Posted on 07/07/2016 11:28:10 AM PDT by bananaman22
Let’s for a second imagine a world without nuclear energy. That’s a tough one but let’s try. No nuclear bombs, of course, no Chernobyl and Fukushima, no worries about Iran and North Korea. A wonderful world, maybe?
Probably not, because without nuclear energy we would have burned millions more tons of coal and billions more barrels of oil. This would have brought about climate change of such proportions that what we have today would have seemed negligible.
Nuclear energy and uranium, which feeds it, are controversial enough even without any actual accident happening. Radioactivity is dangerous. Nobody is arguing against it. When an accident does take place, the public backlash is understandably huge. What many opponents of uranium forget to mention, however, are the benefits of nuclear energy and the fact that the statistical probability of serious accidents is pretty low. They focus on the “What if?” and neglect the other side of the coin. But let’s try to see both sides of the issue.
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And yet they closed the account for my Hardened Containment Vent System, of which I am the Lead Responsible Engineer, despite NRC EA-13-109 requiring that Quad Unit 1 be compliant by March of next year.
It’s no joke or power play. I will not be working there in two years.
Take the time to educate yourself on the next generation thorium salt reactors. They are not breeder reactors with their associated issues. No waste and they run at high temps. This is proven tech.
This is the future, not wind and solar.
Way back in 1977, before Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, Dr Petr Beckmann, a professor of Electrical Engineering at Univ. of Colorado, authored a very sharp book with the title of “The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear!” In it, he detailed the contemporary health effects of all energy generation methods, from source to completion, and showed that the fission nuclear power had the lowest health risks of them all.
He was no pollyanna, as he acknowledged that all methods had a material impact on health at every point in the cycle of power generation. He was equally firm that the LACK of power / electricity was a health hazard that overwhelms all of the hazards of even the worst generation method(s).
If I could find this long out-of-print book again, it would be interesting to see how it stands after 39 years of progress versus regulation versus environmentalism.
The real problem is that nukes cannot be handled by EEOC hires. No room for error.
The process of incorporating HLW into borosilicate glasses is known as vitrification. Stack up the glass blocks in a remote area and keep the idiots away.
Where and when can we expect a thorium reactor to be built? Will it be after we have anti-gravity hover boards or before then?
Molten Salt Reactors and Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactors (LFTR). They were developed in the 50s. One was built at Oak Ridge Nat Labs in the 60s. Our government chose not to use them because we wanted nuclear material from breeder reactorsfor the weapons programs.
They will be built in China because they recognize the need for energy on demand.
You really should educate yourself on this if you have more than a passing interest aside from protesting the perils of all things nuclear.
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