Burning natural gas releases CO2. Less than oil, but it still does. Climate change is an immediate/near-term problem, not one 1000 years in the future.
Slit the petroleum/gas industry’s throat as soon as possible, retrain the workers to work in other energy industries, and let’s move into the 21st century.
And yes, I’d be comfortable a few blocks from a modern nuclear plant.[/quote]
We can dream of the world where all power is produced by nuclear and renewables. But dreaming does not make it happen. There are far too many people who will oppose construction of nuclear power plants and frankly they have more than one point. You may be comfortable living near one but my prediction is that you will be outnumbered by those in opposition.
Burning nat gas is better than burning coal for CO2 emission and this substitution would have a big impact. We can already see it in the numbers. Couple this with efficiency improvements and some lucky breakthroughs in renewables (and perhaps a global depression) and we have a fighting chance against climate change.
The remarks about 1000 years was not about climate change – which I agree is more near term issue. But life does not end once we conquered climate change! There is a definite risk that we present to our future generations by creating 1000s of tonnes of nuclear waste and burying it somewhere underground to decay. We may think we are smart but nature is more powerful than us and our powers of thinking quite limited. What if the waste we thus created ends up leaking some how over the course of 1000s of years and poisoning the planet. I am not arrogant enough to say that we can anticipate every problem and natural force that will happen at such a site.
As you might know Plutonium, for example, is quite deadly. There is a reason why nature did not create it in any significant quantity on this planet. If we think we can create tonnes of it and somehow contain it in some small space for eternity, we are probably naive or arrogant!
[quote=spdrun]
Those reactors are basically irrelevant in a safety discussion of modern reactor tech. Fukushima is more relevant — but again, it was a mid-60s design.[/quote]
I am sure that when these reactors came online in the 50s and 60s their designers thought they were quite safe and they were designed to withstand any possible stress they could think of in those times.
Of course, it turned out their designers were not pessimistic enough so we have this new generation of reactors. My belief is that they will also see some situation which their designers did not think of and after 30 years there will be another “extremely safe’ reactor.
Besides safety of reactors has less to do with the design of the reactor itself and more to do with people running it, geography, backup systems etc.
( I always get amused about how people claim that third generation reactors like French built EPR are extremely safe. I ask them how many are built and the answer is zero. How can one claim something is safe without actually building any? )
