The generation of electricity through nuclear has always been a mystery. Partly because it is a fairly new way of doing things. The question is, should the world look this way more. Nuclear is quite possibly the easiest and cleanest way to MASS produce energy. People may disagree, which is generally good for discussions. Nuclear power provides most of France's electricity, a lot of the naval submarines and other places as well. The technology around it is vastly superior to nearly every other form of generation we have.
There are people who will wail against coal, which rightly so, produces a lot of pollution. With this in mind, to replace coal with nuclear would have an absolutely immediate impact on air pollution. People who are against coal should be in favor of nuclear.
Wind and solar together at the moment to don't equal the wattage output of nuclear. The two are years away from legitimate consideration. Most of the plans to expand solar and wind are done at a fairly big cost bullet. More over, the production of solar cells take place in China for the most part. This county is not known for its safety and pollution controls.
If all countries went 50% nuclear by 2020, would that hurt or help the environment immensely. The argument can be made that it would have an extremely positive effect on nature, air, water and our wallets. Feedback is welcome as this is only an opinion peace. We as consumers need to address things with an open mind.
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4 comments:
I'm not convinced. Nuclear solves one problem and creates another. What about mining, processing, and transporting the uranium? Also, where do we put the waste, and how do we transport it?
As well as that, the hot water output from many plants is dumped back into the rivers from where the water is taken. This raises the temperature of the water, killing off many forms of life.
Jord,
You make some great points. I am not convinced that nuclear will solve the whole problem, but the sort term gains from having it take over for coal, could be great. The amount of waste is nowhere close to that of coal. It will be interesting to see which kind of plants are put up. It could be a great interim until we can get enough solar and wind put up to have any significant energy output.
This is a debate that we are having in Australia at the moment. We mine a high percentage of the worlds Uranium at the moment.
The targeted issues here are:
Renewable energies ability to produce industrial amounts of energy.
Storage and disposal of spent fuel.
We at this point have no reactors producing electricity for the grid. Our reactors are research and medical based. Hence much smaller and containable.
I believe that it part of a cocktail that will make our energy usage for the known future. Hope thogh that the next generation of renewable energy will change my mind though!
epools,
That is a very honest answer. I am sure that there is much debate over in Australia and you are at some of the major discussions on energy. I have been impressed with the push forward and how open and honest the debate is over there.
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