn't exactly helping the environment. Then there is this matter of what to do with all of the coal dust after it is burnt. You know, the same coal ash that over 1 billion gallons recently flooded an area of Tennessee. This contaminated a river, people's land, and destroyed their homes. Even if we ceased 100% of nuclear energy generation today, we still need Yucca Mountain to deal with the spent fuel we already have. It seems that some groups in the US believe that if they scream loudly enough, the problems of the world will simply go away. Also there is this issue of the fact that the energy consumers and the taxpayers already paid for the fucking thing but aren't getting any of the benefits. At this point it is basically just a boondoggle.