Isn't it ridiculous to expand nuclear energy in the US when the gov't keeps saying how vulnerable nuclear...

Question

...facilities, water supplies, and other public facilities are to terror attacks these days? When earthquakes can happen virtually everywhere (and even Japan recently had a scare when an earthquake was near one of their nuclear facilities)?

Answer 1

Yes, it is.

The biggest hurdle to overcome is, of course, what to do with all of the excess waste generated from increased usage of nuclear power.  Currently, nuclear plants provide for nearly a quarter of the country's energy needs.  Now, imagine raising that percentage to 35, 50, or even higher and you have yourself a huge problem of where to put all of that spent nuclear fuel.   Now, the reason why nuclear energy has been relatively viable in France (which gets more than 75% of its power from nuclear energy) is generally because they use roughly half the energy the US uses on a per capita basis, not to mention that their government has done a much better job of managing and even finding ways to reuse nuclear waste.  Thus, even for nuclear energy to become viable in this country on a larger scale, conservation would still be needed simply to avoid overly excessive waste needed to be stored.  One other problem: some of the waste sites are in geologically unstable parts of the country.  

http://a4nr.org/articles/articlenukewast...

Answer 2

I haven't heard the Government talk about their vulnerability for quite awhile now.  The truth is, with the Patriot Act in full swing we haven't had a terror attack on our soil for nearly seven years.  I'm not saying we never will again but a nuclear power plant would probably not be a target anyway.  Nuclear power plants are safe, much cleaner than fossil fuel burning power plants, and extremely efficent.  As far as earthquakes, the power plants are engineered with that in mind.  So the question is, do you want to reduce our dependency on foreign oil or not?  There will always be risks, but this is absolutely a risk worth taking.

Answer 3

No we have to look at the big picture. Compared to depending on oil from the middle east nuclear energy is a small national security threat if that. While I do not know nuclear physics I can tell you that we can put in state of the art security around the facilities, create no fly zones over them, put in an air defense system, guard towers, etc. Also Japan sits on a series of faults, we can build these sites away from active seismic activity.

Answer 4

It is possible to make it safer but the US has done nothing to help improve safety nor come up with a way to convert the spent fuel to something inert.  Their only idea is to store it in the mountains near Las Vegas.  Other countries have done a better job improving those concerns.  So, for right now, I agree with you.  Still, it is an awfully expensive way to heat water.  I prefer wind, water, and solar power to nuclear.

Answer 5

Well, things like nuclear facilities and water supplies may be targets, but I don't think either is particularly vulnerable to terrorist attacks.  There are reasons not to expand nuclear energy: the supply of fissile Uranium is limited, so we'd need to build breeder reactors if we want nuclear power to be a long-term solution, and that becomes a proliferation issue, not for the US (which already has way too many nukes) but for other countries that follow our lead.  Also, it has not been shown to be economic, it usually relies on government subsidies. That may change if there is a tax on carbon emissions.

Answer 6

No, it's not ridiculous.

The notion that a nuclear power plant is some kind of unlit fuse, that all it would take is for a car bomb to go off nearby for the entire plant to blow up like Hiroshima, is held only by people who don't understand how the plants operate.

http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA374.htm...

The bottom line is, we have a means to eliminate over 1/3 of our greenhouse gas emissions - a means that would have been in place today if many of the same people leading the charge on AGW hadn't gotten their way in the 1970s and 1980s.

Please listen to me people - for SOME AGW proponents it's a genuine, legitimate concern based on the warming properties of CO2 - for many others it's one front in a war on modern civilization, on production and consumption, on the American lifestyle.