Well most power plants are coal, not oil. The United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal.

I think it's a good idea on the whole, but I don't think I'd want to live by one. I've watched too much Simpsons to be completely comfortable with the idea of a nuclear power plant.

Hey, if Homer can avert a meltdown....

meh.
I'd rather we went with something like Wind or Solar.

We are working on Wind and Solar. The problem is, it just cannot feed the insatiable need for power that nuclear can. They both take way too much acreage to be viable as the main power source for a nation this size.

Wind and Solar simply cannot produce the anywhere near the same amount as energy for the cost of a power plant.

Yeah, wind and solar are total boondoggles. We should stop wasting our time and money on stupid feel-good methods and focus on things that work, like coal and nuclear.

Its ridiculous that the U.S uses primarily coal instead of Nuclear power like France. The issue is that Democrats have been screaming about it ever since Three Mile Island. But the only reason that Three Mile Island happened was because reactor design isn't standardized in the U.S unlike France, so you don't have set maintenance and control protocols.

If Congress would set aside politics and initiate a policy of no new non-nuclear or water power plants and require standard reactor design specs. And also require all coal and oil plants to be phased out it would drastically reduce greenhouse emissions (which isn't causing climate change anyway) and it would eliminate our dependence on non-renewable energy sources.

Well, uranium isn't renewable either. There's no need to phase out perfectly good sources of energy, particularly if they're cheaper.

When you factor in total life-cycle costs (including cleanup, storage of waste for thousands of years, and negative impact to the ecosystem) both petroleum and nuclear look a lot less attractive than when you simply compare the cost to produce the power over those first 15 or 30 years. Thing is, no one in industry factors in those long-term costs (at least not private firms)... your local power company doesn't have to pay for its pollution, it doesn't have to worry about disposal, and rebuilding of the nuclear plant every 30 years or whatever is not factored into the cost of doing business. Whoever makes these decisions will be long retired at those points. Even when such long term costs are not included, wind is often competitive with nuclear. That all said, I'm all for continued research and perfection of each of these technologies. It seems clean that nuclear and each of the renewable energy sources all have more potential upside than petroleum.

Having served on a nuclear powered warship (The good ship USS Connecticut), I can say that nuclear power can be perfectly safe if used properly.

The issue with TMI was poor maintenance practices (you really have no idea how many gauges were tagged as out of calibration or out of commission) coupled with a massive failure of the operators to watch all the indications to realize what was going on.

Two things would help the disposal problem: Reprocess the "spent" fuel. (which is anywhere from 30-40 percent still unused... the fission products act as fission poisons, which cause a fuel rod to be "burned out" even though a large part of its uranium is still good). And store the spent fuel in a dry state. They store it in water because water is a cheap shield, but if you store in dry, encased in glass, and in Yucca Mountain, leakage is a non-issue.

I'm about as leftist as you can get, but I don't quite understand the fear some of my fellow-travelers have for nuclear power. We're not going to get any less dependent on fossil fuels if we just stand around and hope.

One particularly large problem with Nuclear Power is that it usually takes 3 days to "reboot". This means that you are creating power 24/7 which can't be stored in the volumes it is created. In effect during the night (when consumption is only a fraction of day time consumption) you waste ridiculous amounts of Energy.

@everyone who has said that solar energy is a useless pursuit
Technological progressions in solar energy have similar exponential advancements as hard drive storage in computers. Cornell University has predicted that 50% of Global Power will be solar by 2025. Solar energy and Hydro (as a Manitoban this makes me giddy) energy are the way of the future.

About time.

The only thing that seriously scares me about nuclear power is how old our power plants are getting. I'd far rather get them replaced with modern technology.

If we can get solar to pencil out and get them on every roof in Arizona, California, and other states (and countries) with lots of sun and not too much storm damage, that would be good. Might not be all the power that is needed but some is better than none.

What does France and other countries with a large amount of nuclear power do with their nuclear waste?

But, wind and solar have the opposite problem. Because they do not deliver a constant amount of energy, there need to be a lot more spinning reserves, or diesel generators to pick up the slack when their is a decrease in generation. This is terribly inefficient.

Furthermore, solar/wind take up a lot more space than a power plant would; space that could be used for other things.

Finally, windmills kill a lot of bats. This may sound silly, but the bat population has been plummeting in the US over the last decade, which has serious implications.

Well there really isn't a large amount of waste from nuclear power (compared to the waste from other technologies that goes to our air), it can be safely buried. But I totally agree, solar power farms are the way of the future.

@everyone arguing with me. :P

I've heard that here in New York at least (not NYC, that place sucks) that we would have enough power if we ran off of Wind power, but for some reason they don't use them, because people think they are ugly and loud, or that they will upset the birds migrations.
[run-on sentence^ :)]

Link to the technical side of France's energy program: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf40.html. Link for disposal and reuse: http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2009/05/18/18climatewire-is-the-solution-to-the-us-nuclear-waste-prob-12208.html?pagewanted=all

Wind power is very highly subsidized. Without the subsidies it wouldn't really have a shot in the free market, due to the fact that there is a lot of infrastructure required for very little energy output.

@KK

What type of engineering are you studying?

Electrical - hopefully I can get into a power generation designation.

Nice--me, too. I seriously considered going into the power field for a while, but decided to go in a different direction.

And as a Manitoban I am definitely biased towards Hydro, and most of my professors support solar. So I am really just echoing opinions.

Safety is a concern, but domestic nuclear power might also mean fewer American kids dying in wars for oil in the Middle East. Tough call.

Cool what school are you in?

And what type of Electrical Engineering?

University of Massachusetts Amherst.

I'm now focusing on nanoelectronics, so I've looked at solar from power and devices viewpoints and I'll agree they're pretty awesome, but I still think Nuclear is the most feasible.

@Steve

I doubt it. We still have cars and houses to heat. Plus, until flywheels and other forms of spinning reserves get a little better, we still need diesel generators to accompany any type of power plant.

Cars need to shift to diesel power anyways, it is the most efficient and green technology for automobiles.

I agree and green cars are getting much better, but we're still aways from it being enough.