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Originally Posted by Baraka_Guru
You aren't looking at the big picture.
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Then please enlighten me.
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Non-emission? Where do you think uranium comes from?
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The ground? Granted, there are fossil emmisions from mining uranium, but there are fossil emmisions from building dams and windmills, so are they no longer non-emission either? You are nit-picking. Would you rather I use the term "so-low-emission-as-to-be-statisticaly-irrellevant"? It is a bit wordy...
But you still don't deal with the eco-system destruction problem with locks. River critters have to migrate too you know.
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And willravel is right, nuclear power plants can be ruinously expensive. A lot of money can be dropped into them (i.e. can go multiple times over budget) and they can still sit unused, waiting to go online at some unknown date.
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Over budget, yes. But all projects can. I shudder to think what some of the dams that have been built have cost. Still, from a dollar standpoint over the entire lifetime of the reactor, nuclear is the cheapest large scale power production on earth right now.
The reason they sit unused is because of dipshits like those in the OP. Concern for nuclear safety is one thing, paranoia is another. These luddites are obliquely responsible for the coal industry having so much of a share of the electricity market now because of their misinformation campaign regarding nuclear.
Everytime greenpeace protests a nuke plant, a coal exec buys a new SUV...
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Nuclear waste is an enormously difficult political problem which to date no country has solved. It is, in a sense, the Achilles heel of the nuclear industry. Could this issue strike down France's uniquely successful nuclear program? France's politicians and technocrats are in no doubt. If France is unable to solve this issue, says [Claude] Mandil [the General Director for Energy and Raw Materials at the Ministry of Industry], then "I do not see how we can continue our nuclear program."
"Why the French Like Nuclear Energy," Jon Palfreman, Frontline, PBS.org.
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This is a circular argument. The political problem exists because of groups like Greenpeace. If it weren't for the mass hysteria, France would probably rely even more on nuclear energy than they do today.
Here is a link to the new PBR design that was refernced in the posts above:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor