• sartalon@lemmy.world
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    26 days ago

    He said nuclear waste. Most of those are accidents involving radiation exposure (Are you lobbying we stop radiation therapy too?), Russian subs, and Soviet era handling of nuclear sources.

    The rare incident of death cause by nuclear waste was an explosion at a testing facility in Japan that was apparently trying to research a new way to deal with nuclear waste.

    One death attributed to Fukushima is amazing to me. That was a catastrophic event. (The tsunami that caused the incident may have killed some that would have otherwise died from exposure, but without the tsunami, there wouldn’t have been an incident, so I don’t know how to argue that one.)

    A better argument is cost. It is EXPENSIVE to store nuclear waste. We are not allowed to just bury it and we can’t just shoot it into the sun… yet.

    I’ve seen all kinds of novel ideas for modern ways of dealing with nuclear waste but the current rules are tied up in so much bureaucracy, it would practically take an act of God for approval of any change. People fighting nuclear cause more problems than they help.

    Take the San Onofre plant in California. They replaced a system that was aging, then some time later, they shut down for routine maintenance and discovered that the replacement system was wearing out much faster than it should. So the plant said they would stay off until they found the problem and fixed it. At no time was the public in danger. But the anti nuclear whackos took their opportunity to pounce, took advantage of that famous California NIMBYism, and got the plant shut down permanently. Now electricity is provided by natural gas.

    That was a waste of fucking money. Plant was already producing electricity, and now there is more CO2 getting pumped into the air.

    I don’t trust the anti-nuclear power crowd anymore than I trust the oil industry. They both lie their asses off and don’t care about facts. One just has a lot more money than the other.