haha nuclear power is very safe.
sure.
nothing in the world is safer
I didn't say that nothing in the world is safer – but that's a false dichotomy.
No form of power generation is completely safe.Hydroelectric plants typically required dams, which can fail and, in doing so, devastate huge areas. Coal plants produce hundreds of millions of tons of waste material (some of which is radioactive) and they can also explode to boot, leaving a huge crater behind. Need I go on?
Nuclear power – especially the fourth generation reactor designs – are very safe and, by design, are "fail safe" in the sense that they incorporate passive cooling and loss of control of the reaction results in a safe "automatic" shutdown because of the reactor chemistry.
The U.S. Navy, which has been utilizing nuclear power for decades, has an excellent safety record and has proven that running nuclear power plants can be done safely.
Does that mean nuclear power is all sunshine and lollipops? Of course not. Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima all serve as reminders. It is something that needs be designed correctly, built correctly, operated correctly and maintained correctly.
You will find that in every case of failure, the failure was, ultimately, attributed to failing to do one of those four things (or maybe more than one).
It's not a pleasant thought, but examining the evidence rationally tilts the scale in favor of nuclear power over other power generation processes.
It would, of course, be wonderful if we could rely exclusively on solar and wind power generation, but we don't live in a fairy tale. We live in the real world and in the real world we need reliable and constant power; solar and wind just aren't able to sustain us at this point.
Yeah, and they spouted all this sort of crap when they built the older models.
And you stupid gullible assholes believed that too.
I doubt anybody "spouted" the sort of statements being made today about 4th generation reactors for previous generation designs.
Facts are facts: new designs don't require active cooling and use molten salts instead of steam, do not require pressurized vessels, have reaction chemistries that inherently scram the reactor if reactor control is compromised and consume high-level nuclear waste and actinides. These are easily verifiable facts: the physics and the numbers speak volumes. You may not care to listen (or know how to read) but those of us that do can see how much better the 4th generation reactor designs are.
The gullible are those that don't understand the topic, who don't have the ability to understand it and who rely on parroting the opinion of others (who may not know better either). And there's plenty of gullible people to go around. Look at how many idiots are complaining about wifi causing cancer, vaccines causing autism, gmo foods causing deformities and so on.
