Originally posted by twhitehead
No, not true at all.
[b]And while it's true that given we need a finite amount of power any nuclear plant
being built is renewable plants not being built... that's not because we can't afford
the renewable plants, it's because the Nuclear plants generating the electricity and
we don't need them.
Exactly. Therefore the money will not be spent ...[text shortened]... d not just by your own country, but eventually by everyone else, even the people you don't like.[/b]
Ah. we were unwittingly committing the equivocation fallacy.
Of course you are quite correct that if we spend money on Nuclear Power generation we will
spend less money on renewable power generation. This is both true and trivial.
When I was talking about spending money, and of neither nuclear or renewables loosing
out, I was talking about the money needed to develop and research these technologies.
I was arguing that we can get the development and breakthroughs in both nuclear and
solar/wind/ect.
Not that we would spend the same amount on building and installing renewable power
that we would if we didn't build nuclear vs if we did.
I thought we were talking about the same thing, I apologise.
As for safety, nothing is perfectly safe. But 4th+ gen nuclear reactors are designed such
that they cannot melt down [or are already molten as in MSR reactors] and are not cooled
by high pressure water that can give off hydrogen gas. Which means no very costly high
pressure vessel is needed, and in the even of a core breach nothing explodes, stuff would
just ooze out and pool on the containment building floor where it cools and solidifies.
Which is a major clean-up job and very expensive no doubt... But nothing gets out of the
containment building.
Nuclear reactors as they are generate more power per fatality than almost any other power
source, including most renewables.
Advanced nuclear reactors are even safer, by a big margin.
And they are much worse at creating materials for nuclear bombs than regular reactors are
and because they reprocess fuel on site there is much much less moving it around which
improves safety still further.
The real bad guys who want nuclear bombs in the world pretty much already have them, or the
tech and materiel to make them.
The rest of the world doesn't seem to want nuclear weapons.
As testified by the number of nations that have nuclear materiel from the USA "atoms for peace"
program, none of which went on to build nuclear weapons.
Many more people die making solar panels, or building hydro dams, than die generating nuclear power
as measured by deaths per TWh produced.
I would argue that Nuclear is already safe enough, and is getting safer.