So can someone explain the reason people are so afraid of nuclear energy? I guess I never understood the reasoning…is it the waste or the risk of a meltdown (which is very rare when regulated correctly)? Someone please tell me…

“In a political world in which “long-term” often means until the next election, it is quite interesting to hear opponents of nuclear power claim there is no “long-term” solution to a problem which has a current solution that would be perfectly fine for the remainder of their lifetimes.” This mentality delayed finding necessary solutions to the world’s addiction to oil and coal…

“D’ya think we can keep this up forever?” “Why should I care? It won’t be my problem.” “You’re right, fukit.”

Nuclear is safer than coal, gas, oil, powered power plants especially if you count extraction of fuel to electric generation. Coal mining is still unsafe, and accidents happen all the time in gas and oil rigs all the time. Uranium mining used to be very hazardous, but isn’t the case anymore. The only technology that is safer than nuclear is wind and solar. Hydro isn’t that safe either… dam failures can lead to deaths of tens to thousands, depending on where its located. Not to mention the injuries and fatalities during the construction of the dam.

Coal isn’t going to last forever…I’m putting my bets on lawmakers thinking twice about nuclear when we have to start shelling out big time for scarce coal. Until then, just sit back, relax, and breath in the dirty dirty air.

Pebble bed nuclear power plants should be built as soon as possible.

Burning carbon is a bad way to generate power and should only be used where nothing else will do the job, like my chain saw.

12:50, the same reason we’re afraid of socialists. The Cold War really warped this country. The baby boomers had nuclear attack drills in their public schools; they had to hide under their desks and ready themselves for vaporization or nuclear winter.

Actually, an excellent article recently published proved that “There is no such thing as nuclear waste.” That partially spent fuel can be reprocessed and reused and what’s left is not particularly radioactive. France reprocesses all their fuel and stores what’s left in a room at the Hague. There is yet another solution available, probably by 2020 - a hybrid fusion/fission reactor that can actually extract the very last particle of energy from spent fuel - Voila! Nothing left!! And they obtain energy in doing so - that “nuclear waste ” is very much a valued fuel. As for cost, a 1150 megawatt nuclear plant that costs $5 billion to build the going rate these days (in the expensive US - China can build them for less than $2 billion and Japan for around $2 billion) can produce power at a cost of around 5 cents per kilowatthour. That INCLUDES the .20 cents for decommissioning the plant 60 years from now, and .10 cents for waste strage (assuming no change from today’s method). Now, let’s examin the cost of an alternative, unreliable/uncontrollable power source like many of the alternatives. Take wind, for example. A 1.5 megawatt rated capacity windmill will cost you roughly $2 to $3 million to build install and hook up to the nearest trans line. The amount of real estate ruined by the device is staggering. It can produce on average around 20 to 35% of its rated capacity. A nuclear plant can average almost 100% (sometimes over 100%) of its rated capacity. Thus the build cost to produce the same actual amount of power is roughly somewhere between $6 to $15 billion per 1000 megawatts. But it only lasts 1/3rd as long as the nuclear plant. Therefore to build windmills to last the same requires building 3 of each or now the cost is between $18 and $45 billion per gigawatt or wind power. But wind power isn’t controllable or reliable and not worth much. It has virtually no ability to meet peak demand (in Texas last year their windfarms produced a paltry 2% of capacity during peak demand). This leads to side effect costs as well - no matter how much wind you install, next year when power demand increases (as it always will) you will still have to build the same amount of controllable capacity. Nor can wind allow the shuttering of any existing fossil fuel plants. Denmark found that out after building 25% of their grid power using wind - they could only absorb about 30% of their wind power. They have had to buy hydro power from neighbors and remain the dirtiest CO emitters in Europe. Their CO2 levels have not decreased one iota as a result of building more wind than anywhere on Earth.

I’m not sure if Joey or Patrick is the author. Anyway, awesome column!

“The baby boomers had nuclear attack drills in their public schools; they had to hide under their desks and ready themselves for vaporization or nuclear winter. “

But my children didn’t have to live like this - I give credit to Ronald Reagan.

Wisconsin has a long history of saying “no” to all aspects of nuclear power. A uranium mine in northern Wisconsin, an area near Crandon that is historicly desparate for jobs, was prevented from operating by our liberal political shortsidedness. Our liberal politicians have opposed the construction of everything related to nulear fission power plants for 3 decades and more.

Mean while, countries like France are meeting 80% of their national electricity demand through use of safe nuclear fission reactors. Japan is not far behind. We could as well, if we can ever get the Luddite Liberal opposition’s heads out of their collective orifices.

