Poll: College Research Paper Survery - Nuclear Power

[Syphous]

"Nucaler?!"
"Well that isn't a word.. but yes!"

 

[Kagim]

I support Nuclear power as long as we continue our development of other renewable sources. Nuclear power is safe and reliable i just don;t want it to be our only power source. Eggs all in one basket and what not.

Also...

No.

Simply because we'll run out of places to dump all the waste eventually.

This is actually the one valid argument against nuclear power. But its also completely fucking moot. Nuclear waste is recyclable! We're running around digging holes under death valley and storing it in tanks when it could be (theoretically) endlessly recycled back into fuel grade material. Except recycling nuclear waste is banned under the nuclear proliferation treaty, as the same process can create weapon's grade material.

A piece of fucking paper is stopping us from having endlessly renewable energy.

I find this interesting, do you have any links i can check out to learn more about this? Mostly about the process not the banning of it.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

Yes, yes I do. I actually used Nuclear Power in a presentation a few years back and apparently it's a popular subject these days.

 

[Aur0ra145]

Yes, nuclear power is a great thing, we should have way more nuclear power plants.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

Doesn't nuclear waste remain forever and is not able to be recycled? Maybe that's just my uninformed ass, but I'm pretty sure the only use for depleted uranium is tank armor and armor piercing slugs

If you ignore the potential for recycling, you'll find it doesn't last forever - just long enough that it might as well be. Interesting note - if you take ALL the nuclear waste from ALL the plants in the US that have operated since the 60's you end up with enough to cover a football field a few feet deep.

Oddly enough, most people fear "radioactivity" associated with nuclear power plants yet don't realize that coal plants are, on average, more radioactive than nuclear plants (thanks to the fact that radioactive material is often contained in small quantities inside of coal).

My support of the power source is simply that it provides an excellent stopgap power solution. Currently, there is no viable alternative energy solution that can provide power on a very large scale that is cleaner or safer than nuclear. If you look at projects like the massive wind farms in texas or solar arrays further west at first you may be impressed with the numbers (several hundred MW of average power production). Then you find that a single nuclear plant can produce in excess of 3Gw worth of power and you start to see the problem.

The sad fact is, that a handful of accidents decades ago and the Simpsons still stand out in people's minds when it comes time to commission a new plant

 

[Kollega]

- Chernobyl reactor was outrageously badly designed. Normal reactors don't go "BOOM" all of sudden.

More like a dude who was in charge screwed up. Nowadays everything is 99.99999999999999999% bulletproof. With tons of fail-checks, security, back-up plans.

Actually it was both, but everyone knows that operator screwed up. Not everyone knows that on top of that, the design was faulty.