5 Responses

1. not clean not inviroment frendly and noisy but givs loads of electric

2. No. Nuclear power makes most of our power, and there is some kind of radioactive waste that we can’t just throw away.

3. nuclear power plant give TONS of electricity in mere sec.
   but the negative result polluted air, water & land.
   It destroy natural things around it….

4. The single greatest threat from having nuclear power plants is the possibility of a melt down. This can be caused by a number of things.
   First, the core can be damaged by earthquakes.
   Second, the core can lose water levels, and the core burns up, causing an explosion.
   Third, the core can be damaged by a terrorist attack.
   The Chernobyl disaster in Russia was an example of the second type of event.
   Three Mile Island in the USA (Pennsylvania) was caught before a meltdown occurred.
   France had a contaminated water leak, but the country still treasures their plants since they are so dependent upon nuclear energy for electricity.

   Many point to the toxic waste of spent uranium as another reason to oppose nuclear power, however, the amount generated has been reduced by the industry through technology.
   Another concern is the impact on the regional environment, as the reactor requires cool water to keep things in balance. The local water supply is used and this has an impact on the water’s temperature. This can kill fish and other life forms, like frogs, crayfish, ect…

   The advantages are that the toxic waste is less than other forms of producing electrical energy.
   The overall effect on the environment is less than other forms also.

   Cost of producing electricity by nuclear power remains high, mostly due to the start-up expense and cost of nuclear fuel rods. Disposal of spent fuel is also an expensive cost.

   I support nuclear power, however, I am concerned by the vulnerability to earthquakes and terrorist attacks.
   Japan is one of the three nations with the most dependence on nuclear power (USA and France are the others).
   Japan had to shut down 7 of its plants due to earthquake activity.

5. Nuclear power is the cleanest power source we have ever developed (it’s also the safest, safer even than solar as well as being reliable and reasonably economic (despite the environmental costs being internalised while the competition gets to dump things and make society pay the cost in terms of global warming, land use or dead birds)).

   The environmental advantages (along with basically all the other ones) of nuclear power derive from the energy density of the fuel, Uranium has about a million times the energy density of chemical fuels such as oil or coal which means that you don’t need much fuel which means that you don’t do as much damage to the land when you go to get that fuel (the mines are smaller and lesser than coal mines for the same energy).

   The concentration of energy also has advantages when it comes to waste since it means that nuclear power plants generate so little of it, so little in fact that it can actually be dealt with properly instead of just dumped into the environment (as fossil fuel fired power plants do, the proposals of dealing with the CO2 from them don’t look like they’ll be particularly economical and may not even be workable). Much of the reason why people are so worried about nuclear waste and insisting that it be buried for 10,000 years is simply because it can be done (not that you should be dumping it the way coal plants dump mercury into the air). The fact that nuclear waste is radioactive also means that it gets less dangerous as time goes on if you just leave it sitting there whereas the waste from other power sources stays dangerous forever.

   The high energy density also means that nuclear power plants can be very small compared to renewable power which needs to capture diffuse natural energy and therefore uses a lot of land and disturbs the natural environment to a large degree (solar covers a lot of land up, hydro involves flooding quite a bit of land, etc). It also takes more materials to build the same capacity in wind turbines as it does to build a nuclear power plant further increasing the advantage of nuclear power.

   This concentration of energy also allows for very extensive safety measures to be taken that would be completely unaffordable with any other energy source and which also reduce the environmental impact by reducing the probability of an accident as well as the probability of an accident having off-site effects (which has only happened once and with consequences (in terms of people dead) no worse than the normal operation of a coal power plant (which kills people through air pollution without having an accident) and probably considerably less worse than what a coal power plant would have done).

   The nuclear industry is also quite highly regulated which probably contributes something to the safety although it is probably over-regulated (a lot of the rules probably don’t actually improve safety, but just increase costs and make nuclear less competitive with dirtier power sources).

   Another big advantage nuclear has is that there is still significant room for improvement in the technology while most of the alternatives to nuclear have pretty much reached the point of diminishing returns.