General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: All nuclear plants should be shut down, IMHO. [View all]jeff47
(26,549 posts)If there's a big problem at a nuclear plant, it causes a hell of a lot of damage around the plant. That's why they can't get insurance. The damage is spectacular. But it's also confined to a few square miles.
If fossil fuel plants faced the liability for their damage, they too would not be able to get insurance. But "pump crap into the atmosphere" is a legally acceptable way to dispose of their waste.
The reason I have a different opinion is I believe threat of climate change is far, far more dangerous because it is harming the entire planet. You can't "pull a Chernobyl" and move people away from the affected area.
That doesn't make nuclear plants safe, nor does it mean they can't cause problems. It means one of them blowing up causes smaller problems. There isn't a "good" solution at the moment, there are "less bad" solutions.
And as long as you turn neither plant on, that would make nukes worse. But when you start burning tons of coal or natural gas, you quickly blow past the difference.
Were you aware that thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel is being stored in unsafe conditions all across this nation? Why? Because the nuclear industry hasnt figured out what to do with their spent fuel.
Actually, this shows a misunderstanding on your part.
The US Government promised to create a long-term storage facility for nuclear waste, and to accept the waste from the nuclear plants. The problem is it is politically difficult to create such a facility. We get clusterfucks like Yucca Mountain because that's where it became legally feasible to create the facility.
So it's not up to the power companies to deal with that waste. We agreed to take that on before the plants were built. So you can't really blame the power companies for not having a plan for their spent fuel.
As for your quote, yes Germany has solar plants. I'm not disputing that. But they also have cranked up the fossil fuel plants to deal with the lost output from the nuclear plants.
Again, what we need to do is first crank up our solar/wind/renewable capacity, and then retire our nuclear plants. Retiring our nuclear plants before then will just result in burning more natural gas and coal.