Discuss: Reasons Not to Glow

About the pollution from mining, does Rebecca understand that extracting the minerals from which we extract silicon uses the same.  Not to mention the fact that we don’t receive metals like manna from heaven in building windmills, or any “renewable energy” source, so since any power plant which somehow uses electrical induction or silicon has some sort of mining behind it? What really makes nuclear any different?  The difference is, you get an immense output of negligibly intermittent electrical power, which, just like solar and wind, does not generate GHG emissions, sulfur dioxides, nitrogen dioxides, or smog in its generation process, which in fact is the kind of power we need to sustain ourselves beyond the status of the third world.
  Mass production and manufacturing, which consume plenty of electricity, are the means by which we can even hope to live with even the biofuels, or the other energy sources.  Even though France, as many of you said, does have renewable, It depends on nuclear as its foundational source of electric power, and this generation so long outweighs solar and wind power.  If you want to know how our food supply is better than the Third World, try living in the farmlands where I live, and watching the tractors plant, plow and harvest by the truckloads.  It’s all done by a few people, and more effective than any subsistence farmer.
  For those who argue so much for solar, there’s plenty of electricity involved in producing pure silicon from minerals, that unless you find a substantial, non-intermittent source of electricity, that does not emit during the generation process, there will still be a fossil fuel dependency.
  The facts are pretty simple

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf40.html

Nuclear will be the workhorse for easing many environmental problems during the coming decades, and while this solution isn’t eternal, it is until we find more powerful processes than nuclear fission to harness energy, and a more dense energy source than Uranium.

I have never read such a disgustingly one-sided, and ill thought out argument. The rejection of nuclear power in all forms is not only unreasonable it is extremely ignorant. Just look at the progress being made with Terra Power and the traveling wave reactors they are developing. Not to mention modular development and even processes for complete liquid fusion. You reject not a means of generating power, but an entire field of science. You site three mile island as a disaster, when in reality the events of three mile island only proved that the safety precautions put in place by the United States Government.
What really upsets me about this article is the thoroughly misleading idea that United States nuclear power plants are worse than any other form of energy, no American has ever died, or even been critically injured by any form of radiation from an American nuclear power plant. Meanwhile coal powered plants emit literally one hundred times the radiation of nuclear plants into the environment and that is when they’re generating the same amount of energy, less than 25% of our energy in this country comes from nuclear power, almost all of the rest is from coal , so do the math on how much radiation we are putting into the environment versus how much we need to even if we sustain our current habits. Rebecca Solnit is an embarrassment to the real green movement. I think somebody drank the Koolaide when The China Syndrome was released.

Love the fanatics with pens, especially ones with little knowledge over an issue.
This country will continue to have an increase in the need for energy. These “green” energy sources such as wind and solar are nice to try and off set our dependence one specific energy source, but they do not produce what we need. Nuclear power has the highest start up cost, but produces more energy than any other process out there. Much less radioactive waste than coal plants, and the waste in nuclear plants can be used as a fuel. Its an obvious win to anyone intelligent. The problem comes in the down sides, corporations running it make a profit and human error. The worst nuclear accident from a power plant was Chernobyl. In which 30-50 people died and in the surrounding area a 1-4% increase in cancer was found in the passing years. Seems like a relatively low number of people dead from the worst ever accident. Which was completely operator error since they pulled the rods further out of the reactor than the engineers who designed it said was safe and that is was not surrounded by a containment building.

As a student going studying nuclear engineering learning about energy in general and looking at efficiency of the different types nuclear is a clear winner.

AND thank you Obama for seeing that!!

Tommy:  Sorry to say that nuclear energy be it fission or fusion keeps adding trapped energy in the atom to become kinetic energy of molecules in the biosphere.  So temperatures will keep rising in air water and even soil.
  The problems in Japan accent the hazards that are obviously worse, but some still think that they can be overcome to make N-power viable.  But the heat energy released from nuclear sources will keep adding to the overload that we already have in the biosphere.  So the weather will keep worsening even if we got completely to N-power.
  We have to get negative energy and carbon
and we can do that by realizing that our organic wastes are a resource; basically, they
are already harvested biofuel crops that we let decompose to reemit trapped CO2.  Worse we let germs, toxics and drugs escape from those biowastes to pollute the biosphere. 
I have made many comments on various blog posting on Dotearh and Green NYTimes and elsewhere so I won’t go onto details about using pyrolysis on our biowaste messes.  They contain probably more energy than we can get from even doubling the useless bioethanol foolishness being foisted on us.
  Nuclear is an Unclear winner.
  Dr. J. Singmaster