"So is it time to embrace the atom again? There's a "nuclear renaissance" buzz emitting from engineers who design and operate reactors, think-tank academics who worry about long-range energy and environmental strategies, utility company executives, top members of the Bush Administration, and members of Congress."
I think that nuclear energy is the way of the future. Its relatively clean and only a small amount of waste is produced. Take Europe for example. They recycle their uranium over and over again and and use it over and over again until they can't get anything out of it anymore. But, by then, its such a small amount of waste that we can tolerate it. There is also talk about fission plants. The technology is not quite there yet but if we were to use fission to power our plants it would be so much safer. If the reaction leaves the chamber it dies because it needs continuous heat. Though there is the downside.
"The amount of free energy contained in nuclear fuel is millions of times the amount of free energy contained in a similar mass of chemical fuel such as gasoline, making nuclear fission a very tempting source of energy. The products of nuclear fission, however, are on average far more radioactive than the heavy elements which are normally fissioned as fuel, and remain so for significant amounts of time, giving rise to a nuclear waste problem. Concerns over nuclear waste accumulation and over the destructive potential of nuclear weapons may counterbalance the desirable qualities of fission as an energy source, and give rise to ongoing political debate over nuclear power." - Wikipedia
"France gets 78 percent of its electricity from nuclear power and is considering replacing its older plants with new ones."
Go France! If we switched to nuclear we could get so much more energy and with that energy we could go electric and cut down even more on CO2 emissions.
""We can't go back, we can only go forward," said Swapnesh Malhotra, a spokesman for India's atomic energy department. "Life depends on energy, and I ask, where do we get it? We will get it somewhere.""
Coal = Back --> Nuclear = Future
What would we do if we had a Chernobyl? How can we downsize nuclear plants? They're so huge that they're like windmills they produce energy but they block the view.
"That's if there's money. Congress last year passed an energy bill that guarantees loans made by investors and includes a subsidy of up to six billion dollars for running the first new plants. But the industry insists that it can't get private financing for construction of the plants without government loan guarantees. "
Its money we don't have probably.
"Environmentalists like Speth consider the nuclear industry mature enough to sink or swim without federal assistance—and with vigilant regulation."
If anybody hasn't noticed by now, the government has the loosest regulation sectors ever.
"In two or three decades the industry could see generation-IV machines that run more efficiently at much higher temperatures, thus getting far more energy from their starting load of uranium. The intense nuclear reactions at such temperatures would leave waste that, compared to today's, is less toxic and lasts for a shorter period of time. Advanced reactors would have simpler safety features and require less sophisticated backup systems. They could cool themselves down in the event of an accident with little human intervention, making them less tempting targets for terrorists."
We can do it. Technology replaces itself every two years and with waves of new engineers it'll come faster than we think.
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