The greenies and lunatic Left will never accept nuclear power at the level needed. The Hollywood fed overreaction to three mile island may have doomed humanity to their climate change horror. Gotta love the irony?
“The greenies and lunatic Left will never accept nuclear power at the level needed.”
As long as that’s the case, we know the climate is not an “emergency” and we can ignore them.
Now, we just need to remove the current bunch of criminals running the country, and reverse the current disastrous policies...
Regardless, the world needs a LOT more energy going forward. The only sane way to achieve that is putting a large amount of nuclear power into the mix. Various next-gen reactor designs are walk-away safe, and nuclear waste is a solvable problem.
Perhaps within a few decades we’ll have even better options.
Three Mile Island failed so catastrophically that its safety systems worked as designed, and only because of human error was any radiation released at all, and that radiation was not harmful to anyone (the total radiation release was trivial compared to background).
Fukushima, which should never have been built where it was, failed in exactly the way the AEC had warned it might, and failed so catastrophically that—even though safety systems were eventually overwhelmed — no one was killed.
The reactors at Chernobyl should never have been built at all, lacking the secondary containment needed to accommodate the sort of failure that occurred and the control systems needed to prevent human error from triggering it. It failed so catastrophically that almost 60 people were killed, and eventually, as many as 6 or 7 thousand may die of all cancers and illnesses related to the event—a tiny fraction of the number killed every single year in the US by auto accidents, radon released from coal-fired power plants, or pollution from coal-fired power plants.
Even after accounting for these three large failures—failures that should never have happened and can be prevented by switching to later, safer reactor designs — nuclear energy is still a thousand times safer per kilowatt hour produced than coal, and safer even than wind power. (And unlike coal and gas-fired power plants, nuclear is carbon-free.)
We have the technology to make nuclear reactors that fail safe. We’ve used them without incident in US navel vessels for decades. We now have much better technology, and can make fail-safe reactors that either shut down or idle no matter the human error or insult—and the next generation of reactors won’t even need enriched fuel and will be able to consume the spent fuel from past reactors.