Does anyone ever make Nuclear Power Plants?

[Blaupanzer]

I don't usually buld coal for the health hassle or nuclear because of posts like these. So it is either hydro or live without power off my own continent. The Three Gorges project solves my home continent issues.

[mike2h]

fwiw, around 70% of frances power is nuclear generated. when properly done & well planned out nuke power is one of the best options for power we have at this particular time. &probably is the best as solar, wind, & geothermal are geocentric.
problem in the US is greed, beauracracy, & uninformed fear.

[wodan11]

Funny. We're talking about this and I just had my first EVER meltdown in CIV. Interestingly, it happened just 1 turn before I won the space race.

[jnh140]

Originally posted by mike2h
problem in the US is greed, beauracracy, & uninformed fear.

Ohhh i wouldn't say its blatant greed that keeps nuclear out of reach in america. Its the uninformed fear, mostly, and a whole bueracracie (the new purpose of this thread is interesting new spellings of buerokrazy) has developed to KEEP it out of our hands.

For instance, after 3-mile island... President Carter banned nuclear fuel reprocessing. Well, thats great, but its like burning 20% of the gas in your tank, then dumping the rest out and refilling. Its incredibly wasteful. You need to take those fuel rods, and recycle them back through the enrichment process and then you have highly enriched uranium once again. But no, we store them on site, wasting the U235 thats left over, and are wrangling over how to dump the waste. Which is a waste, if you ask me.

The greed of the energy industry is good for the country, and we would have a LOT more nuclear (the nuclear industry, being greedy, would love to build more plants), but its generally political suicide to attempt it. So, we're stuck on coal, hydro is tapped out, and most of the others are just boutique sources.

[Blaupanzer]

Actually most of our power comes from coal, oil, and natural gas in that order, Natural gas is moving up and oil is moving down.

The greens (enviromentalists) as a political element in the US have lost almost every battle they've fought with industry and the government (exhibiting a unified front for the last 24 years) except those relating to endangered species, experiments with animals, and those related to nuclear power. The American public almost never rallies into actual demonstrations of any size, except on the nuclear issue. Tens of thousands of people will show up to protest a nuke plant within 50 miles of any city on the East or West Coast or the corridor between Chicago and Philadelphia. Even in states with very small populations, like Nevada at just over 1,000,000, large rallies can be spurred by just suggesting that nuclear waste storage is about to begin at the Yucca mountain facility built for that purpose. The actual waste is moved in unmarked trucks and unmarked special trains to prevent interference and panic along their routes.

This may be an exhibition of unreasonable fear, as the average coal plant puts out more radiation than the largest nuke plants, but it NOT "uninformed fear." Newspapers, magazines, books, and even textbooks are filled with information on the dangers of nuclear power including the phrase "inevitable failure of containment" everywhere in America. We will be hard presseed to overcome that.

[jnh140]

I call it uninformed fear because people are scared of the word nuclear (or nucular). You get an MRI exam now, but back in the seventies it was a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance exam. "Like hell im going into a nuclear tube, whacko doctor!"

Originally posted by Blaupanzer
The greens (enviromentalists) as a political element in the US have lost almost every battle they've fought with industry and the government (exhibiting a unified front for the last 24 years) except those relating to endangered species, experiments with animals, and those related to nuclear power.

Don't forget banning cheap and otherwise harmless CFCs from propellents and refrigerators-- even though no one has ever observed an ozone layer without a hole.

Also banning DDT is the number-one-most-humongous win by the environmental movement, a win they have sought to replicate and leverage numerous times. This ban was based on crummy egg-shell thickness measurements that have been largely disscounted. It was the hunting bans with federal prison sentences that stopped the decline in bald eagle populations, not the banning of DDT. And the ban on DDT caused the worldwide eradication of malaria to falter, so now millions of africans are infected with, and die from, malaria.

Of course, no one wants to address what I feel is an important threat, taking the anti-bacterials out of handsoaps. We scrub our hands and homes with antibiotics, and our homes are no more antibiotic than they were before we scrubbed, but the bugs are more resistant.


Back on topic for Wodan:

Ha! Hey, at least the colonists managed to get to a new planet before you covered the old one in fallout