> No one in this thread has suggested that coal is safer.
But many are more eager to abandon nuclear than coal. I will be fair, however, in saying that at least some of them hope to abandon both.
And I will also say that if they can make wind & solar (or whatever else) work, I'm all for it. I believe that nuclear is a good engineering choice, but you can change that opinion by providing better technology.
The problem is that I am not one of them, but if I say anything critical of nuclear power, or the fukushima disaster, I'm immediately put in that bucket and the fangs come out. The rabid pro nuclear people sound completely unhinged. I think we should use more nuclear power, over coal, but I'm there enemy because I dared to say that something bad might happen at fukushima. I become one of "them" even though I'm not.
I apologize if my original replay came off a bit snarky.
I agree with you that it's really a shades of grey issue. I certainly don't think nuclear is the end all be all of solving our long term energy problems, but it's also not the boogeyman so many people try to make it out to be.
As far as pollution goes, my opinion is that modern nuclear is the best thing we have right now to bridge the gap to true clean energy (fusion, thermal, whatever). To connect this with your original comment, burning coal is like smoking cigarettes. 1 certainly will not kill you, but the aggregate effects of many plants (China was building 1/week at some point!) over many years is the real problem.
The biggest advantage of nuclear that I see is that it mostly concentrates and contains the waste. If we fully reprocess (something the US can't do now b/c of laws) there will still be some nasty stuff to deal with. Even then, I would much rather have it that way instead of just spewing the nasty all into the environment the way many coal plants do now.
Energy-producing fusion will require a neutron flux. That leads to nuclear activation and is significantly less clean than one might wish, but I certainly hope that the engineers find some way of making it work.
But many are more eager to abandon nuclear than coal. I will be fair, however, in saying that at least some of them hope to abandon both.
And I will also say that if they can make wind & solar (or whatever else) work, I'm all for it. I believe that nuclear is a good engineering choice, but you can change that opinion by providing better technology.