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Nuclear power has come under flak and support for quite a while, and I thought I'd ask KYM's opinion of it. So, KYM, do you support or oppose nuclear power, in one or all of its forms?

NUKLEAR POWAH IS DA BEST POWAH IN DA UNIVERSE!! I SHALL IGNITE HELL WITH IT AND CONSUME THE WORLD!!!

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In all seriousness though, I think the standards for Nuclear Power Plants needs to be raised, otherwise major things go wrong.

It's cleaner than oil and coal, that's for sure. My home actually gets power from Turkey Point nuclear power plant in Miami.

The idea of the Earth being polluted beyond hope amuses me to no end.

Which further demonstrates your diabolical personality.

Wat.

YOU'RE THE TYRANT OF YOUR OWN PSYCHOLOGICAL KINGDOM.

I think most of the flak for nuclear energy is pretty dumbfounded. What happened in Chernobyl happened because of experimentation outside of safety procedures and what happened in Japan happened because they chose to build their reactors on top of fault lines. Nuclear power plants have very strict safety standards and are supposed to have a large number of fail-safes in place.

That being said, one legitimate concern against nuclear energy is the waste it produces. The nuclear waste produced has a half life of over 2,000 years. If you couldn't tell, that is quite a while.

The nuclear waste produced has a half life of over 2,000 years

That's only in certain types of nuclear reactors. Thorium reactors, if I recall correctly, have a much smaller waste half-life (About 50-70 years, I think).

Am not. Violence =/= Psychosis

I have one problem with the way we use nuclear power; not enough is spent on the plants.
What plants we have were all built in the 1960s. There are sporadic updates, but there isn't enough funding in the development of further technologies.
In the coming decades, Nuclear power could not only become more efficient by a possible factor of 4 (according to estimates) but our safety procedures could be refined further.

In the early 60s, it was predicted that there would be a major nuclear disaster every 25 years later. 25 years later, there was Chernobyl. 25 years after that, Fukushima happened. So yeah.

Also, the half-life of spent nuclear fuel is over 10,000 years. Storing it for that type of duration is inconceivable. Sure, there are programs to reuse it, but they are not 100% efficient, and there are still vast volumes of waste being generated that must be stored somewhere.

And what's more, there are the vast amounts of resources needed to extract uranium from the Earth, and only a limited supply of uranium to begin with, so it's not sustainable in any sense of the word.

In addition, the cost of building and maintaining nuclear power plants is astronomical. And again, there's the danger of disasters. Fukushima had all those fail-safes. They worked during the earthquake, and the reactors were shut off safely, but then the tsunami came. Chernobyl was due partly to mechanical failure and human error. So my point is this: no matter how many fail-safes and safeguards we have, there will always be some unforeseen event that will bypass them all.

So I'm against nuclear power for these reasons.

Also, the half-life of spent nuclear fuel is over 10,000 years.

Again, depends on the nuclear waste. According to Wikipedia:

"According to some toxicity studies,[13] the thorium cycle can fully recycle actinide wastes and only emit fission product wastes, and after a few hundred years, the waste from a thorium reactor can be less toxic than the uranium ore that would have been used to produce low enriched uranium fuel for a light water reactor of the same power."

Meaning that Thorium reactors seem to produce less waste, and the waste that it does produce is less toxic than conventional nuclear methods.

And what’s more, there are the vast amounts of resources needed to extract uranium from the Earth, and only a limited supply of uranium to begin with, so it’s not sustainable in any sense of the word.

According to estimates, Thorium can supply the planet's energy demands for thousands of years, as it is very abundant. Remember that Uranium is not the only source of nuclear energy in the world.

In addition, the cost of building and maintaining nuclear power plants is astronomical. And again, there’s the danger of disasters. Fukushima had all those fail-safes. They worked during the earthquake, and the reactors were shut off safely, but then the tsunami came. Chernobyl was due partly to mechanical failure and human error. So my point is this: no matter how many fail-safes and safeguards we have, there will always be some unforeseen event that will bypass them all.

Multiple new designs for nuclear power-plants have additional fail-safes, and some are unable to meltdown (For example: National Geographic did a short article on a nuclear reactor that uses graphite spheres which contain nuclear pellets the size of poppy seeds. These spheres are then rolled through a chamber which heats up substantially, but causes no nuclear fission. The heat is then transferred into water which creates steam, and subsequently rolls a turbine.)

