Something scary, today on the news was McCain is coming to Michigan’s Fermi Nuke plant to promote his plan to increase Nuke plants to “Reduce our demand for foreign oil” - Tell me, do ANY of our LARGE power plants use any oil as fuel ??? Hummm. Again we have the choice to vote for scary and scary.
From the Government’s site, almost 17% of our e-power is from diesel generators, but these have an average of 17M watts each, vs. 1,015M watts for the average Nuke plant… So I guess the plan is to replace all these small diesel generators in Alaska and other remote locations with HUGE Nuke plants 100 times as large. If their small size and remote location did not make it economical to do a cheaper running coal plant, why Nuke ??? Scary.
Don’t forget, you can vote for Ralph Nader. He will be on at least 30 State Ballots alongside McCain and McBama.
There are tons of other people running for the President of the US and it is possible Nader or someone else is far more worthy of a president. I hope others feel this way.
It wouldn’t just be for electrical generation. A lot of the oil we import also goes to heat houses in the Northeast. Increasing electrical generation, whether by nukes or other means, and requiring that oil burners be phased out of the NE, would cut our foreign oil usage by quite a bit. Heating oil accounts for 23 percent of a barrel of crude when processed. This fuel can actually be reprocessed into other products, so instead of creating home heating oil and gasoline they can just make it all gasoline. So yes, building nukes can help lower our dependence on foreign oil, and as we use 23 percent of crude for heating oil, it would cut our usage by 23 percent with no other action being taken.
My opinion, using a liquid fuel like petroleum or a gaseous fuel like LPG or natural gas to heat a stationary building is one of the first things that needs to go. Save the liquid fuels for motive power needs and use electricity for stationary power/heating needs.
So far as the nukes themselves go, there is technology out there to reprocess and reuse nuclear fuel, we’d just have to get rid of Carter’s stupid executive order that banned research into it. If not for Carter’s ban which has prevented the US from researching nuke fuel reprocessing, we might have come up with a way to deal with nuclear waste safely by now.
Quit worrying about what it will be/do in the next 50,000 years and get it stored now in a place MUCH safer than where it is now (scattered across the US in 103 plants)
Then maybe in the next 200, 300 or even 500 years (while it will be very safe in Yucca ) study other options for it. Maybe we will find a better way to store it. Either way we should come up with something better for the next 50,000 years.
BTW - we have the technology to ship and reprocess it now. It’s just we do not have the political where with all to let it happen.
Dependence on nuclear power is not in favor of mankind because recent nuclear crisis at Fukushima Nuclear power plant in Japan.This shows that the Nuclear power is not safe.