Similarly, we have sufficient reserves of coal within the contiguous United States borders to meet our total electrical generation needs for more than 200 years, at a 2008 electricity consumption rate. More than just elecrticity generation is possible from coal. The technologies are available today to convert coal into synthetic diesel oil, gasoline, and most of the products derived from crude oil sources. We can immediately reduce our dependence on unreliable foreign sources of oil. Only our political will prevents this from happening.

There is no reason not to use coal, this low cost and abundant energy source, to its maximum potential. The hypothesis of Man Made Global Warming, as caused by CO2 emissions, has been throroughly discredited by both research and reality. A natural planetary warming trend ended in 1999 and a natural cooling trend became apparent in 2003, as shown in the major “global mean temperature” data bases. The “global mean temperature” continues the cooling trend today, even as man made CO2 emmisions have continued to increase throughout the period! Reality demonstrates that the hypothesis of Man Made Global Warming is false.

Similarly, the polar ice caps are not melting more than is naturally normal. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/22/ice-target-zero/#more-7284
North polar sea ice area is today within the “1 sigma” variability range of the 1979 to 2000 sea ice area average that the global warming alarmists use as their standard reference. The south pole sea ice area is nearly 20% greater than average and has been slowly increasing each year as well. Again, reality demonstrates that the hypothesis of Man Made Global Warming is false. Call your Senators and Representative and tell them to vote against the Waxman - Markey Carbon Tax bill that the Global Warming alarmists are trying to push through Congress right now! It is a nonsolution to a nonexistent problem.

We might have had nuclear FUSION available today, had the Clinton administration not cut US support for both the Tokamak Physics Experiment (TPX)and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor programs back in the 1990s. UW - Madison played an active part in both programs, until the budgets were severly cut. But freeing up monies for social welfare programs was a higher priority than developing nonpolluting, zero emmision energy sources back then. Besides, it had the scary “nuclear” word in the title! The ITER fusion reactor is completing constuction in France now and will soon be in “shake out” trials. Clean energy from the fusion of hydrogen atoms, the same fusion process that powers all stars in the universe, is the goal. Our US scientists today have a very limited role in fusion energy research, thanks to the short sightedness of primarily liberal democrat US politicians like Gov. Earl, Gov. Doyle, Clinton, and Obama. The same is true for our domestic power supplies from nuclear fission, coal and oil.

We have met the enemy and he is us, Pogo! We must insist that elected politicians pursue real solutions to real problems and stop crippling the American economy with their ideological malfeasance.

“The hypothesis of Man Made Global Warming, as caused by CO2 emissions, has been throroughly discredited by both research and reality.”

But not before it made the Garacle $100 million dollars!

So what has Al Gore gained from his Big Green escapades?

According to public disclosure information, Gore was worth somewhere between $1 million and $2 million in 2000. Not quite eight years later, Gore is estimated to be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million. While I ordinarily would applaud such financial gains from such a short period of time, I can’t help but to question just how it happened. When you look out at what Al Gore has done, it’s evident that he figured out on a way to capitalize on the creation of Big Green while becoming the official doomsday prophet that has helped to build Big Green into the monetary powerhouse that it has become.

In any other industry this would be considered a severe conflict of interest. In essence, Al Gore has helped to create a fictitious catastrophe, then told everybody what the solutions have to be, and then put himself in a position to capitalize on the hype. It’s not only seriously dishonest, but many people and industries are going to suffer in the wake of this hype while Gore and Big Green bring in millions (and in some cases, billions) of dollars in green money. Hat Tip Bruce Kesler

There is so much misinformation in this article and comments it is hard to know where to start.

Maybe it’s with the premise that Wisconsin treats nuclear power differently than other industries. True. There’s a reason: No other industry produces high-level radioactive waste that is so dangerous it must be kept out of the atmosphere and away from humans for hundreds of thousands of years. Until there is a way to dispose of the waste safely, it makes no sense to build more reactors that produce more of it. The idea that there is no such thing as nuclear waste is laughable. More of it is piling up every day. I see from another comment there is no man-made global warming, either. What planet do you people live on?

The French solution? Part of France’s “recycling” strategy includes dumping radioactive waste in the ocean. Independent medical studies have shown higher rates of leukemia in young people who live near the reprocessing center; and radioactive uranium solution accidentally leaked into the groundlast summer, leading the French government to make two rivers off limits for human activity.

As to the economics, new reactors cost $10-billion, take 10 years to build, and the government expects about half of them to default on their loans, which is why the nuclear industry is asking right now for a $50-billion taxpayer subsidy in the form of loan guarantees.

I don’t need to be anonymous. I’m Bill Christofferson, co-chair of the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice, a statewide coalition of 165 member organizations.

“take 10 years to build”

8 years of that to fill out the EPA paperwork?