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Current mood:  breezy Category: News and Politics
I can't seem to leave some stories alone...
Freezing To Death In The Dark
Have you ever noticed that if you move the first two letters around that nuclear becomes unclear?
Anyway...
Believe it or not, I really don't like the idea of using nuclear energy to generate electricity. There are a number of problems with nuke plants. Some of the biggies are:
(1) Cost. Nuke plants are very expensive to build. A good deal of that cost—as much as 60% by some estimates—is due to excessive regulation, but even if that were corrected, a typical nuke plant would cost about 30% more than a fossil-fuel plant of the same capacity.
(2) Waste Disposal. What do we do with the radioactive waste left by a nuke plant? The solution so far has been to bury it. Sorry, but that's not a solution any more than sweeping the dirt under the rug. A few ideas have been tossed around, like putting it on a rocket and sending it into the sun. No, that won't hurt the sun in any way, but do you really want to trust NASA not to blow it up? I don't.
(3) Lack Of Personnel. The American education system is such that we can't—or won't—produce people who can design, build, or operate a nuke plant. Sorry folks, but we're way too worried about making sure that our engineers—and I use the term loosely—know about the history of rock and roll instead of how to design a power plant.
But, despite all of these issues, I don't see that we have much choice.
Wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and other technologies are great solutions to our energy needs. At least they will be great solutions when we can actually make them work. Right now, none of these are viable on a large scale, and I honestly doubt that they will be "ready for prime time" for at least twenty years or more.
The trouble is that we need new, large scale power plants much sooner than that, on the order of between now and five years from now.
We can do one of three things...
(A) Build More Fossil Fuel Plants. Between the costs of fuel, damage to the environment, and increased dependence on foreign suppliers, this just isn't a good idea. There are literally hundreds of ticks on the downside and few on the upside.
(B) Build More Nuclear Power Plants. Still not the best possible answer in the long run, but we could do it and it will meet our needs long enough to get the other, long-term solutions online. No pun intended.
(C) Freeze To Death In The Dark. 'Nuff said.
Keep Loving!
Melodee Aaron, Erotica Romance Author
Melodee's Books at BookStrand
Melodee's Books at Fictionwise
Inquisitor Betrayer
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Space Elevator
By Inquisitor Betrayer
Release date: 2006-09-26 |
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3:23 PM
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