Nuclear power has always seemed fine to me, although I tend to believe I ignore those risks aforementioned in your paragraph both accidentally and deliberately.

By that, I mean that, sure Chernobyl and that, but I tend to either forget about that or deliberately ignore it to focus on the good side of nuclear power. I think it's an idea, but we always seem to have trouble with almost every good fuel source we have, in fact, pretty much ALL our productive fuel sources, that's the problem; In whole, we are doomed.

Unless we get pretty lucky.

We should just get all of the poor, weak, and stupid to turn huge hand-cranks.

1. Nuclear power is incredibly dangerous. Like Opspe said, "accidents" are bound to happen every 25 years.

2. There is nothing we can do with nuclear waste

If we are to continue living on this planet, we're gonna need to stop using nuclear power completely. We (humans) cannot contain it. It will always hurt us.

Solar sucks, wind sucks, so we're gonna continue burning fossil fuel for as long as we can. That won't hurt the planet.

Better to have no clean oxygen than have everything irradiated. Who knows, maybe we'll find a way to clean the oxygen.

StopNuclearPower
Greenpeace Nuclear

Stop nuclear power, stop hurting current and future generations.

People are just running nuclear for profit anyway. And to slowly kill us

DAMMIT RUSSIAN YOU'VE CALLED THE HORDE.

A) Improperly used, yes, nuclear power is incredibly dangerous. However, the 25 years statistic was essentially pulled out of an alarmist's asshole.
B) Nuclear waste is simply uranium that is 1% used. If nuclear technology were allowed to develop further, more of that 99% of fuel could be consumed, leaving less waste.
C) Solar and Wind do not "suck". They're simply expensive to implement, and don't pay off for years.
D) I hate to break it to you, but nobody is running energy production out of the goodness of their hearts. In fact, nearly everything in modern society is run for profit. And the charitable actions are funded by those who do things for profit successfully. And as far as I know, there is absolutely nobody intending to slowly kill humanity through radiation poisoning.

In addition, I challenge you to find an example of a technology that was implemented with fewer then 3 catastrophic errors in design. You probably can't. Nuclear power has been the most carefully implemented technology in history.

All im sayin is, this world would be better off without nuclear power.

Its contamination when a nuclear reactor is damaged is insane.
We're loosing good, usable land due to pollution from nuclear.

We've already lost 2,600 km2 (1000 sq mi) due to Chernobyl. Lets not build 'time bombs' known as 'nuclear reactors'. What about the animals and the people getting hurt from the pollution. Look at all the mutated shit in the Chernobyl Exclusion zone.

They haven't been building nuclear plants for at least 40 years in North America. There's an indefinite moratorium on further construction.
As for all the "mutated shit", that is medically speaking incorrect. Radiation does not cause genes to recombine; it causes them to degrade, leading to cancerous tumors or radiation poisoning. The "mutation" in Chernobyl is simply evolution; the hardier organisms survive and mate more then the less durable.
Why would the planet be better off is we closed the door on the most potent technology in the history of mankind? Accidents are incredibly rare, and the possibility of their occurrence is decreasing every day. (Note that Chernobyl is the only large-scale nuclear disaster to have ever occured; the lessons learned there prevented others from going critical) We would gain nothing, and in the long run lose out on a massive amount of potential.
We're losing good, usable land every day. Because of Ethanol production. Soil is degrading rapidly in the US due to farmers improperly rotating their fields in the rush to produce their cash crop, which creates a fuel which is not only inefficient, but only used due to environmentalist hype.
People who say they fear invented and exaggerated threats like global warming or nuclear catastrophe, but ignore serious threats to this planet like overpopulation and the decline of our oceanic biosphere (it's almost gotten to the point where it will be unable to recover for a thousand years) fill me with nothing but scorn.

Edit: You mentioned earlier that you think that nuclear power is worse then fossil fuels, because "dirty oxygen is less bad". Fossil fuels do not make the air unclean, they simply release carbon dioxide. The Oxygen bonds with released Carbon. Breaking those chemical bonds on a large scale is extremely difficult; the best way is to have them bond with other elements, which cannot be carried out in any imaginable future scenario unless it extends past the next millennium. Radioactive contamination is when radioactive particles are scattered over an area. It's also immensely difficult, but when compared with scrubbing the earth's atmosphere of carbon dioxide, it seems a surmountable obstacle. Not to mention that while carbon dioxide creation is inevitable with fossil fuels, nuclear contamination is neither inevitable nor likely with nuclear power.

Solar sucks, wind sucks, so we’re gonna continue burning fossil fuel for as long as we can. That won’t hurt the planet.

Nuclear energy emits much less greenhouse emissions then fossil fuels, but Solar, Wind, and Hydroelectric power basically have no effect on the environment (though they don't supply much power). I believe that cleaner, renewable energy resources will become more useful in the future, but for now nuclear energy is the best form of power we have.

Burn Hydrogen.

There's plenty of that shit. We can make it from water and vice versa.

Alright, now to address your argument:

1): If you're not upkeeping a nuclear power plant correctly, then yes, accidents will happen. But that's the same with any power plant, or basically any system at all. Two nuclear meltdowns is not a definitive statistic when you realise that there are hundreds of nuclear power plants that have been doing fine for decades. Also, why the quotations marks around "accident"? Do you think that those meltdowns were caused on purpose?

2): There are quite a few things we can do with nuclear waste, actually. If you want to go the exotic route, we can launch it into space, or store it on another planet (Which is quite feasible, actually; space technology is rapidly evolving.) We're almost bound to come up with new ways to lessen the visceral radiation that surrounds the waste, so we might have clusters of de-radiating factories springing up in the near future. Or, we could just end up storing it, and we can find more efficient ways of locking it away somewhere. My point in all of this is that we can do something with it.

3): So, there are no energy sources but solar, wind, nuclear and fossil fuel? Even if wind and solar become too inefficient (Which they are not), there are other possible sources of energy, like fusion.

4): The burning of fossil fuel does not just pollute the air. I'm actually surprised that someone so headstrong about protecting the planet is advocating fossil fuels. It drives the temperature up as well, driving the planet through vast climate changes and ravaging a multitude of environments. Fossil fuel, if used continually until it runs out, will utterly destroy a massive amount of the earth's environment and population. That's been proven. So it's simply not an option if you want the environment to persist with any smidgeon of its current form intact.

I changed my mind. Nuclear Power is A-OK.

These Generation IV reactors seem promising

17% of France's electricity is from recycled nuclear fuel
There is no reason to be afraid of the world getting clogged with nuclear fuel that doesn't degrade for thousands of years, we can already recycle a lot of waste back into fuel, and we will continue to improve on it.

The only problem with nuclear power is the waste. We can use some of the waste and reconvert it back into fuel/power but not all of it.

Its clean, efficient, and overall a good energy source. I would be completely for nuclear power if it wasn't for idiots. Chernobyl was caused by human error and Fukushima(spell?) was just terribly built and placed. I understand completely that there are hundreds of power plants in every country all across the world.

I just think we need to maybe raise our safety procedures a little and think out where we should exactly place our plants. Putting them next to the ocean, for example, is a bad idea. If something were to happen the radiation not only spreads to land but also to the sea.

We can not also put them in the middle of a city for obvious reasons.

The major problem that most people think about nuclear power is that "OMFG THEY LIKE BUILD THAT SHIT WITH ATOM BOMBS AND IT R REAALY LIKE HARMFUL TO DA AIR AND STUFF."

If you went out on the street and tried to ask someone about all they knew about nuclear power, how its made, how many are there, how efficient is it, etc. they wouldn't know much.

If we spent more time educating the public then nuclear power could become a bigger/better source of energy.

In case anybody is interested in why the Fukushima reactors had a meltdown: here is the European Nuclear Societies Position Paper on it.

To sum it up:
The cooling systems of the reactors were never expected to be offline for extended periods of time, for even if they got cut off from the main power grid, the plant still had back up generators.
They didn't expect a tsunami so high, so they did not build the levy suitably to handle the flooding, and as a result the water flooded where the back-up generators were and took them out.
With the earthquake removing their connection to the public power grid, and the tsunami taking out their back-up generators, the cooling systems were left without enough power to prevent a melt down.

They should have built a larger levy, and also they should have made the decision to pump sea water into it sooner.